The Columbus Dispatch reports on the kerfuffle caused by John Kasich’s running mate, Mary Taylor, in telling an audience that she used to advice wealthy clients to move to Florida.

Florida’s tax burden is less than that of Ohio’s, the GOP has responded; but the Republicans make no qualification or concession for the fact that the Sunshine State’s tourism industry brings in more tax dollars than Ohio’s income and sales taxes combined.

The Dispatch reports on Ohio’s inroads into solar energy:

While Ohio is just beginning to develop solar power, the state is already a leader in manufacturing the components. Companies such as First Solar and Xunlight, both in the Toledo area, produce thin-film photovoltaic panels, a light and flexible material that is helping drive down the cost.

The presence of component manufacturers is what inspired a state law that led to the Wyandot County project. Two years ago, Strickland signed Senate Bill 221, a measure that requires utilities to produce 25 percent of their electricity from so-called advanced sources by 2025.

At the time of passage, Ohio had virtually no utility-scale solar installations.

“Ohio had this core industry growing in northwest Ohio around solar, and it was important to specifically create a requirement for local deployment,” Shanahan said.

Solar power was the only energy source that got its own piece of the pie in the law. Solar must compose 0.5percent of overall electricity by 2025, which translates to roughly 400 megawatts.

Notably, the law applies only to investor-owned utilities, a group that includes American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy and Dayton Power and Light. Rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities, such as AMP’s clients, are exempt.

So far, AEP has made the largest investment in meeting the requirement. The Columbus-based utility helped develop the Wyandot project and has a contract to buy all the power produced there. AEP now has enough solar capacity to meet the benchmarks for 2010 through 2012. (AEP and AMP are not affiliated, despite their similar names and the fact that both are based in Columbus.)

The Dispatch reports:

Strickland said McGee Brown’s vivaciousness enhances his re-election chances. But he and others also know her as a smart and demanding public official, who gives no quarter to excuses and demands personal accountability.

“She’s fun, but she also has a serious side and most of that seriousness is based on her own experiences growing up on the East Side of Columbus,” Johnson said.

It was not an easy upbringing. She was born to an unwed teenage mother, her father long gone. If not for her grandmother Eunice Banks, who died at 79 in 1985, McGee Brown has no idea who she might have become. Maybe not a lawyer or a judge or a good mom and wife. Lieutenant governor probably wouldn’t be in the conversation.

“My grandmother is who I got a lot of my strength from,” McGee Brown said.

Born on a sharecroppers’ plantation in Macon, Ga., Banks married an alcoholic who wasn’t around much for their eight kids. When her daughter, Sylvia Kendrick, became pregnant at 18 with McGee Brown, Banks made sure Mom worked to support the new baby.

“Life didn’t give my grandmother a fair shake, but she would always say to me, ‘You go to school, baby, and you learn everything those people have to teach you because once they’ve taught it to you they can never take it back,’” McGee Brown said.

When a professor at Ohio University in Athens urged McGee Brown to go to law school – putting on hold her goal of becoming a congressional press secretary in Washington – she sought Grandma’s advice: “She looked at me and was quiet for a while, and then said, ‘Well, if you’re going to live to be 25 anyway, why not be 25 and be a lawyer?’ ”

Banks died on Christmas Day in 1985, a month after watching her granddaughter be sworn in as a lawyer. A year earlier, she had beamed as her own daughter, Sylvia, received her bachelor’s degree, a 10-year endeavor.

McGee Brown had steady boyfriends at Mifflin High School and OU but waited until age 32 to marry. She was a first-time judicial candidate in 1992 for Franklin County Common Pleas Court and had no time for dating. But she couldn’t resist the fawning attention of Tony Brown, a high-school teacher of learning-disabled students whom she met in church. His wife had died of cancer about a year earlier and he brought 14- and 6-year-old daughters to the marriage.

“He said, ‘I have these girls. I’m not a dater. I’m not going to have women in and out of my house. I have to live a moral life for them.’ And he said he knew I was the one,” McGee Brown said. She and Tony added a son to their family.

It was Tony who persuaded her to run, she said.

When Strickland came calling, McGee Brown was not looking to establish another milestone. She already was the first black woman elected to the Common Pleas Court and would be the third woman, and second African-American, to serve as lieutenant governor. In 2002, she became founding president of the Center for Child and Family Advocacy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and was committed to the mission of serving abused children. The $75,900 lieutenant governor’s salary would mean a $222,890 pay cut.

