An abundance of Trump flags dotted the cornfield-lined state route through Richland County on a dreary February day.
But inside an unassuming farmhouse in Shelby, a small rural town just outside Mansfield, a group huddled under Palestinian, Ukrainian and rainbow pride flags.
Their politics are demonstrably left leaning, but believe it or not, they’re packing heat.
The parking garage at Cleveland City Hall is filled with hundreds of nondescript vehicles, but one stands out among them.
Wrapped in city branding and affixed with a mounted camera, this new 311 City Support Vehicle can do in a matter of weeks what previously took the city nine months, $170,000 and dozens of housing employees, already in short supply.
"Citywide housing surveys are few and far between, typically every five years," said Sally Martin O’Toole, Cleveland’s Director of Building and Housing. "They're very expensive and they're very labor intensive."
The grant-funded pilot program uses new artificial intelligence technology from the Alabama-based company City Detect, utilizing a mounted camera and software that captures and analyzes images of the city’s housing stock.
Maxine Mayer-Mack began her mat Pilates class at The Studio in Downtown Cleveland with guided breathwork.
"Another inhale through the nose, fill the belly up with air," she soothingly cooed.
As she instructs her students to meditate and find inner peace, Mayer-Mack is heated, and it’s not just the 100-degree room.
"I am very angry about this parking situation," she said.
Mayer-Mack used to park for free after 6 p.m. and on weekends. But now, because of the city’s new rate hikes and extended enforcement hours, it costs her $180 to park in The Flats each month.
"Which, as a low-paid worker, that is not acceptable," Mayer-Mack said.
Mayor Justin Bibb pitched the changes as a way to eventually reinvest back into city streets, though no legislation has yet come through City Council to divert that revenue, and to help small businesses.
Ohio's long history of firefighting is memorialized at the Western Reserve Fire Museum in Downtown Cleveland. Its centuries-old roots have contributed to a system that is struggling to serve all Ohioans today. (Abbey Marshall / Ideastream Public Media)
Three years ago, a fiery derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous materials upended life in the quiet rural town of East Palestine.
The fallout was apocalyptic: A plume of smoke and fire billowed from dozens of derailed cars. The vinyl chloride they released into the frigid February air hung heavy over the homes of the town’s 5,000 residents, about half of whom would be swiftly evacuated.
The first responder to roll up on the scene wasn’t a chemist, or a police officer or an engineer.
It was a volunteer firefighter who had no idea what he was walking into.
In a National Transportation Safety Board hearing four months later, local Fire Chief Keith Drabick said it was a miracle no one was hurt.
“For that miracle, I am grateful to my East Palestine Fire Department members, all of whom are volunteers,” Drabick told members of the federal agency.
In the following days, the volunteers worked with a slew of local, state and federal agencies to clear debris, perform a controlled burn of toxic chemicals and usher residents to safety.
There was more Drabick wanted to do to initially respond to the crisis, but he said it wasn’t possible.
“Small departments like ours and most volunteer departments in this country ... don't have the ability to send people to chase a train,” he said.
The East Palestine disaster is an extreme example of what volunteer firefighters are being asked to do all the time. The firefighters and emergency medical services responders who staff a majority of Ohio departments are recovering bodies, responding to fatal car crashes and running into burning buildings, for little to no pay, armed with as few as 36 hours of training.
Even before the East Palestine disaster, a state task force had sounded the alarm about fatalities, inadequate training and a recruitment crisis for volunteers that staff 70% of Ohio’s 1,180 fire departments.
“Unfortunately, these volunteer services are seeing changing times. Many of these volunteer service departments are in jeopardy,” Gov. Mike DeWine said at a 2022 press conference announcing the formation of the state task force. “We need to look at these challenges and come up with fresh solutions.”
But addressing those problems may prove challenging: Ohio’s modern volunteer firefighter system has centuries-old roots that are difficult to untangle.
Community bucket brigades in early colonial times inspired some of the first American volunteer departments in the 1700s. Unaffiliated with local governments, these fire societies were small, self-financed and self-governed.
