Wednesday, March 25th, 2026

Welcome to Wednesday’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, March 25th, in 1913, the Great Miami River overflowed, breaking the surrounding levees, and flooded downtown Dayton and the surrounding areas with 20 feet of water. Later dubbed The Great Dayton Flood, it still to this day is the greatest natural disaster Ohio has ever seen.

An Ohio city has been ranked the third most affordable city in the country. Read which city it is below.

Also, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has been selected to become a Space Force Intelligence Agency. Find out what this means in Page One.

Toledo, Ohio, has landed third on Niche.com's annual list of cities offering the highest pay and lowest cost of living, trailing only Laredo, Texas, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, among U.S. cities with at least 250,000 residents.

The study, which weighted affordability and median household income equally, used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to identify cities where residents can stretch their paychecks the furthest.

You can read more here.

Ohio Farm Bureau president Bill Patterson is raising the alarm that the rapid spread of data centers across Ohio is pushing up land prices and squeezing farmers out of their own fields.

If the trend continues unchecked, farm leaders warn it could cause lasting damage to Ohio's food supply and drive up energy and water costs for rural communities.

Click here to read more.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he believes everyone has the right to own and carry a gun, supports constitutional carry, and wants to shut down the Federal Bureau of Investigation and replace it with a new agency to handle background checks.

Conversely, some gun rights supporters have noticed that his campaign website does not mention the Second Amendment at all, and his exact positions on a few issues, like gun shows and schools, are not fully clear.

Read more on this story here.

A massive data center and power plant are planned for a former uranium enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, that has been shut down and is still being cleaned up. The project, called the PORTS Technology Campus, would generate 10 gigawatts of power, mostly from natural gas, to run computers that support artificial intelligence.

Construction companies Bechtel and Kiewit have been hired to build the project on the 3,700-acre site, which the federal government owns. The effort is a partnership between the U.S. government, SoftBank of Japan, and energy company AEP Ohio, with Japan committing roughly $33 billion to the project as part of a broader trade agreement between the U.S. and Japan.

The Portsmouth plant opened in 1955 and enriched uranium for the country's nuclear program before closing in 2021. Construction on the new campus is expected to begin this year.

For more on this, go here and here.

Five billion dollars. Let that number sink in for a moment.

That's how much Intel has spent, much of it your money, Ohio taxpayer, on what amounts to some underground pipes, a few steel columns, and an office building that's only two stories tall. Two stories. For $5.26 billion.

The latest report Intel sent to the state of Ohio reads less like a progress update and more like a lesson in saying nothing while sounding busy. Underground corridors. Pre-cast columns. Steel beams on a boiler building. Somewhere, a public relations team is patting itself on the back for the words it proudly put on paper.

Meanwhile, the Intel project created exactly zero new jobs in 2025. Zero. The finish date has already been pushed back and now sits somewhere between 2030 and 2032. The state says Intel must create 3,000 jobs by 2028. But the buildings won't even be open until years after that. Someone needs to explain how that is supposed to work.

Ohio taxpayers were promised a $28 billion project. So far, only $7 billion has been committed, with a shrug and a promise. Ohio gave Intel $600 million in grants. JobsOhio added $125 million more. The federal government chipped in $1.5 billion. That is taxpayer money at every level of government, poured into a construction site that looks a lot like, well, a big construction site with no end in sight.

The press releases streaming out of state agencies all sound the same. Everyone is "encouraged." Everyone "fully expects" Intel to come through. But nobody is asking the hard question. What happens if they don't?

That question will never be answered because when it comes to boondoggles, answers are few and words are plenty.

Ohio taxpayers are investors. And right now, our investment has bought a very expensive hole in Licking County and a long string of press releases that are starting to sound more like gibberish than information.

Intel, the Columbus Partnership, JobsOhio, somebody owes us a real answer. Not another update full of words that mean nothing.

But Intel is old news. A Japanese company is already planning to build the world's largest data center on a piece of irradiated land in Piketon. Ohio taxpayers have seen this movie before. Let's hope it has a different ending.

The Pennant welcomes letters to the editor and guest columns from readers. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity, and AP style. The Pennant reserves the right to verify all information contained in submissions before publication.

Please send all submissions to [email protected]