Catching Our Eye News Roundup, June 4, 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

• Rural AI. The Ohio Newsroom’s Kendall Crawford is reporting, “A new project aims to bring more AI literacy to rural Ohio.”

For years, there’s been a push to create better broadband infrastructure in rural areas, where access to high speed internet can be hard to come by.

Now, Wright State University is tackling a new digital frontier: artificial intelligence.

The university received $2.5 million in grant money from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education to develop an AI curriculum for rural educators at Ohio and Kansas high schools and colleges

• Property tax deadline. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler is reporting, “Effort to abolish Ohio property taxes faces looming deadline for fall ballot.”

The clock is ticking on the volunteers working to gather 413,487 valid signatures to put an amendment to abolish property taxes in Ohio before voters this fall. In April the group’s lead organizer said they’d collected around 305,000 signatures, but didn’t specify if they were valid. They have until July 1 to get those signatures for the fall ballot, and it’s expected they’d need to get to around 700,000 signatures in just a few weeks to cover those that are rejected as invalid.

• Low-income housing? ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Tony Schick are reporting, “A Low-Income Housing Program Is Pouring Billions Into Housing Many People Can’t Afford.”

On any given night, thousands of people sleep on the streets in Portland, Oregon. They seek shelter in tents, bushes and overpasses in a city that has struggled with one of the worst housing crises in the country.

Portland, like many cities, has raced to increase its supply of affordable housing by turning to a federal program that’s existed since the 1980s: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It provides up to $15 billion worth of tax credits a year nationally to help developers build apartments. Portland supplemented the federal construction money with local dollars, creating incentives that were hard to turn down.

But to meet the affordability requirements, all the developers needed to do in most cases was put rents within reach of someone earning 60% of median income, an earnings threshold that equates to about $75,000 annually for a family of four.