As time went on, fire departments never became as uniformly organized as law enforcement, leading to a scrappy free-for-all in growing urban areas.
“When volunteer fire departments were formed, in order to raise money for equipment, they relied on fire insurance companies,” said Kenny Rybka, a former volunteer firefighter who now works with the Western Reserve Fire Museum in Cleveland. “And if there was a fire and the volunteer fire company showed up, if you had a fire mark on your building, they would go to work to fight your fire.
“But if you didn't, they would do nothing.”
It got to the point where different volunteer departments would scuffle over the right to fight a fire and collect the insurance paycheck after.
“So there would actually be fistfights in the street in front of the fire building,” Rybka said. “They would take axes and cut the other fire company's hoses. And it was a mess.”
The 1895 book “History of the Cincinnati Fire Department” describes a particularly brutal brawl four decades prior:
“The battle took place during a fire on the corner of Augusta and John streets, between Western Hose Company No. 3, and the Washington Company No. 1. On that occasion ten companies were drawn into the fight, while the building, a planing mill, was permitted to burn to the ground. Mayor [Mark P.] Taylor appeared on the scene and read the riot act, but to no purpose, the battle continuing until daylight.”
Two years later, in 1853, Cincinnati established the first professional and fully paid public fire department in the country.
“So they decided to start paying the firefighters,” Rybka said. “They start paying for the equipment. … They took the current volunteer fire departments that were in existence and absorbed them into the city.”
Many others in Ohio — and in the nation — followed.
But not all were able to do that. Staffing a full-time department is expensive, especially in rural areas with smaller tax bases. Even to this day, nearly three-quarters of departments in Ohio are made up of volunteers.
It’s a system so flawed the highest ranking firefighter in the state said it puts the lives of volunteers and residents at risk.
“The threats, the fire risks, the fire hazards, they've all increased,” said Ohio State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon. “Line-of-duty deaths, they've all increased.”
The work can be incredibly dangerous — even more so than professional firefighting: Ideastream Public Media’s data analysis found that between 1990 and 2025, 57% of Ohio firefighter fatalities were volunteers. That’s 10 percentage points higher than the national average of that same period.
They died on scene at fires, responding to the emergencies, on duty and in other ways. Almost half died of overexertion.
Residents are suffering too. Ideastream’s analysis found that response times for volunteer fire departments are more than two minutes longer than full-time departments – two minutes that can make a huge difference mid-blaze.
The volunteer departments are often in sparsely populated rural areas where longer drives are a given. Even so, Reardon said the volunteer model just doesn’t cut it.
“Getting a call on a pager or your phone or whatever, and then getting in your car, driving to the station, and then taking a run,” Reardon said. “They're not gonna make any saves with it with a 10-minute response time. You're not gonna save anything or anybody. You're not even gonna save the mailbox.”
And a crisis is looming. As volunteers age, with the average volunteer firefighter at 54, volunteer departments are struggling to replace those who retire. Service calls were up 23% for departments who classify themselves as volunteer from 2020 to 2024, according to an Ideastream analysis of data from the Ohio Department of Commerce.
Meanwhile, fewer people are getting certified as volunteer firefighters. The number of active volunteer firefighter certifications has decreased nearly 15% since January of 2020, according to an Ideastream analysis of data from Ohio Emergency Medical Services.
“Some people would say they do firefighting as a hobby. That is completely wrong. Anyone that says that to me is going to have an argument,” Reardon said. “They do it to serve their community.”
All week, we’ll look at the challenges the volunteers face as they seek to do that, the support they lack to do it safely and possible solutions for the future of volunteer firefighting. Tomorrow, we’ll learn about the funding challenges small volunteer departments face.
Abigail Bottar and Kendall Crawford contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published by Today from the Ohio Newsroom and aired across Ohio’s stations on Jan. 12, 2026.
Jasmin Santana has her Cleveland City Council seat all but secured, but she's campaigning like she doesn't.
