Federal workers rallied in Cleveland to protest job cuts by the Trump administration.

As cities like Cleveland worry about the impact on the city budget.

Governor Mike DeWine's proposed budget would reduce funding for public schools and increase private voucher dollars, according to an analysis.

And Cleveland is expected to land a double new NBA franchise.

Go Rocker's Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to IDEAS.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you for joining us.

Federal workers gathered outside the Anthony J. Calabresi Federal Building in Cleveland Thursday to protest cuts to federal agencies and Elon Musk's influence on President Donald Trump's administration.

Akron's police auditor says the Department needs de-escalation training.

Governor Mike DeWine's budget, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission, takes from public schools and gives to vouchers for private schools.

And Cleveland may get a new WNBA team with a very familiar name.

Joining me to discuss those and other stories, Ideastream Senior Arts reporter Kabir Bhatia.

And from News five Cleveland, Michelle Jarboe at the Statehouse News bureau in Columbus, chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

Workers, union leaders and politicians rallied in Cleveland Thursday to protest federal job cuts by the Trump administration, which has a goal of shrinking the federal workforce by 10%.

Michel The impact of the job cuts just beginning to reach Cleveland.

We saw a few folks from the National Park Service who had lost their jobs.

The union folks, though, are saying a number of people have been put on notice.

Right now, though, it's hard to get a picture of the full impact in Cleveland on this austerity measure by the president's administration.

Oh, yes.

It's so hard right now.

We have multiple people in our newsroom who have been doing outreach on this.

You reach out to a federal agency, you get sent to the Office of Personnel Management and you don't get answers.

And I think I think it's a tricky position in reporting on all of this to try to in real time tell people what you know, but not contribute to the already high levels of anxiety that may be out there because we really we really don't know what's happening or what the extent of this might be at this point.

We have heard that employees in probationary positions have been let go in some cases.

So these are people who may have been new to their jobs or may have recently been promoted or moved between jobs within the federal government.

It seems like they were kind of the low hanging fruit.

And then, you know, we're hearing some chatter about people who may have accepted buyout offers or deferred resignation offers, but we don't really have any numbers on this yet.

We also don't know yet exactly the impact that will have.

The president's administration says essentially that the federal workforce is bloated and we want to knock it down.

And it seems like a wrecking ball.

Way to do it, not a scalpel way.

But they're trying to reduce the workforce.

Whether that's a good thing or not would be yet to be seen.

What we're hearing from these workers, though, is real impact on them.

That's why you see these union members, even though no one has lost their jobs in the union ranks, rallying ahead of time with the number of folks, essentially, it's time to fight back.

A representative, Chantelle Brown, said fight back.

You know, I think that shows you kind of both sides of this, right, Like the idea of cutting bureaucracy, making things more efficient.

I think we all can understand that.

But then there is a human side to any sort of trimming of the workforce.

I mean, we're talking about people with families who are in some cases, people who are taking care of small children or elderly relatives, people who may be in paycheck to paycheck situations.

And we're also talking potentially about significant impacts on the regional economy.

You know, we have, as you mentioned, you know, thousands of federal workers in northeast Ohio.

And there are there are some agencies that are major employers here, Nassau, Glenn, the VA, the Coast Guard Defense, the Defense Finance Accounting Services Agency.

And if we have a broad job cuts at those agencies, it could have a major impact on the economy that will ripple through over time.

The mayor of Cleveland, Justin Bibb, has submitted a budget to city council.

Now, there's a lot of work that needs to go on in terms of what that budget will ultimately ultimately be.

But the mayor said he's been kept up at night because of what's going on federally.

How might that impact city budgets?

Cleveland, Akron, basically all of them.

Well, a huge amount of money that is in local government budgets trickles down in one way or another from the federal government.

I think the one that gets talked about a lot is community development block grant funding.

So that's money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that's used in we get it on a regular basis here in Cleveland, and it's used for things like housing programs, but also for neighborhood level work for the community development corporations that are out there on the streets working on home repair and targeting blight and helping small businesses.

So if that goes away and we haven't heard that, that's going to go away.

But if it does, how do you fill that void that could have a significant impact on the city budget?

And I'm Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

I was just going to say one more thing beyond that is outside of the budget, we've also got these big one time funding allocations from the federal government, like the money announced for the lakefront rate, for reconfiguring the shore way and the land bridge again, we haven't heard that that's going away.

