[toomuchtodo]

> A Cleveland.com investigation in September found that over a hundred Ohio residents said their names were attached to form letters sent to the commission in a public comment period without their knowledge — all of them urging state parks allow fracking.

> Those names included a 9-year-old girl and a blind woman. The form letter, which appears over 1,000 times in the public comment database, urges Ohio to “responsibly” lease rights to minerals under Salt Fork State Park, among other areas.

> The 9-year-old’s mother, Brittany Keep, told Cleveland.com that her daughter knows nothing about oil and gas exploration and neither of them have visited Salt Fork State Park.

Politicians enabling fraud. The members of the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission are public record, journalists should dig deep. All available evidence points to bad faith actions and sidestepping the will of local citizens for oil and gas interests attempting to ram this through.

Last time it was nuclear power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

[justin66]

Cleveland.com's editors tend to be tools [0] for the same right wing that supports this stuff, and it forced out all its unionized journalists a few years ago, [1] so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "deep" reporting on this. I guess we can hope a small, underfunded, more independent paper in the state might do something with it.

[0] https://www.ideastream.org/2014-11-04/the-only-video-of-kasi...

[1] https://prospect.org/labor/busting-the-guild-in-cleveland/

[toomuchtodo]

I messaged ProPublica.

[justin66]

Ah. That’s a great idea.