Thursday, July 30th, 2026

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this day in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law, creating federal health coverage for Americans 65 and older.

Ohio Democrats want to lower the voting age to 16, and a data center firm is fighting to join a Supreme Court case in Ashville — you can read both in Top of the Fold.

In Sports and Business, Ryan Day says Ohio State had "a great summer" heading into Big Ten media days, and Notre Dame topped the Buckeyes in the new jersey-patch money race.

COLUMBUS — Reps. Chris Glassburn, D-North Olmsted, and Sean Brennan, D-Parma, have introduced House Joint Resolution 8, which would amend the Ohio Constitution to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 for state and local elections only, not federal races.

The amendment must clear three-fifths of both the Ohio House and Senate before going to voters, and the sponsors are aiming for the Nov. 3 general election ballot.

COLUMBUS — School districts, cities and townships across Ohio have until 4 p.m. Aug. 5 to certify levies and other local questions to their county boards of elections, the last chance to get an issue in front of voters this fall.

Once the boards certify what came in, the picture gets clear all at once: which districts are asking for new money, which are seeking renewals, and which decided to wait another year.

ASHVILLE — EdgeConneX, the company behind a planned hyperscale data center in this Pickaway County village, has moved to intervene in a case three Ashville residents filed at the Ohio Supreme Court on July 14, which alleges Fiscal Officer April Grube improperly withheld a citizen petition that would have put the project to a public vote.

CHICAGO — Ohio State coach Ryan Day took the stage Wednesday at Big Ten media days, opening his eighth season in Columbus.

"It's more of an honor now than it ever has been for me" to lead the Buckeyes, Day said.

He called his staff "the best coaching staff in America" and, noting every coach claims a strong offseason, added: "But we have had a great summer."

COLUMBUS — Ohio State said Tuesday the Chase Bank logo will appear on uniforms across all 36 of its varsity sports, part of a JPMorganChase deal reported at nearly $17 million a year.

Notre Dame answered the same afternoon with a six-year SoFi agreement worth $18 million to $20 million a year, believed to be the richest in college sports.

Under the rules, the patches can't exceed 4 square inches.

We've spent a lot of time this year on school levies, data centers and property taxes. Between the three of them, we're hard-pressed to name an Ohioan who isn't touched by at least one. And while we were wading through the property tax changes, one item kept nagging at us.

There's a line on your tax bill called the non-business credit. For decades it knocked a little off the tax on every home in Ohio, whether you owned the place or rented from somebody who did.

That credit is going away.

Lawmakers sweetened a different one in its place — the owner-occupancy credit. If you own the home you live in, you're fine. You may even come out ahead. For everybody else, the credit just walked out the door with nothing behind it — renters, and the people who own the apartment building, the rental house or the multi-family condo down the street.

The change is in House Bill 186, in plain sight. It drew almost no attention because everybody was arguing over the headline number, and because renters don't get a tax bill in the mail. They get a lease renewal, and that doesn't come with a line item explaining anything.

Landlords will do what landlords do with a new cost, which is try to move it along. Not all of it, and in a soft market they eat some. But a share lands on the tenant.

We're not going to argue homeowners didn't need help. Reappraisals hit hard, and something had to give.

When the state decided who to help, it drew the line at ownership — and according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, roughly one in three Ohio households ended up on the other side of it. Many of them are the ones with the least room to absorb anything else.

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