And if it does go away, that is not an annual budgetary impact, but it is a big impact.

That's a great point.

I'm glad I didn't interrupt you on that because in addition to what you expect on a day to day, we had these big announcements, millions and millions of dollars for massive overhauls of the city infrastructure and the federal government could look at that and just say, hey, we can't afford that.

You guys take care of that.

That's a state issue or a local issue.

Figure out how you're going to fund it yourself.

That money could be clawed back.

It's possible.

Again, we have not heard that any of that is going to be clawed back.

And the folks I'm talking to are cautiously optimistic that funding that has been announced will stay in place.

But it's keeping a lot of people up at night for sure, including, as I mentioned, the Cleveland mayor who also worries about business renovations and those types of small businesses.

So this is getting down, you know, directly into the neighborhoods.

Kabeer We also had some reports this week about job cuts at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, although they don't seem extensive of just a few full time employees.

But they're also bracing for, you know, agencies throughout the federal government that might lose manpower.

Sure, it's going to affect them.

It is already affecting them.

There's three, maybe four people, full time employees that that were let go.

One of them was an engineer.

One of them, I think, was working on the former Brandywine Golf Club property and re-imagining that in charge of putting some new trails in.

So the projects they were working on were things that would be visible definitely to the public, things that people use when they come to the parks.

But on top of the people who have officially been let go, they're kind of in a hiring freeze, it seems, for seasonal employees and those needed to be hired pretty much by now.

So they're going to be behind schedule once this freeze does come off.

If it does and this is happening, advocates of the parks say after years of underfunding.

So the parks are vulnerable at this point.

They they they're vulnerable.

I think even if people can picture the scope of CBP, the size, it only has about 90 full time employees.

And I think, you know, you walk into a big box store, there's 90 employees, there's 90 employees with this massive, varied landscape here in northeast Ohio that so many people use.

And they they're funding and staffing.

They're down 10%.

But visitors that number, those numbers are up 16%.

So there's a big gap there.

Yeah.

And what's a great place to visit?

It's a great place to visit.

We remember during the pandemic, Governor DeWine telling everyone, go out to your parks, go out to your national parks.

And people did and they continue to do so.

It's unfortunate.

Karen, I've got a question from a listener who wants to know about Medicaid's potential cuts.

So that's a federal program that's going to then be impacting the state budget.

And we look at the discussion about potential Medicaid cuts and how that might through trigger language, make Medicaid expansion something that gets drawn back.

Well, Medicaid is probably the biggest part of the state budget, So it's a huge percentage of what the state spends.

The state gets federal money in to cover Ohio Medicaid costs.

You got more than 3 million Ohioans who are on Medicaid right now.

The question is about 770,000 Ohioans are on Medicaid expansion, which was allowed under the Affordable Care Act.

And Ohio is one of the states that went ahead and did that under former Governor John Kasich, a Republican who went against Republicans in his own party to go ahead and do that.

So there's a question here about whether if Congress passes legislation that would decrease or eliminate the federal match, that matching money that comes in, then that could definitely remove many of those people, if not all of those people, 770,000 people off of Ohio Medicaid rolls.

And so the question is whether if the federal government does that and the state can also end coverage for that Medicaid expansion population if there is a reduction, not just an elimination, but a reduction.

So that's in the budget.

That's language that's in the budget as well.

And my state of Missouri colleague Joe Ingles did a forum yesterday with Congressman Troy Balderson, a Republican from central Ohio, and he sits on a committee that looks into this and says that the Medicare and Medicaid cuts are not on the horizon here, which is reassurance we keep hearing from Republicans.

But we've also heard other agencies that were not going to be cut.

There are still questions about those.

Right.

So there's a real concern among people who are in the Medicaid expansion population.

But on Medicaid in general, again, more than 3 million Ohioans receive Medicaid benefits.

And so there's a real concern Governor DeWine's budget proposal includes $23.4 billion to fund education in the state over the next two years, and it hikes money for vouchers while decreasing funding for public schools.

Kiran, this is what we're looking at here as well.

Overall, education funding may be going up a reduction in public school funding and a benefit for charters.

Yeah, traditional K through 12 public schools are going to be getting less money in this budget than in the current spending year, about $103 million less over two years, which is a surprise I think, for some traditional public school advocates who were hoping that when DeWine said that the fair school funding plan would be fully funded in this budget, that they were going to get the money that they were expecting, that it was going to be fully funded and the formula is fully funded.