"Yo soy la concejal ya en el distrito 14," she introduced herself to a man blowing leaves outside his Brooklyn Centre home on a recent Saturday afternoon. "Jasmin Santana."
She handed him an election information packet, with materials in English and Spanish, including polling locations and "know your rights" cards for immigrants amid fears of ICE raids and detainments. Nearly half of Santana's current ward is Latino. The man smiled and wished her luck.
"This is fun!" she said with a smile as she moved onto the next house.
Contested or not, Santana said every vote matters in her West Side ward, which includes Clark Fulton, Brooklyn Center and the Stockyards.
"Because we don't have a competitive race this year, I don't anticipate many residents going out to vote, but we're trying to encourage them to get out to vote," she said.
Marie Vibbert logged in to her Case Western Reserve University work account on March 19 to find an early-morning email with the subject line: “Confidential and Urgent: Removing scholarship pages from the College of Arts and Sciences website.”
The email, sent by a staff member in the university’s marketing department, asked her to remove three web pages.
Vibbert, the webmaster for the College of Arts and Sciences, clicked through the three links. All contained information about diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships.
“They said that the university was under a lot of pressure and that they needed to do this legally. This university could be sued for having DEI language,” Vibbert said of conversations with leadership when she asked for an explanation.
The university, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.
Vibbert refused to comply with the order to remove the web pages.
Like many transgender people, Kaden Jarosz is cautious about where he goes to the bathroom for his own safety.
"We literally just want to do what we got to do and get out," said Jarosz, a 19-year-old Oberlin College student and transgender man.
One place where he didn't have to worry about using the bathroom was in his dorm. It had one gender-neutral bathroom and two other multi-stalled bathrooms that use the "E-system" to indicate with whom they're comfortable sharing the space. "E" stands for "everyone."
"It's usually on 'everyone,' so you do that," he said as he reattached a sheet of laminated paper to the door with Velcro so "E" faced upright. "If you are only aligned with wanting women in the restroom or people who identify as women in the restroom, flip it like that."
He flipped the sheet of paper again, which also had the option for total privacy with "me, myself and I."
"It works. It works really well," Jarosz said.
Under Ohio law, the "E-system" would be illegal starting on Feb. 25. Oberlin has now scrapped it and converted the dorm bathrooms to two single, all-gender restrooms and one women's room.
Since Jarosz lives on campus, his dorm is subject to the “Protect All Students Act.” Often called the transgender bathroom ban, the new law requires Ohio schools to designate multi-occupancy restrooms, locker rooms and "overnight accommodations" for exclusive use by male or female students based on their original birth certificate.
That means thousands of transgender students, staff and visitors across the state will no longer be able to legally use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender.
“Destination Cleveland will NEVER get support from me again.”
That message from Cleveland City Councilmember Anthony Hairston on a text thread kicked off a divisive and explosive argument between council members after news broke that Cleveland’s Ward 1 Councilmember Joe Jones was under investigation for inappropriate behavior.
The text thread, obtained by Ideastream Public Media, appears to indicate two council members — Anthony Hairston and Richard Starr — intended to retaliate against the tourism nonprofit that raised concerns about Jones’ behavior, sparking a third-party investigation.
Jena Gross almost died having an emergency C-section in 2021.
"It was terrifying because Ellie did not make any noise when they pulled her out of me," Gross recalled. "And so I am like starting to cry on the table. My guts are everywhere. My husband is like trying to figure out what's going on like it was. And I just kept asking like, 'is she okay? Is she okay? Is she okay?'"
She had to be induced at 36 weeks because Ellie’s life was at risk.
"It was the longest five minutes of my life," she said.
Now, Ellie’s a healthy toddler, and the 31-year-old Parma mother and her husband want to give her a sibling. But Gross's medical history raises the risks of miscarrying — and she feels unsure about future protections for herself and her family.
