Kasich told Sean Hannity on the Fox News Network, “President Obama was in Columbus last week and I’m disappointed to report that he didn’t bring a loan guarantee with him, especially because it will do nothing to increase the national deficit.”
Kasich said he had recently written a letter to Obama asking for his leadership in securing the loan guarantee.
“For too long, the process has been bottled up in bureaucratic red tape,” Kasich said. “And it is preventing us from creating thousands of jobs in southern Ohio.”
In a story in the Columbus Dispatch, Sheri Anderson of Portsmouth, a USEC employee, said she had high hopes that during Obama’s visit to Columbus he would announce his administration had approved the loan guarantee.
“We’re just dying to get this project off the ground,” Anderson said. “We feel like we’ve just been hanging on.”
Portsmouth businessman Jeff Albrecht, operator of the Holiday Inn, hosted the president in 2008, while he was on the campaign trail, and was told then he would support the loan guarantee.
The ACP would, if completed, create 8,000 jobs — 4,000 of those in Ohio. If Obama does not authorize the loan guarantee and the project is shut down, 1,100 current jobs are forecast to go away.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown met with John Welch, president and CEO of USEC Inc. last week. In that meeting, USEC briefed Brown on ACP and its near-term and long-term outlook. Brown said he pressed USEC on continuing its improvements with the ACP project as well as its commitments to the local workforce.
Brown said he came away from the meeting hopeful about the future and he said he is committed to continuing to work together with USEC as well as advocating for the ACP with the Obama administration.
FRANK LEWIS may be reached at 740-353-3101, ext. 232, or flewis@heartlandpublications.com.
Florida's HS route was to connect Tampa and Orlando. It would have cut 15 minutes off the travel time. The only true beneficiaries of this rail would have been Busch Gardens and Disney / Universal Studios, for tourists may have used the connection.
So Florida has not created those jobs mentioned.
Flagler created a rail system connecting Jacksonville to Miami ages ago. It opened up south Florida for developement. Now those rails are mostly cargo. The passenger lines are widely underused. Has this changed since gas prices soared? I don't really know. You can blame the R governor, but the state didn't have the cash projected for our portion of the committment and long term maintenance. He wanted to use the money for upgrading our ports, but that was denied. HS rail or nothing.
Florida has a hard time connecting popular destinations. We've got big Lake O and a swamp in the middle of the state, and those areas are federally protected.
Yes Kasich, we know all about prevention / creation of jobs. You sent the high speed rail money back to Washington, thus Florida and New York took the money that was given to Ohio to form high speed rail between Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Cincinnati and they have all created 1,000s of jobs with it.