But the problem is that the salary data and other financial information that's in this formula is not updated.

It's from 2022.

So the formula isn't fully funded because those update, those inputs have not been updated.

And so that makes that just adds one more level a complexity to their school funding formula, which, as you might recall, is the way that state lawmakers tried to solve this issue of unconstitutionality of funding public education by tying the state share with the state gives to individual districts based on not only their property tax value, but also their income.

And so that's really what that formula is about.

But what happens here in the budget, too, in the $23.4 billion in education in primary education, here you have that hundred and $3 million cut to K through 12 traditional public schools, but also almost a half a billion dollars in increases to charter and STEM schools and to vouchers.

And that, for some public education advocates, is a real concern because one pot is going down, the other one's going up pretty significantly and vouchers have gone up big time.

I was looking at the numbers from just a couple of years ago about the amount of money from the state that goes into the voucher program.

We know that it started in Cleveland as an experiment, but now we're looking at this essentially universal universal voucher program, which some are saying they want to make even more expansive.

It's definitely draining money away from the public schools.

Yeah.

And because the budget does not increase the amount of individual vouchers, then the increase implies that there's an expectation that more families are going to take vouchers.

And like you said, universal vouchers are basically what we have in Ohio here.

Any family who wants a voucher to send their child to a private school can get one.

The higher your income level, the smaller the voucher you can get is.

But what's interesting here is to look at the voucher program.

As of right now, the ED choice expansion program, most of those have been going to families who are already sending their kids to private school.

Their kids never went to public school.

So this is money that was already going out to private school that now is being supplemented by these taxpayer paid vouchers.

So there's there's obviously some concern about where that money's coming from, because this is a finite pot of money.

I mean, you only have X amount of money for the state to spend on its priorities.

And obviously in the education space, vouchers is a big one.

And on the public school side, yes, they're saying we're losing money and we can't do the job that we need to do.

On the other side, you're hearing from those who support this that people should be able to take their tax money to where they want to educate their children.

And that's what exactly what the governor spokesperson spokesperson said, which is that we're bringing this money.

If you want to go to a private school, whether you are already going there or not, it's your money and you should be able to bring it with you.

Well, and one of the things that's kind of buried in these numbers here, too, is that a fifth of the schools that will receive less state funding in this budget actually grew their student populations in the last year.

So that implies that, you know, this is a 20%, 20% of those schools that are getting less money actually have more students.

So the the complexity of this is just tremendous.

I mean, you've got the guarantee that allows for school districts to get the same amount of money every year.

If all of these things are at play here and it makes it very difficult for for people like me to track this, but also for school districts to start planning, you have to come up with five year forecasts as a school district to try to figure out, you know, are you going to need levees?

What are you going to do in terms of planning for raises and hiring and that sort of thing?

This makes it the fair school funding plan was supposed to make it easier to do all that.

I Akron's police auditor said the city's police department should undergo de-escalation training and should amend its use of force policy.

Anthony Finnell released a report this week that challenged a use of force incident previously ruled as objectively reasonable in an internal police investigation.

Come here, Let's talk about this.

It goes back to a traffic stop from last summer when an officer punched a motorist to get him out of his car.

The report addresses the stop.

It was in June of 2024.

Let's talk a little bit about what led up to that and why the the monitor or the auditor in this case says the officer could have done better to de-escalate the situation.

Sure.

Well, the report says that that what happened there was a vehicle, it had expired plates, and Officer Spragg was one of the people pulling that vehicle over.

The driver they found was a suspended driver.

So so they arrested him.

And then the passenger, Terrell battles, they ordered him out of the car.

And apparently the issue started when when he asked, you know, why do I need to get out of the car?

And and I guess the officers didn't explain well, because it's expired plates, we need to tow this vehicle.

And instead there was just an altercation and punching, kicking.

And according to the report, it battles didn't do any of that.

It was the officers.

And he was pretty beat up.

Mr.

Battles was.

And they, of course, got him out of the car.

That's all how it went down, according to the report last June.

And so if the passenger says, why do I have to get out of the car?

And the answer is because I said so, that is not the right tactic.

Essentially, they're saying you need training now to understand that when that question is asked, the answer might be and the the auditor said this, the answer might be you have expired plates.

I need you to remove yourself from the car so that I can.