“I swear to God, I thought I was done with public service,” McGee Brown said. “The center was my baby.”

Even so, she was restless, telling her husband, “I’ve got one more big job in me.”

“Tony said, ‘You belong in public service. You’ve had your foray in the private sector. You’re good at this. You like being with people; you need to get back in.’ ”

Contemplating her husband’s advice, McGee Brown’s eyes were lost in another smile: “God really smiled on me with him.”

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The Dispatch reports on good news coming from state government at the end of FY2010:

State government ended the 2010 fiscal year Wednesday in the black with an unobligated ending balance of $139 million.

The balance reflects the difference between the state’s ending cash balance of $510.3 million and its outstanding obligations of $371.3 million, Budget Director J. Pari Sabety said last week.

The state’s budget picture wasn’t looking so good in April, when personal income taxes came in below projections by $229.1 million, or 16.3 percent.

However, state spending in the fiscal year totaled $25.6 billion, or about $500 million less than expected, Sabety said.

The Strickland campaign has announced that the Governor will be delivering a major campaign speech tomorrow morning at 11 A.M. Watch it live hereand tune in to Policy in Practice later in the day for a full analysis of the remarks.

In the arch of Ohio’s history, the past 30 years have seen the tides of change take much away from the state’s shores, while bringing in new opportunity for Ohio to reinvent itself and reassert its place as an international leader in producing innovation–and innovators.

The transformation from a state that thrived in the economy of old to a state that is claiming its place in the new global economy is a difficult one, to be sure. Countries across the world are bearing that out now, and no state has born the brunt of that responsibility more so than Ohio. But its people in its cities have taken the onus that has come with being an old capital of the manufacturing belt, and they’re now leading the way in helping the U.S. adapt to the times. Consider the city of Toledo, once a bustling port that produced glass and cars, its economy has struggled in recent years as the way people do business changed. But innovators and innovation, in collaboration with government and private business, have made the city a global leader in developing and producing solar technology.

A state whose communities and schools have cultivated renowned figures in law, medicine, politics, literature and sport has seen one of its favorite sons rise to extraordinary heights on the basketball court and off in LeBron James, the Akron-born and Akron-raised superstar whose proclivities in the NBA have made him the most sought-after free agent in professional sports history this summer. Being courted by a billionaire to join the New Jersey Nets, by the glitz and glamour of the New York Knicks, by the ability to replace the void left by James’ idol Michael Jordan at the Chicago Bulls, LeBron James is coveted the most by his home state of Ohio and the people who knew him when he was dazzling with his promise to be a legend. Now having become one, James has the opportunity to write another chapter in his and his home state’s lore as someone who transcended more than business and basketball, to do something few athletes have ever had the opportunity to do: to build up one’s community from whence one came, all the while pursuing that which one loves.

As Ohio reinvents himself, so too has LeBron James reinvented the game of basketball, bringing to the court a physicality steered by grace, ever capable of adjusting to that which each game situation requires in order to maximize his team’s ability to win. In a few days, LeBron will announce his decision to stay or go, and though Ohioans all over will support him no matter what he chooses to do, this state’s story will be all the more enriched by a decision to stay and continue to help write it.

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times followed Democrat Steve Driehaus on the campaign trail to report on the challenges Democrats face in an election cycle without Barack Obama drawing new voters to the party at the polls.

While all candidates ask voters for support, the pitch from Mr. Driehaus is more pointed than most. He is among the class of Democrats who face the challenge of running in difficult districts without the same enthusiasm and expected voter turnout that helped the party expand its Congressional majorities when Barack Obama led the ticket two years ago.

The race highlights a central question of this election cycle: What chance do Democrats have of defending House districts, like the one here in Cincinnati and a dozen more across the country, where, by narrow margins in 2008, they captured seats held by Republicans?

To hold these seats and to protect others that are vulnerable, Democrats are trying to re-create the Obama campaign machinery and expand turnout beyond a typical midterm election to compete with a particularly motivated Republican base.

The prospects for Democrats holding on to the House, and perhaps even the Senate, could rest with whether legions of first-time or occasional voters who supported Mr. Obama, including a high percentage of African-Americans, return to the polls this year.

The contest in Ohio’s First Congressional District offers one of the best case studies in the country. The campaign is among a dozen rematches in this election cycle: Steve Chabot, who was first elected in the 1994 Republican sweep, lost his seat to Mr. Driehaus by four percentage points — 14,772 votes — and is fighting to win it back.