CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — The Mayor of Dayton announced last month she was running for Governor of Ohio in 2022, and if the busy campaign schedule she keeps is any indication of how hard she will work if elected, Ohioans might just be inclined to make Nan Whaley their first female-Governor.
She visited the area on a coffee shop tour over the weekend, meeting with voters at Paper City Café on Paint Street. She spends her 16+ hour days balancing her time between serving as the Gem City’s chief executive and sharing her vision for — what she calls — a better Ohio. In an interview with the Guardian on Monday, the 45-year-old discussed a wide range of stances, from corruption to the drug epidemic, and even broadband internet access in rural Ohio.
“I recognize I am a different kind of candidate than Ohio has seen in the past,” Whaley said by phone. “I’m also from the middle class, I live in a middle class neighborhood in the heart of west Dayton. I’m not splitting my time between the Governor’s Mansion and my own personal mansion.”
Unlike current Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and his predecessor, John Kasich, who both chose to reside in their personal homes while leading Ohio, Whaley said she and her husband would reside in the Governor’s Mansion in Columbus.
Whaley and her husband, Sam, paid just over $60,000 for their home, she said, expounding on the sentiment that she is a “regular” Ohioan with executive experience who is ready to lead.
“I have a sense of what most Ohioans need and I see what is really happening on the ground, and that is something where I think Mike DeWine has gotten out-of-touch …. I think the people of Ohio deserve better,” she said. “We’ve been doing the same thing for three decades, and Ohio just gets further behind, and it’s time for a change.”
Whaley was first elected to the Dayton City Commission in 2005 and was one of the youngest women ever chosen for a commission seat. She was elected mayor of Dayton in 2013, winning 56 percent of the vote. After serving two terms as mayor, she said she’s ready to challenge DeWine to bring Ohio to the forefront.
“DeWine is weak and he’s let down the people of Ohio because he can’t standup to his own party, and he can’t get things done. We’ve seen this with COVID, we’ve seen it around corruption, and with common sense gun safety issues, and he’s too weak to standup to really make a difference in this state.”
Whaley was mayor when a gunman opened fire in the popular Oregon District in Dayton in 2019, killing 9 people and wounding 17 others. One particular example she pointed to when she says DeWine is weak is gun safety legislation. Shortly after the shooting. the Governor visited with Whaley and announced he would pursue gun reform laws.
DeWine’s proposal included “pink slip” laws by expanding the 72-hour involuntary commitments of those with severe mental health problems to include hospitalization for those suffering from drug dependency and chronic alcoholism. In addition, if doctors decided a person needed long-term treatment, a probate court hearing would have been required within five days after the commitment. Police officers could have also taken guns off the streets. DeWine said he supported a proposal under which a “safety protection order” could be sought by family members or authorities and issued by a judge directing police to seize a person’s guns if they were deemed a threat. Less than six months after the Dayton shooting, the Governor dropped those items from his proposal. To this day, — two years after the shooting — no new gun laws have been passed except for one that expanded Ohio’s “Stand Your Ground” law, going into the complete opposite direction, Whaley said.
“We need someone who is tough and willing to make changes.”
When asked if she thought she was “tough” enough to implement change, she replied saying her track record speaks for itself.
“My history of running Dayton, and the way I’ve led here has shown my ‘Dayton-toughness’, frankly.”
Specific things on Whaley’s agenda involves weeding out corruption in state government. She said Ohio is ranked number one in the country for corruption; something she shares often on her social media platforms. Recently, the FBI told The Columbus Dispatch that Ohio’s public corruption case involving $61 million in bribes in exchange for a $1.3 billion energy bailout is the biggest open investigation in any Statehouse in America.
The two-term mayor became passionate discussing unemployment and DeWine’s decision to return $300 a week in federal unemployment dollars; a move that Cleveland.com said will cost the state more than a billion dollars in economic stimulus.
“This is what I am talking about when I say DeWine is weak. He’s making decisions purely based on politics, and that’s what happened when he turned down the federal unemployment insurance money. We know this money has great impact in the community and there is not one single study that is cited to show that this is going to do any good for the people of Ohio besides take money out of their pockets. When he was asked at the announcement if he had made this decision based on data and fact, he said, ‘no, no,’ and gave antidotal stories.”
Broadband internet access is something that Whaley said is critical to Ohio, specifically, rural Ohio. According to InnovateOhio, more than 300,000 households, or 1 million Ohioans, lack access to high-speed internet. Recently, the Ohio Senate nixed a proposal in DeWine’s budget that would have allocated $250 million to grow internet access. Whaley said, however, that this is just another sign that the Governor gives “lip service” and cannot get things done.
“Broadband is so key on infrastructure; it’s almost like electricity was for the rural areas …. what this administration has been doing is giving lip service and not putting any funding into it …. they actually introduced a piece of the bill [from a for profit company] that would say that municipalities could not provide broadband. That’s the kind of corruption and cronyism that is going on at the Statehouse over-and-over again, and it has got to stop.”
The election for Ohio’s next Governor is November 2022. A primary between Whaley and fellow democratic mayor, John Cranley is set for the spring.
