Companies get $45.5 million in Ohio aid but produce no jobs

Companies get $45.5 million in Ohio aid but produce no jobs

Associated Press

TOLEDO

Companies receiving state money failed to deliver thousands of promised positions and in some cases state officials inadequately vetted the corporations and their executives, a newspaper investigation published Sunday found.

The Blade of Toledo cited as an example Buckeye Silicon, whose machinery at a nearly empty warehouse is South Toledo is dormant three years after it received almost $3 million from the state. The company failed to launch, never created the nine jobs promised and never produced the 50 metric tons of polysilicon annually it said it would.

The newspaper review of taxpayer-funded loans and grants between July 2007 and June 2012 found more than dozen such examples that the report said represented a breakdown in the vetting, oversight or management of state economic-development loans and grants. Key Ohio job-creation duties have since migrated to the private nonprofit JobsOhio.

The issues highlighted spanned the administrations of Govs. Ted Strickland and John Kasich, a Democrat and Republican.

About half the companies receiving public grants during the period failed to create the jobs they’d promised after receiving awards totaling $45.5 million. Much of that money is now lost.

Just $2.6 million of the $47.5 million in bad loans and grants that Attorney General DeWine has been asked to collect since fiscal year 2009 had been recouped as of Oct. 16, largely because severely troubled companies have no money or assets to pursue.

“Sometimes these deals are cut and they shouldn’t have been cut,” DeWine said.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator.