LIMA — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine told members of the local National Federation of Independent Business on Tuesday fighting the Obama administration is one of his full-time jobs.
“The Obama administration is taking a law and stretching it much beyond what Bill Clinton did,” DeWine said.
As an example, he said clean air regulations proposed by the Obama administration are so extreme if those went into effect the laws would dramatically raise the price of power production devastating the state and the residents who would be forced to pay the higher prices. It also would affect whether businesses moved to Ohio.
“We have filed lawsuits to block it,” he said.
DeWine said he learned as a young boy, through his family’s business, the struggles those who run companies face. His grandparents started a small business where he worked as a child in Yellow Springs.
“My grandmother used to talk about those crazy people in Washington and Columbus who were making her life more difficult. She said if they had to run a business like she did maybe they would not pass all those laws,” DeWine said.
DeWine said he has always remembered the words of his grandmother and the struggles of small businesses.
DeWine also told the group during a meeting at Westgate Lanes banquet hall that more needs to be done to rehabilitate former felons, especially because most of the people who go to prison will someday get out.
“People need to be able to move on, too, and they need to be able to have the opportunity to do so,” he said.
The attorney general spoke on a variety of topics including telling the group the turnaround for DNA testing at the crime lab his office manages is 22 days compared to 125 days when he took office five years ago. He added he has four times as many pieces of evidence to test than the previous attorney general.
He also said he has pushed to process old rape kits that contain DNA evidence, some more than 20 years old that are sitting in police evidence rooms across the state. The state’s crime lab just processed its 10,000th old rape kit. Of those, scientists have been able to identify 37 percent of the people who committed the crimes through a national database of known people, he said.
“In some cases the rapist is dead, some are in prison and in one case we had a guy within four days of getting out so we stopped him from getting out,” DeWine said. “It has been an amazing success story.”
DeWine told the group heroin is big problem in Ohio that touches every community. He said education, rehab and prevention are the keys to solving the problem.
“We are not going to arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.
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