Catching Our Eye News Roundup, Oct. 27, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Data centers. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles reports, “Candidates for Ohio governor focus on data centers in last week of campaign.”

As campaigns for governor are headed into the last week before the election, Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton is on the offensive, launching a new ad about where her opponent stands on data centers. But a political action committee (PAC) supporting Republican Vivek Ramaswamy is also putting a new ad out on his behalf that goes after Acton on data centers.

• Tax cuts for weapons manufacturer take away from schools. Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media reports, “An Ohio school needs funds. It voted to cut Anduril’s tax bill, anyway.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 16, 2025, just hours after Ohio’s governor announced that the autonomous weapons manufacturer Anduril was setting up a mega-factory near Columbus, the treasurer of a rural school district sent an urgent email to school board members.

He asked them to convene at 8 a.m. the following day and vote on whether to grant Anduril more than 30 years of property tax breaks. In Ohio, school boards are allowed to review and veto such deals when the tax abatement is more than 75% of what the company would have otherwise paid to public schools, which rely heavily on property taxes for their funding.

Records obtained from the school district indicate that the local government agreed to cut Anduril’s property taxes by at least $60 million. However, a calculation by Inkstick using figures in separate county records suggests the value is far higher.

• Oil and gas incidents. The Athens County Independent’s Dani Kington and Eric Boll report, “Report finds increase in Ohio oil and gas incidents.”

A new report from regional environmental groups claims that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources failed to properly investigate, enforce regulations and record data on oil and gas wells.

The report, authored by the FracTracker Alliance and the Buckeye Environmental Network, looked at ODNR incident reports over a 10-year period, 2015–2025.