ABOUT OHIO HB 6
Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 6, the roughly $1 billion financial rescue for Ohio s two nuclear power plants after lawmakers on July 23, 2019.
HB 6 is now in the crosshairs of a $60 million federal bribery investigation, in which four people including the former Republican Ohio Speaker of the House have been arrested.
HB 6 intended to bail out two nuclear plants - Davis-Besse in Oak Harbor and Perry, northeast of Cleveland - by having Ohio customers pay a monthly surcharge on their monthly electric bills. The fees ranged from 85 cents for residential consumers to $2,400 for large industries. The surcharges were to be in place from 2021 until 2027.
Column: What will Biden presidency mean for Ohio pols?
Thomas Suddes
More than 10,000 Ohioans died during Donald Trump’s presidency thanks in part to his administration’s incompetence in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Were anyone to draw up a profit-and-loss statement analyzing how Ohio fared during America’s 45th presidency, that’d be the single greatest loss the Buckeye State suffered.
On the profit side, ask the many Ohioans who remain fans of the former president. More than 2.8 million Ohioans voted for the Trump-Pence ticket in 2016, more than 3.1 million in 2020. Evidently, regardless of what Donald Trump was or wasn’t doing for Ohio, our 45th president said things a majority of Ohio’s voters liked to hear, even things some might be afraid to say.
Jan 21, 2021
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost continues to fight the damaging effects of House Bill 6, which is at the center of a $60 million federal bribery investigation, and was intended to bail out FirstEnergy Corp. subsidiary Energy Harbor.
This time he has asked the Franklin County Common Pleas Court to block FirstEnergy from collecting special fees from customers which were established as part of the effort to shore up Energy Harbor’s two nuclear power plants even if energy prices fall. Yost correctly asserts customers should not have to pay the $102 million the company would collect this year because of a “perverse” form of decoupling, which unlinked how much the company makes from how much electricity it sells, and guaranteed it would maintain a record-high level of profit.