Monday, August 3rd, 2026

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

This Day in History: On Aug. 3, 1936, Jesse Owens won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, taking the 100-meter sprint. The victory, on Adolf Hitler's home turf, was a direct rebuke to Nazi claims of Aryan racial superiority.

Reportedly, out-of-state investors have been spending millions to buy out taxpayers’ debts in property taxes. Read more on this in the Top of the Fold.

Also, New Albany has come up with a solution to solve data centers’ energy usage, but critics say it isn’t enough. Find out why in our editorial.

Private investors from cities like Omaha and Chicago are purchasing tens of millions of dollars in unpaid Ohio property tax debts from county treasurers, giving them the right to collect the amounts owed plus up to 18% interest.

Places like Cuyahoga County and Franklin County have set records for these tax-lien sales, which officials say help recover revenue and push owners to pay or enter payment plans.

Critics, including bipartisan lawmakers and banks, call the practice predatory because the high interest can trap struggling residents in growing debt that may end in foreclosure.

As a result, bipartisan legislation to ban such sales on residential and agricultural properties has been proposed.

Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, formally dropped his domestic violence case against his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno, after a judge ruled this week that he had not been harmed or placed in fear of his safety.

Miller originally filed the petition in February seeking a protection order to keep her away from him and their young daughter amid a contentious custody battle involving mutual abuse allegations.

The court ruling comes amid accusations from Miller's ex-wife that he had been abusive toward her. Miller has denied the claims.

The Puerto Rico Police Department has named a person of interest in the murder of Ohioan Tyler Wilkin.

Wilkin was found dead on a beach in Puerto Rico on July 10 from an "execution-style" gunshot wound to the back of his head, days after texting friends about mysterious howling noises he heard while camping.

The FBI has confirmed its involvement in the investigation as authorities continue to hunt for more information.

A company called Veolia is building a 350-megawatt power grid in New Albany to run one AI data center and nothing else. It has its own generation and battery storage, with no connection to the grid the rest of us use. Nobody's electric bill goes up because of it.

That answers a complaint people have made for a year — that data centers drive up power costs for everyone else. Here's a project that doesn't.

Watch how little that changes.

The same fight keeps turning up in one Ohio town after another, and the complaint changes with it. This was never about kilowatts.

Look at Grove City, where a charter amendment goes to voters in November. The city already stopped data centers with a moratorium. It didn't need an amendment. One came anyway, and the petition on file with the county board of elections calls the measure "facially neutral as to industry and commerce, applying solely to defined impact thresholds regardless of the industry or operator involved."

The findings name warehousing outright. The thresholds catch anything over 50 acres. Warehouses. Business parks. Housing. A hospital.

The word its backers use is democracy. Their filing says decisions of this magnitude "must be directly authorized by the residents most affected." Who could argue with that? Read the fine print, though.

The developer pays for the election. Which means there won't be many elections, because no company funds a public campaign against itself. Capital is mobile. A city is not. They'll build somewhere else, and Grove City will never know what it didn't get.

The tax base shrinks from there, and with it the money for schools, firefighters, police and paved streets.

Once the amendment passes, only a vote of the people can undo it. Council can't touch it.

And this language travels. It's carefully lawyered, built to survive a court fight, and written so it can be dropped into any charter with the names changed. Grove City is where it gets tested. If it holds, the next town gets the same text, and the town after that, in Ohio and then somewhere else.

There's an old Brady Bunch where Greg gets discovered, renamed, and handed a sparkly outfit. Then he finds out the studio can make anyone sound good in the booth. He'd been picked for one reason. He fit the suit.

The power bill fit the suit. New Albany just ripped out the back, so expect a new objection inside a week. Water, or noise, or traffic. Whatever fits.

Questions, comments, and letters to the editor are welcome at [email protected].

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