By Bob Strohm
bstrohm@wbcowqel.com
A bevy of national, state, and local issues were discussed at state Representative Jeff McClain’s town hall meeting in Galion on Tuesday.
McClain started the town hall meeting going over a list of what has been done at the Statehouse during his tenure. That list included bonding the turnpike, balancing the budget and providing $3 billion in tax relief to Ohio citizens which he hopes the money saved goes into job creation.
After fielding questions regarding gun control, jobs, the drug problem, and healthcare, McClain explained what he would be taking with him back to Columbus as a result of the town hall meeting.
“There are a lot of things that we heard today that we have taken the notes, we are going to have some conversations with the folks in Columbus, and we are going to get back with the people who had the questions,” McClain said. “I think there are some opportunities out of this that will make things better.”
The first question McClain fielded dealt with the natural ANR Pipeline system coming through Crawford County by the company TransCanada. McClain said that he didn’t know many of the details as he has had only one meeting with the company, but that he wants to try to keep as much of the gas in Ohio as possible.
When asked about gun violence, McClain said, “I am OK with universal background checks; however the bills with the Democrats have been too expansive. Ultimately the responsibility should fall to the gun owner.”
McClain said that with today’s technology that there is now reason a place cannot run a background check.
Crawford County Municipal Court Judge Sean Leuthold asked the state representative, “We need to look at the criminal statutes. So we can take heroin dealing in small amounts to a Felony Level 3 conviction. It would give us the discretion to get heroin dealers off the streets.”
On jobs created by the government McClain said, “With the government any job we create the tax payer are paying for it. But what we can do, and as we have done a lot of it on the taxation side, we still need to do more on the regulatory side, but our job especially as the local rep is to try to get companies to come here. We are not going to create the jobs; it is the folks like GE, Timken, and IB Tech.”
Galion Mayor Tom O’Leary asked what will be different when the health districts in Ohio are accredited and the other branches are having trouble getting accredited.
“We fought that one, we didn’t win. As we know in local government there are places in Ohio where mergers would be a good idea, whether it is schools, whether it is health districts, I think we are going to give incentives to merge districts.”
After being thanked about his support of the Developmental Disability Act, McClain was asked if there was anything more that the legislature could do to get developmental disability services equal throughout the state.
“As a home rule state this is the downside, you are going to have imbalances on things,” McClain said. “There were some discussions about that in the last couple budgets, and there were some extra dollars that came out from the state, but yeah that is something we need to look at.”