Whatever.

Like an explanation.

Exactly.

Finnell said that that was an opportunity for de-escalation and that it wasn't taken.

And so that's why he's calling for for some de-escalation training for for Akron police.

There was a community forum about this.

And Brian Lucey from the Akron Police Union was there.

And he characterized it as as a mob that was there speaking.

He said people were carrying on and the city of Akron was was pandering to them.

People who were there, of course, said that that's not what happened.

And it was fairly civil.

People were just passionate.

So there's disagreement, even on the way that this issue has been discussed amongst citizens and council.

The Vache Rama Swami will kick off his campaign for the 2026 Republican nomination for governor of Ohio on Monday as he embarks on a two day statewide tour with stops in Toledo, New Albany, Cincinnati and Strongsville.

Attorney General Dave Yost is also in the race planning to seek the Republican nomination.

Karen Ramaswamy initially turned down consideration for J.D.

Vance's U.S. Senate seat.

It's not clear why he's not co running doge now.

The Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk, as it was originally announced, was his plan always along that way to run for governor, do you think, or did something come up that this became the opportunity for him to jump in?

Well, I think a lot of things have come up.

When Trump won and J.D.

Vance became vice president.

That opened up a lot of things here.

And I'm not sure that Ramaswamy ever completely took himself out of consideration.

He did at one point when he was going to be partnered with Elon Musk in Doge, and then that seemed to be going in a different direction.

He then met with Governor Mike DeWine about the U.S. Senate seat, which of course Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted eventually got appointed to.

And so we're all assuming now is in that space of running for governor.

He's been talking about it for a while.

He has assembled a pretty formidable team of people who have run and won in Ohio.

And that's not the greatest news for Attorney General Dave Yost, who has been running for quite a while.

He was planning on running against John Husted, I believe, and he launched his campaign kind of a soft launch last month.

He posted and then Vivek is doing this two day tour, as you mentioned, starting in Cincinnati here.

I think it ends at the local bar in Strongsville.

And so this is kicking off what we're going to see over the next almost a year and a half or almost two years, I guess, of campaigning for the office of governor.

But of course, the Republican primary is the big prize here because Republicans have done very, very well in Ohio statewide.

And so the expectation, I think, for a lot of Republicans is whoever wins this primary is going to win the whole thing in November 2026.

And we still don't know if the West is going to run.

We don't he has not ruled it out.

Can you say who the best is that?

Of course.

That's Lieutenant Governor Jim Tressel, former Ohio State football coach, former Youngstown State football coach, former Youngstown State president, Never held elected office, but neither has a fake RAMASWAMY.

So I think that wild card of Tressel possibly being in the race is something that people are very interested in talking about.

And so I'm interested to see how the vic handles it, how we're almost one way he handles it.

And I plan to be there in Cincinnati for his kickoff.

He's got this kind of interesting mix of going to some businesses and locally owned businesses and then a civic center in Toledo and then at the local bar in Strongsville.

So kind of heading some a different mix there as is going around the state.

The Cleve Museum of Art is sending a statue worth $20 million back to Turkey minus its head, which the art museum never had.

The ancient Greek or Roman sculpture reportedly depicts Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but because of the headless thing, we're not really sure.

We have no idea.

No one has any idea, but they're pretty sure it's not him now.

No, it's not.

Yeah, because they did testing.

This has been there since 1986.

The statue.

And in 2023, they were served by a judge.

A New York judge sees the statue.

They did a lot of testing where the statue had been in Turkey, and they determined that the pedestal that it was on did not have any indication that it was Marcus Aurelius.

The way it was dressed was more like a Greek philosopher.

So that's been established with the testing, which is great, but it's also established that it was probably looted in the 1960s, funneled through a network that the New York the Manhattan D.A.

has been investigating for a few years and ended up here in in 86.

So a place like the Museum of Art and many other museums are now really having to take a look at these kind of things.

And I don't I imagine this won't be the first time that we find out there is a piece.

Yeah.

What they're doing with Turkey, though, is trying to sort of negotiate with like, Yes, we'll return it because it's yours but maybe there is some consideration.

We can display it or there are other things we can display there.

They're discussing whether they can display it briefly before it does go back to Turkey.

But this is kind of opened up a dialog with the Turkish officials, Turkish cultural institutions that, okay, now we've got this process for testing and this sort of testing.

A lot of it wasn't even available in 1986.

