COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Former Ohio Health Director Amy Acton, who became a household name in the state in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, is running for governor.
Acton, 58, a physician and public health expert who stood alongside Republican Gov. Mike DeWine for months during his daily coronavirus briefings, said people still stop her in the grocery store or at a restaurant to share their struggles — and she doesn't want to look away.
“I feel like I have a bond with Ohioans and a connection,” she said in an Associated Press interview. “You don’t go through what we’ve been through — trying to save 11.7 million people the way we did — and not have some special connection.”
Acton filed paperwork and launched her campaign Tuesday. She plans to run as a Democrat, which places her at an immediate disadvantage in a state that has turned solidly red in recent years.
While she has said before that serving in DeWine’s cabinet taught her much about how the office operates, on Tuesday she said she believes that Ohio's Republican leaders — who control all three branches of state government — are spending too much time fighting the culture wars and they're taking the state in the wrong direction.
“It’s not OK with me that Ohioans don’t live as long as people do in other states," she said. "It’s not OK with me to watch what used to be a top education system, state-of-the-art education system, begin to fall year after year after year. It’s not OK with me that our GDP is like 45th and our biggest export is Ohioans, is young people.”
Acton's entry into the race comes as Republicans Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and Attorney General Dave Yost already are positioning to run for the seat, which the 78-year-old DeWine must vacate next year due to term limits. But the landscape of the race is far from settled.
DeWine has yet to appoint a replacement to U.S. Sen. JD Vance, who will be inaugurated as Donald Trump's vice president Jan. 20. Though DeWine has long endorsed Husted as his favored successor, the lieutenant governor is now considered a leading contender as his pick for the Senate. That's after Husted and DeWine met with Trump and Vance last month at Mar-a-Lago, a trip first reported by WEWS-TV.
Giving Husted the job would create a political opening for Trump insider Vivek Ramaswamy to possibly make a gubernatorial run against Yost in the 2026 primary. Ramaswamy has said he would not seek the Senate opening — Ohio's third in as many years — right now, because he's busy heading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency effort with Elon Musk. DOGE is not an actual government department, but a private effort.
DeWine plucked Acton from Ohio State University, where she was an associate professor of public health, to lead the Ohio Department of Health in 2019. As the pandemic ramped up in early 2020, she was thrown into the state and national spotlight — becoming a beloved source of comfort to many viewers of the governor's daily news conferences.
For her service as health director, Acton earned the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in COVID Courage Award, the Columbus Foundation’s Spirit of Columbus Award and Ohio State’s highest alumni honor, the Alumni Medalist Award.
But her position as the face of the DeWine administration's aggressive stance against the virus also earned Acton many enemies, among them Statehouse Republicans and average Ohioans who opposed pandemic restrictions.
During the crisis, Acton used the health director's broad emergency powers to halt the state's 2020 presidential primary, to temporarily close gyms and fitness centers around the state, and to impose stay-at-home orders as the administration tried to prevent COVID’s spread. Husted also took part in the administration's COVID response, but not to the extent that Acton did.
After a grueling period of public exposure, angry demonstrations, lawsuits and personal attacks, Acton resigned her state job in June 2020. DeWine sent her off fondly, describing her as a hero in a white coat. She stayed on as his chief health adviser until that August.
She said Tuesday that she recognizes she has not held elective office, but she feels she has the skills necessary to do the job.
“We know that I’m a doctor. I’m not a politician,” she said. “But I am a leader, and I tend to think of myself as more of a public servant and a problem solver.”
After leaving government, Acton joined the Columbus Foundation as a grants director with the title “vice president for Human:Kind.” She left that post after about six months to explore a run for U.S. Senate, ultimately deciding against joining the 2022 contest won by Vance. She later took on a job as director of the city of Columbus' Project L.O.V.E., an initiative aimed at encouraging early vaccinations in children.
Acton said she has spent all that time supporting candidates and causes that she believes in and carefully considering whether to enter politics.
“My challenge to whoever else wants to run in this race is it's time to put something bigger than ourselves at the top here,” she said. “So many of us have values in Ohio that we all hold dear. We have got to put the real problems, the day-to-day problems we all face on the table and put that first.”
FILE - Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton gives an update on the state's preparedness and education efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Cleveland, Ohio, Feb. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File)
POINTE À LA HACHE, La. (AP) — Oil company Chevron must pay at least $740 million to restore damage it caused to southeast Louisiana's coastal wetlands, a jury ruled on Friday following a landmark trial more than a decade in the making.
The case was the first of dozens of pending lawsuits to reach trial in Louisiana against the world’s leading oil companies for their role in accelerating land loss along the state’s rapidly disappearing coast. The verdict – which Chevron says it will appeal – could set a precedent leaving other oil and gas firms on the hook for billions of dollars in damages tied to land loss and environmental degradation.
Jurors found that energy giant Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, had for decades violated Louisiana regulations governing coastal resources by failing to restore wetlands impacted by dredging canals, drilling wells and billions of gallons of wastewater dumped into the marsh.