"I really want another kid... because I love being a mom. I love being with Ellie and everything," she said as she choked back tears.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Ohio’s abortion laws changed significantly and quickly: hours after the Supreme Court decision, the state implemented a Heartbeat Law which dropped the limit for an abortion from 22 weeks of pregnancy to about six weeks, which a judge temporarily blocked. Then, Ohioans passed a constitutional amendment that put the limit back at 22 weeks.
That tumult is terrifying for Gross and other women like her who worry the law could change again while they’re pregnant.
While more than half a million Cuyahoga County voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s general election, residents like Latoya Butler stayed home.
“People don’t care anymore,” Butler, a 57-year-old Cleveland resident said Tuesday as she waited for a bus. “As an African-American woman, I just feel like Trump — he is like the first president that I feel like just outright in our face does not care about the minorities. He does not care. And it's like, how do you go on and vote for someone and you really don't know. You know, it's like, I don't know who to vote for.
“So I just chose to not vote.”
Many non-voters share Butler’s sentiment: Their vote, they say, doesn’t matter.
And while the United States voting base has recently turned out in historic numbers, with about two-thirds of the voting-eligible population showing up for the 2020 presidential election, millions of Americans still opt to stay home.
In Cuyahoga County, 34% of registered voters did not cast ballots in Tuesday’s election.
Why?
Pumpkin isn’t as spry as he once was.
His orange fur coat, from which the 13-year-old cat gets his moniker, is now flecked with gray. He’s fed a special diet for his kidney problems. And his arthritis keeps him from hopping up and laying behind the glass facade of the Athens County Board of Elections. So, much to the disappointment of Ohio University students walking to bars and shops along the city’s main drag, the local celebrity is rarely seen.
Except during an election year.
At 74 years old, Susan Hohs has voted in dozens of elections. But none of them, she said, compare in tone to the last three presidential cycles that have included Donald J. Trump.
"I think it's only getting worse," Hohs said. "And I don't like it at all. It's mean-spirited. It's wrong."
As America gears up for results in the match-up between former President Trump, the Republican candidate, and Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, Tuesday, heated political rhetoric is seemingly at every turn.
In recent weeks, Trump has called Harris "mentally impaired" and a "sh** vice president," while Harris has mocked Trump's statement that he is the "father of IVF" and laughed at his assertion during the presidential debate in September that he had a "concept of a plan" for health care.
Voters like Hohs, a retired nurse living in Northfield, Ohio, say they are tired of it.
A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that 85% of Americans say political debate in the U.S. has become less respectful. In May, 62% told pollsters they were already worn out by so much coverage of the campaign and candidates.
So, if people are so burned out, why do politicians go with it?
Half a world away from what was once home, Tantine Mukonge bent over the soft earth and tugged at a ripe tomato.
The 37-year-old mother of four has worked on the Ohio City Farm since she first arrived in Cleveland in 2017 from a refugee camp in Rwanda, where she lived for 18 years after fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“Here is more better because I [am] working, and I find some little bit of money,” Mukonge said of Cleveland. “But in the Africa, [it] was a little bit troubling.”
The five-acre farm, located just off the bustling dining and retail corridor of West 25th Street on Cleveland’s West Side, is a peaceful oasis in the center of the quick-paced urban environment: Crickets chirp among fields of produce and greenhouses and the soft chatter of Swahili and other languages.
Cleveland City Hall is closed again to the public after an unspecified cyber threat shuttered the government building and many of the city’s services for almost a full week.
Inside, the city keeps records including the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Cleveland and other Cuyahoga County residents, including birth and death certificates, permits, payment records and more.
As the days pass without an answer about what resident data — if any — has been affected, cybersecurity expert Erman Ayday said the lack of details about the incident itself can severely damage public trust.
Khadejah Cunningham yanked helplessly on the locked doors of Cleveland City Hall Tuesday afternoon.
He quickly began to panic.
The government building's closure was more than an inconvenience: Cunningham said it was the difference between being able to see his child or not. He needed a birth certificate to establish his paternity to begin his bid for custody of his daughter, but he left tearful and empty-handed.