Let's talk about maybe some sort of cultural exchange, more so than we've been doing.

They opened this up with Vietnam a few years ago in a similar situation.

So there are some positives to the fact that the statue is going to have to go back.

Let's move to right next door Playhouse Square.

Well, we're in Playhouse Square, but right next door to Playhouse Square Theater's unveiled the Broadway 2025 26 season this week.

Four of the musicals in the season are adaptations from classic literature.

One of those adaptations is The Outsiders and Career.

Playhouse Square had a role in producing that show.

Yeah, the producers are all locally local origins, and when they first started discussing this, Playhouse Square got involved and became eventually a co-producer.

So when the Emmy last year went to Best Musical, one of the statues came here to to Playhouse Square.

So we've got that connection to The Outsiders, which will be here next spring.

What else is on the menu?

The Great Gatsby.

Another, as you said, adaptation.

Then the season kicks off this fall with two plays that are launching their national tours from here.

There's a tax credit that makes that more attractive to do from here.

We're certainly an affordable city, so it's going to be a lot of activity this fall when first the notebook is here, they'll be checking and all that fun stuff.

And then right after that, the Alicia Keys musical Hell's Kitchen, which is not just her greatest hits, but some new material.

So both of those back to back will be launching the tours from here.

I'm so clueless.

I thought the name of the first show was a tax credit.

It should be.

They should make a show.

And I was like, Wow, yeah.

I don't know how that would be interesting, but apparently it can get a guy who's looks like Bob Newhart to be the accountant.

It'll be great.

Cleveland Public Theater is in the midst of a major capital campaign.

It received a boost.

We talked about a boost not long ago, but another one, a challenge grant from the Mandel Foundation.

Yeah, for every dollar 50 they raise, the Mandel Foundation will give them a dollar.

And that's going to end up with everything that came before.

They're going to get $12 million.

And if you've been over there, Gordon Square, of course CBT, it's easy to spot, but the front facade is going to be redone and then adjacent to their parking lot, there's an old church to over 100 years old that they own, but it's been sitting there empty.

It's not ADA compliant or anything, so they're going to refurbish that into a performance and rehearsal space.

And a lot of the funds are going to go to that and they hope to break ground this fall.

Really exciting.

Cleveland is reportedly in line to land a WNBA expansion franchise, according to reporting by the Sports Business Journal.

Go Rocker's says the city will join the league in 2028.

The franchise will be called The Rockers after the original Cleveland WNBA franchise that was owned by the Gunn family.

Rockers were one of the league's founding franchises folded, though, in 2003.

Women's sports, especially women's basketball, is enjoying a surge in popularity due to superstar talents like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

All kinds of great players.

This is a jump ball.

One of you answer that.

Well, I don't think we agree that it's got basketball term.

Yeah, well, I don't know what that meant.

You hit me in the face.

I need a mouth guard.

Breanna Stewart, All these people who are making women's sports more popular.

And, you know, hopefully that they become just as popular as men's sports.

But as you said, we had the rockers before.

We're going to get them again.

We just lost out on getting a soccer franchise, women's soccer franchise.

We lost to Denver.

But now that the WNBA is expanding again, that's going to give us something and it'll go into the arena, whatever its name is, I tell you, I can tell you my daughter is excited about it.

And I think there's a lot of young women that are really excited that representation with the WNBA, but also the idea of soccer.

We've had a great discussion here and Jenny Hammel lead about a new sports bar for women W that's opening in the Detroit short way area.

So all kinds of terrific news about that.

Absolutely.

The future Home of the Rockers and the current home of the Cavaliers and the Lake Erie monsters will have a new name.

The Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse is now Rocket Arena.

It's also been a number of other things Quicken Loans Arena, Gund Arena, which I think it always will be for a number of people.

But Michelle Rock, The Rock Rocket Arena brings it more in line with Dan Gilbert's ventures.

Yeah, this is a rebranding that aligns with, you know, rocket companies and and the many, many business tendrils that he has.

I will say I finally got used to writing Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse Capital H. Yes.

And which words go together?

In which words have a space in between them.

So now I'm going to have to reiterate, this will be easier.

Monday on The Sound of Ideas On 80 97w KSU Jenny Hammel will lead a conversation about how the new Trump administration is pushing the boundaries of the executive branch.

We'll talk to politics, reporters and constitutional experts.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching.

And stay safe.