Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
One of the nation’s largest electric utilities poured money into the campaigns of state legislators in Ohio last election cycle. Now a dark-money group linked to senior aides of the statehouse speaker is pushing to prop up two of the utility’s struggling nuclear-power plants using ratepayer funds.
The group, Generation Now Inc., has purchased a host of radio, television, and social-media ads boosting House Bill 6, a measure that would use a fee levied on Ohio electricity customers to subsidize the state’s clean-energy producers—which it defines to include nuclear. The legislation is widely seen as a lifeline for FirstEnergy’s two nuclear plants in the state, which are on track to shut down absent state intervention.
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Chief among its backers in the statehouse is Speaker Larry Householder, who, along with members of his Republican caucus, received huge financial backing from FirstEnergy last cycle. Householder has denied that that funding has anything to do with his support for the legislation.
Generation Now couches the bill as a fight against “big oil,” even though oil is rarely used to produce electricity, and natural gas and coal are by far the largest sources of electricity production in Ohio (petroleum liquids make up less than 1 percent of the total).
A few weeks ago, PAY DIRT examined the natural-gas industry’s efforts to combat what it dubs a nuclear “bailout” in Pennsylvania. Generation Now provides a glimpse of the other side of the fight playing out in multiple statehouses, and how it’s employing tactics designed to obscure who is providing its financial muscle.
Generation Now was formed in early 2017. It’s a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, meaning it can engage in political advocacy without disclosing its donors. But what little information is publicly available about the group indicates deep ties to Householder’s Columbus political machine.
In a donation form posted on its website, Generation Now lists the Columbus address of a building owned by the Strategy Group, a prominent Republican consulting firm. When PAY DIRT covered Generation Now’s political activity last year, Rex Elsass, the Strategy Group’s chief executive, told us that his firm sublets that office space.
Initially, Elsass said his tenant was Larry Householder. Within minutes, he called back to recant that statement. The actual tenant, he insisted, was Generation Now, not Householder.
The speaker’s apparent ties to the dark-money group don’t stop there. Generation Now maintains a website separate from the one it lists in the group’s official communications. That website has no content on its homepage. But it has been used to post memos detailing extensive polling data about the 2018 Ohio statehouse elections and Householder’s prospects for winning the speakership.
Metadata in a number of those documents list two names in the “author” field: Jeff Longstreth, a veteran Ohio Republican consultant and Householder political adviser; and Megan Fitzmartin, an employee of Longstreth’s firm, JPL & Associates.
A number of the polling memos also contained headers indicating they were created by a firm called Storytellers. That firm is run, in part, by Chris Schrimpf, a Householder spokesman.
During the 2018 cycle, Generation Now provided nearly all of the funding—more than $1 million—to a super PAC called Growth & Opportunity PAC. It spent that money on mailers supporting a number of Householder allies in the statehouse. More than $800,000 of its expenditures went to Storytellers.
It’s not clear whether FirstEnergy is financially supporting Generation Now, or did so last year. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment. But when the group polled Ohio residents about the 2018 elections, it used language of which the utility would surely approve.
“Ohio’s nuclear plants produce clean energy, employ thousands of Ohioans in small towns, and generate millions in tax revenue for local schools. The nuclear plants are currently underfunded and need to raise rates to stay open,” one poll question declared. “Knowing this, would you support legislation to keep the nuclear plants open that would cost consumers $1 a week?”
By a 2-1 margin, respondents said they would.
Get the data:
