Ohio Vision

A city that has lost its people and its jobs cannot bootstrap its own revival. It needs external support to rightsize, reorganize, and rebuild for a new economic reality. We will provide that support through direct state funding to municipalities, flexible resources that allow cities and their communities to determine their own futures.

This is not a one-size fits all solution. We must recognize the unique history and characteristics of each city. We should give direct funding to the city and leave it to the city and the community to choose how it is spent, to choose the best future for themselves, to claim their own destiny.

We need to create more coordinated regional planning infrastructure. Create more mechanisms for municipalities, counties, townships to work directly with each other and to partner on different projects. Reduce the often oppositional relationship between them. We need to recognize that people and networks function outside of arbitrary boundaries. Build infrastructure, build transit, write laws that map how people really live and work.

We need to standardize many regulations between cities to allow businesses to better operate between them. They can still have a great deal of freedom to set rules within their boundaries, but they should use standard language and attempt to be consistent with other municipalities setting the same rules.

We will invest heavily in public safety across Ohio. We will also fund neighborhood-based peacekeeping efforts that complement formal law enforcement. People who live in a community are its first and best early-warning system. That knowledge has value, and volunteer effort alone is not sufficient to capture it so we will fund it.

We will end homelessness in Ohio. 

Most people who experience homelessness do not do so simply because they lack housing or income. Many chronically homeless individuals are living with untreated serious mental illness, severe substance use disorders, or both. Housing alone does not fix that. A person in the grip of acute psychosis or active addiction cannot reliably maintain stable housing, sustain employment, or participate fully in their own recovery without first receiving appropriate care. Pretending otherwise serves no one. 

Our approach is rooted in two convictions: that every person deserves real help, and that real help means treatment and housing together.

We will build the infrastructure of care that Ohio currently lacks. This means a significant expansion of community mental health centers and outpatient psychiatric services, accessible and affordable in every part of the state. It means more residential treatment capacity for serious mental illness. It means accessible addiction treatment including medication-assisted treatment. It means permanent supportive housing for those with chronic mental illness or disability who need ongoing support to live stably. And it means robust case management: people who help individuals navigate housing,benefits, healthcare, and employment, and who maintain relationships with them over time.

For those who have hit hard times the intervention is different: emergency shelter that is safe and dignified, rapid rehousing assistance, and short-term support to get back on their feet. We will build a bridge for them.

For individuals whose mental illness or addiction has reached a level where they are a danger to themselves or others, Ohio’s existing civil commitment framework already provides legal mechanisms for involuntary evaluation and treatment. We will use those tools fully, ensure that legal standards are applied rigorously and fairly, and guarantee that civil commitment leads to genuine treatment in appropriate facilities. 

No part of this approach involves punishment for poverty, illness, or addiction. What it involves is the state taking responsibility for building the system of care that, if it had existed earlier,would have prevented most of this suffering in the first place. We owe that to the people on our streets and to the communities they live in. Every Ohioan has a right to participate in public life without being made to feel unsafe. Our streets, parks, and public spaces belong to everyone. A person experiencing a psychotic episode on a sidewalk is not exercising freedom; they are suffering in public, often without any awareness of it, and their presence in that state harms both themselves and the community around them.

One of Ohio’s lasting advantages for decades has been that it is a low cost place to live, work, and raise a family. But that no longer holds as a genuine affordability crisis is hitting the state. We have allowed the housing stock to decay and plummet. We have failed to build new housing where people want to live. We have made it harder to work and live in Ohio. We have let so many of our villages and small cities that are a desirable lifestyle for many to be hollowed out and left behind. No longer.

The commitment of this campaign is an Ohio for everyone and for anyone. Whether you want to live in suburbia, a small Ohio village, an urban metropolis, rural Ohio, or Appalachian Ohio; we want to make it a place that is affordable, accessible, and healthy. You should be able to live in these places and still have ready access to a job, to education, to healthcare, to nature, to stores and entertainment, to healthy food. You should be able to walk around where you live. You shouldn’t have to suffer crime or pollution. You should be able to live the life you want. 

Investing in Ohio’s small and medium sized cities is addressing the affordability crisis. 

New and expanded post-secondary campuses should be located within cities, not on remote outskirts. Ohio’s cities are full of underutilized buildings that can be repurposed for educational use. Placing colleges downtown is cheaper than building greenfield campuses, creates foot traffic for local businesses, and makes education genuinely accessible. A resident should be able to walk or take a short transit ride to attend class.

Colleges and universities are huge influxes of state and federal money. They should support the communities where they are located. Deep integration will make both stronger.

Colleges will be directly integrated with local business and industry. Specialized training programs will be developed in coordination with regional employers, and degree pathways will map clearly onto real job opportunities in the local economy. Apprenticeship programs will also be facilitated.

We will dramatically increase direct state funding for research and innovation at Ohio’s universities and colleges. Funds will also support cluster development and public-private partnerships in research and development.

Every Ohio public educational institution will be connected to a new statewide startup services entity: an all-in-one hub integrating technology transfer, entrepreneurship programming, business management services, business incubation, and capital access. These hubs will work alongside technology transfer offices to bring patents to market quickly, and they will offer angel and venture capital funding,small business loans, supply chain support, and connections to national and global markets. The goal is to generate new businesses endogenously across all of Ohio’s cities, building robust economies that are more diverse, more resilient, and more durable.

Ohio’s educational system will be rebuilt as a coherent ladder from pre-K through two years of

post-secondary education; universal in access, differentiated in path, and competitive in outcome.

We will introduce universal pre-K administered directly through the public school system. Early childhood education has among the strongest returns of any public investment; we will not leave it to chance or household income.

K–8 education will emphasize foundational mastery: literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning,and civic knowledge. Students will be grouped and paced by demonstrated ability and achievement, not simply by age, from the middle grades onward. This means slower students receive genuine support to catch up rather than being passed along, and faster students are challenged at the level they are actually operating at. A teacher managing a class of students performing at roughly the same level is a more effective teacher than one trying to serve a twenty-point ability range simultaneously.

High school in Ohio will become a genuinely differentiated and competitive system, drawing on the best elements of high-performing international models.

Beginning in the final years of middle school, students and families will identify academic and vocational tracks aligned with their interests, goals, and demonstrated strengths. High schools will specialize in science and engineering, in arts and humanities, in technical and vocational training, in health sciences, in business, and students will be able to apply to schools beyond their neighborhood based on these specializations. Selective high schools will admit on merit through a transparent application process. Neighborhood schools will remain strong baseline options; the existence of specialized schools does not justify neglecting them.

This is not a system that sorts students at age 14 and locks them in. Track-switching must be possible and supported. Students at different levels with different goals are served poorly by identical instruction. The student who wants to become an electrician and the student who wants to study biochemistry both deserve a high school education genuinely oriented toward their future, not one designed for neither.

High school will also carry a clearer social contract. Attendance, effort, and achievement matter and will be recognized and rewarded. The culture of schools should cultivate a genuine desire to learn, an understanding that excellence is worth pursuing for its own sake, not only as a credential. In an era when AI increasingly makes knowledge retrieval trivial, the competitive advantage of a well-educated person is not what they can look up but what they can think, create, and build. It is overwhelmingly about drive and desire for personal improvement.

Every Ohioan will be guaranteed two years of tuition-free post-secondary education following high school at a community college, technical school, or public university. This program will

be universal in eligibility and differentiated in path: students may pursue a two-year associate’s degree, a technical certification, a vocational qualification, or the first two years of a four-year degree at any public Ohio institution. The state pays the tuition; the student chooses the direction and must demonstrate ability.

The program will be voluntary but strongly incentivized, and we expect adoption rates approaching 90%. 

By default, high school graduates will have a connected pathway to their local affiliated community college or university. But they may apply to any public institution in Ohio and attend if accepted, including flagship research universities, where the two-year benefit applies toward a four-year degree. Students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement will have access to selective and accelerated pathways.

Long-term this will create one of the best educated and skilled workforces in the world. Preparing Ohioans for a changing future and preparing Ohio to compete and succeed. At the same time it will help fuel an explosion of new business formation, invention, and innovation that will grow the economy, lower costs, and deliver more and better. 

This will require a massive expansion of Ohio’s post-secondary institutions, especially community colleges. It will require the hiring of thousands more instructors and professors. New and expanded facilities will be a tremendous investment in all of Ohio and provide new services and be aligned with downtown revitalization efforts.  

We will build a high-speed rail system across Ohio. Beginning with a 3C+D corridor —Cleveland to Columbus to Dayton to Cincinnati — and supporting a federal and interstate initiative linking New York City to Chicago through Cleveland. Ohio’s flat geography makes high-speed rail construction significantly cheaper here than in most of the country (looking at you California); we can achieve French-level construction costs if we build with the ambition and scale that makes such efficiency possible. In the range of $12-15 billion to make the 3C+D corridor. 