"I've been trying to breathe for the last few hours... I went to police stations... They all directed me here, so I just went and paid for parking, got my other daughter a babysitter to come down here," Cunningham said. "And I guess I'm not going to get anywhere today at all."
Cunningham was one of many residents impacted by City Hall's closure Tuesday — the second day in a row after an unspecified cyber threat shut down most public-facing city operations.
Cleveland is on track to be the first city in the country to launch a jobs guarantee program.
City Council approved a proposal Monday to develop a $21 million pilot program designed to eradicate poverty, called Universal Basic Employment, that officials say is the first of its kind in the country.
Cleveland-area native Devin Cotten devised the idea after working with impoverished families in Cleveland for years in his role at the Burten, Bell, Carr community development corporation in the city's Central and Kinsman neighborhoods.
"We subsidize literally everything — roadways, housing developments, businesses — literally everything," Cotten said. "But we failed to subsidize the individual agency and prosperity for the nearly 40 million Americans currently living in poverty."
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s pick for a new top safety position made "tweaks" to his own job description before it was posted, records obtained by Ideastream Public Media show.
Controversy has followed Phillip McHugh, Bibb’s former college roommate, since the mayor selected him to fill a newly-created Senior Advisor for Public Safety position last month.
Now, emails show that McHugh, who resigned Thursday, helped craft the job description last fall before he was a city employee. The annual salary for the job is $124,000.
Jerry Gordon is finally moving out of his apartment in The Residences at Shaker Square.
He loves the area: the accessibility, the transit access, the restaurants, the proximity to his hospital, but after 14 years of dealing with management turnover, rent hikes and maintenance issues, the 65-year-old said he just can’t live like that anymore.
"Just think about it now; I have to go pick up my medication," said Gordon, who struggles with heart failure. "If the elevators are not working, I have to walk down six flights, go get my medicine and walk back up."
Monday night meetings in Cleveland City Council chambers are usually a quiet and orderly affair. Council members filter into their seats, listen to the voices of the public commenters among a typically sparse crowd and pass the city's legislation, most of which has been hashed out in committee meetings before it reaches the council floor for a vote.
But for the past several months, City Council meetings have been a hotbed of tension and protests. Rows of wooden seats are packed with people wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, carrying signs — which are banned in chambers, according to council's rules — demanding things like "Free Palestine" and "Cease-fire now," and flooding public comment periods with impassioned pleas for empathy or condemnations of a "xenophobic" council.
"Every person who sits behind me, you have wronged," Kamal Alkayali, a manager at the Palestinian-owned Algebra Tea House on Cleveland's East Side, told council members during Monday's public comment period. "We begged for three straight months for you to see our people as human, but we are done begging. Do you forget who you work for? We run this city."
At least one person has been removed from chambers by Cleveland police for shouting and started chants charging Mayor Justin Bibb with "genocide" for comments he made on social media after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 Israelis. Shouting and disruption have persisted for several weeks, and in the case of Monday night, even forced an early adjournment after legislation had been passed.
On a winter day, before polar winds descended on Cleveland, Raysean Johnson stood outside his forest green tent posted on a tree lawn along Superior Avenue in Downtown Cleveland. He’s been unhoused for nearly five years, bouncing between homeless shelters and city streets — and this winter is his first living outside.
A car pulled up and a stranger handed him and his girlfriend Myesha Carroll a bag of supplies.
Carroll thanked the woman, but the contents of the bag were baffling: false eyelashes, microwave popcorn and food they had no way to cook.
"Why would they give us canned goods?" Johnson said with a chuckle.
"Right, like, how we supposed to microwave this?" Carroll asked, joining in on the laughter.
"I’m not savage, I’m not eating this out of no can," Johnson said, as he put the can of mushroom soup back in the bag.
Johnson said he’s grateful for the help, but it’s an example of how people — including those responsible for solving the problem of homelessness — don’t understand what people living on the streets need.
Northeast Ohio temperatures have now dipped into the single-digits with subzero wind chill further stressing the safety net system already struggling to accommodate Cleveland’s estimated 250 chronically unhoused people.