The jury awarded $575 million to compensate for land loss, $161 million to compensate for contamination and $8.6 million for abandoned equipment — a total of $744.6 million. Including interest from when the lawsuit was filed in 2013, the amount earmarked for restoration exceeds $1.1 billion, according to attorneys for Talbot, Carmouche & Marcello, the firm behind the lawsuit.
The parish had asked for $2.6 billion in damages.
“No company is big enough to ignore the law, no company is big enough to walk away scot-free,” the plaintiff’s lead attorney John Carmouche told jurors during closing arguments.
A 1978 Louisiana coastal management law mandated that sites used by oil companies “be cleared, revegetated, detoxified, and otherwise restored as near as practicable to their original condition” after operations ended. Older operations sites that continued to be used were not exempt and companies were expected to apply for proper permits.
But the oil company did not obtain proper permits and failed to clean up its mess, leading to contamination from wastewater stored unsafely or dumped directly into the marsh, the lawsuit said.
The company also failed to follow known best practices for decades since it began operating in the area in the 1940s, expert witnesses for the plaintiff’s testified. The company “chose profits over the marsh" and allowed the environmental degradation caused by its operations to fester and spread, Carmouche said.
Chevron's lead trial attorney Mike Phillips said in a statement following the verdict that “Chevron is not the cause of the land loss occurring” in Plaquemines Parish and that the law does not apply to “conduct that occurred decades before the law was enacted.”
Phillips called the ruling “unjust” and said there were “numerous legal errors.”
The lawsuit against Chevron was filed in 2013 by Plaquemines Parish, a rural district in Louisiana straddling the final leg of the Mississippi River heading into the Gulf of Mexico, also referred to as the Gulf of America as declared by President Donald Trump.
Louisiana’s coastal parishes have lost more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) of land over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has also identified oil and gas infrastructure as a significant cause. The state could lose another 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) in the coming decades, its coastal protection agency has warned.
Thousands of miles of canals cut through the wetlands by oil companies weakens them and exacerbates the impacts of sea level rise. Industrial wastewater from oil production degrades the surrounding soil and vegetation. The torn up wetlands leave South Louisiana – home to some of the nation’s biggest ports and key energy sector infrastructure -- more vulnerable to flooding and destruction from extreme weather events like hurricanes.
Chevron’s lead attorney, Mike Phillips, said the company had operated lawfully and blamed land loss in Louisiana on other factors, namely the extensive levee system that blocks the Mississippi River from depositing land regenerating sediment — a widely acknowledged cause of coastal erosion.
The way to solve the land loss problem is “not suing oil companies, it’s reconnecting the Mississippi River with the delta,” Phillips said during closing arguments.
Yet the lawsuit held the company responsible for exacerbating and accelerating land loss in Louisiana, rather than being its sole cause.
Chevron also challenged the costly wetlands restoration project proposed by the parish, which involved removing large amounts of contaminated soil and filling in the swaths fragmented wetlands eroded over the past century. The company said the plan was impractical and designed to inflate the damages rather than lead to real world implementation.
Attorney Jimmy Faircloth, Jr., who represented the state of Louisiana, which has backed Plaquemines and other local governments in their lawsuits against oil companies, told jurors from the parish that Chevron was telling them their community was not worth preserving.
“Our communities are built on coast, our families raised on coast, our children go to school on coast,” Faircloth said. “The state of Louisiana will not surrender the coast, it’s for the good of the state that the coast be maintained.”
Carmouche, a well-connected attorney, and his firm have been responsible for bringing many of the lawsuits against oil companies in the state.
Louisiana’s economy has long been heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry and the industry holds significant political power. Even so, Louisiana’s staunchly pro-industry Gov. Jeff Landry has supported the lawsuits, including bringing the state on board during his tenure as Attorney General.
Oil companies have fought tooth and nail to quash the litigation, including unsuccessfully lobbying Louisiana’s Legislature to pass a law to invalidate the claims. Chevron and other firms also repeatedly tried to move the lawsuits into federal court where they believed they would find a more sympathetic audience.
But the heavy price Chevron is set to pay could hasten other firms to seek settlements in the dozens of other lawsuits across Louisiana. Plaquemines alone has 20 other cases pending against oil companies.
The state is running out of money to support its ambitious coastal restoration plans, which have been fueled by soon-expiring settlement funds from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and supporters of the litigation say payouts could provide a much-needed injection of funds.
Attorneys for the parish said they hope that big payout will prompt more oil companies to come to the table and engage in coastal restoration.
“We continue to fight to restore the coast,” said Don Carmouche, an attorney with the firm representing the parish and other local governments which have filed suit. “All the parishes want is for the companies to come together for reasonable restoration of the coast.”
FILE - Wetlands are seen from a helicopter on the Louisiana coast on July 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
FILE - This Tuesday, May 2, 2017, photo shows a Chevron sign at a gas station in Miami. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz, File)
