Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that a full year has passed since I began writing these messages as CEO of our statewide association of electric cooperatives. 2025 was a fulfilling year, filled with both highlights and challenges, and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts and to reflect on our progress.
Steve Stolte was a civil engineering student at Ohio State University when the Silver Bridge, which connected Gallipolis to Point Pleasant, West Virgina, on busy U.S. Route 35, collapsed into the Ohio River.
After the collapse, Ohio began to require that all bridges in the state be inspected once each year. Seeing an opportunity to both make some money and potentially save some lives, Stolte and some of his college friends started up a new business.
They attended classes during the week, but on weekends they traveled into rural counties throughout the state to perform those mandated bridge inspections.
“We learned quickly to drive across each bridge prior to doing our inspection, because we often didn’t want to drive across after seeing the condition they were in,” he says.
Kyle Hicks, the new senior government affairs analyst at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, hadn’t always planned to pursue a career in public policy — he wanted to be a teacher.
Hicks decided to apply to take the trip after hearing about the experiences his mom and sister had when they went on Youth Tour in 1994 and 2017, respectively. South Central Power selected him as one of its delegates as he was finishing his junior year at Amanda-Clearcreek High School, and that summer, he boarded a D.C.-bound bus with 30 other Ohio students who had been sponsored by their own co-ops.
What do a church, a brewery, and an elementary school have in common? Each is home to art installations created by the Artifactory, a partnership between two Delaware County artists who work with those groups to create intricate mosaic pieces from recycled materials.
Now she and Corwin teach groups in central Ohio and beyond to create those free-form mosaics that are then installed as permanent works of art.
Gray squirrels are the bane of those of us who attempt to keep backyard bird feeders filled with birdseed. In large cities, small towns, and even rural areas across the Buckeye State, these arboreal aerialists seem to defy gravity in getting to places we don’t want them to be.
For instance, a very early Columbus resident and hunter shot 67 gray squirrels in one day from just one tree in the middle of a cornfield on what today is the Statehouse lawn.