While more costly than the much proposed and debated 3C+D Amtrak expansion of low speed rail, High Speed Rail is the only investment that will result in meaningful change in behavior and meaningful new connections and opportunities. That, and it builds for the 21st century. Just because something is cheaper does not make it good or better. Building rail that wasn’t modern in the 1970s is not a good idea. 

We will build a comprehensive, low-cost, statewide public transit network linking together local transit networks with the state backbone, one that makes getting around Ohio without a personal vehicle a genuinely practical choice for the vast majority of Ohioans, regardless of where they live, and acts as a convenient, efficient complement to personal vehicles.

The goal is straightforward: any Ohioan should be able to reach everything they need within 45 minutes, and travel anywhere in Ohio in under eight hours for less than $50. This is a measurable standard we will design the system to meet.

The network has four layers that must work as one.

The backbone is high-speed rail on the major intercity corridors. Frequent, reliable, fast service between Ohio’s cities changes the calculus of travel. If Cleveland to Columbus takes an hour and the train runs every half-hour, people will use it.

The second layer is regional rapid transit: dedicated-lane or signal-priority bus routes as well as light rail lines connecting smaller cities and towns to each other and to the rail network. Bus rapid transit delivers reliable travel times competitive with driving. These routes feed into the high speed rail network, keeping usage high and providing the fares needed to support the network.

The third layer is local transit within cities: bus networks, light rail where density and ridership support it, and demand-responsive services for lower-density areas. We will fund local transit systems directly at the state level, helping municipalities that cannot sustain quality service on their own tax base, and we will require minimum service standards in exchange. This will be combined with investments in biking and walking paths. Once people arrive at a city, they need to easily get around it. 

The fourth layer and the hardest problem in public transit is the last mile. This is where transit systems historically fail. A person can take a train from Cincinnati to Columbus and a bus from the station to a major employer, but if the bus doesn’t run after 7 PM and home is a 40-minute walk from the nearest stop, the system doesn’t work. If people still need to own a car for edge cases, then they will own and use a car and not be able to use the convenience of the public transit network. 

Autonomous vehicles change this equation entirely. Shared autonomous taxis, pooled, summoned by phone, operating continuously, can serve as the last-mile connector for the entire transit network at a competitive cost structure and with greater safety. A person takes the train to their stop, opens an app, and an autonomous vehicle takes them anywhere they want to go, even far from a public transit route. Ohio will build the regulatory environment that allows robotaxis to scale. 

We will make Ohio one of the most welcoming states in the country for autonomous vehicle development and deployment, because a mature AV network layered on top of strong public transit is what finally makes car ownership genuinely optional for most Ohioans. That is the long-term goal, and it is achievable within a decade if we build the foundation now. This is a better world for everyone with more choice about how to live and how to get around. This is an especially good deal for car owners who will see traffic significantly reduced and will find their car offers far more flexibility than it did before being able to change from one’s car to another form of transit whenever they want. 

The entire network will be unified operationally. One app. One fare structure. One ticket purchased on a phone, automatically split across every provider on a route. Schedules will be synchronized so connections are reliable. 

We will invest in the low-altitude economy: a regulatory framework enabling drone delivery and drone taxi services, and the infrastructure needed to support aerial innovation. Our small cities are a natural space to be connected with regional airports and drone taxis. Ohio should be a national leader in this space.

Every corner of Ohio will have access to excellent, affordable high-speed internet and mobile service. Broadband infrastructure investment will be coordinated with smart grid deployment to reduce costs and extend reach.

We will build a smart energy grid for Ohio. We will legalize and encourage the construction of solar, wind, and battery storage facilities. We will establish the research and regulatory infrastructure for nuclear innovation, including investment in small modular reactors and next-generation nuclear design. We will make Ohio the cheapest place in the country to buy electricity, attracting energy-intensive industries and giving households more money to spend on everything else.

A smart grid also enables more efficient, market-driven energy generation and distribution, integrating rooftop solar, microgrids, home battery systems, and the growing fleet of electric vehicles that function as distributed energy storage. The result is a more resilient, more efficient,and lower-cost energy system for everyone.

We will take full advantage of the datacenter buildout to ensure large datacenter developers are financing the big investments in new, clean energy and grid development to enable lower costs for all, abundant energy in the future, and a modern grid. Not surprisingly, all debate around datacenters has so far ignored the massive opportunity before us to usher in the new energy revolution.