Plea deals expected in bombing plot
Three more defendants charged with trying to blow up a bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park are expected to change their pleas to guilty today.  

Twenty-year-olds Brandon Baxter of Lakewood and Connor Stevens of Berea, and 26-year-old Douglas Wright of Indianapolis are expected to admit to roles in the attempt to plant explosives beneath the Route 82 bridge in late April. The bomb was a fake supplied by an  FBI informant.

Another of the five originally charged, 35-year-old Anthony Hayne of Cleveland, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the government last month.  Charges against the fifth defendant, 23-year-old Joshua Stafford of Cleveland, are still unresolved. He’s undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.

Brown asks Dems in Charlotte to help him fight super PAC millions
Ohio’s U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown ran the numbers of his race by the Ohio delegation breakfast at the Democratic National Convention this morning. He noted that super PACS are spending  in unprecedented amounts  on television ads to defeat him.

Brown on the power of $16 million

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“No Senate race in the country have they spent this kind of money; $16 million. …. That doesn’t count these … expensive electronic billboards. That’s not counting the radio ads, that’s not counting the direct mail pieces they’ve been sending into Ohio. That’s not counting all the other things."

Pointing proudly to his Cleveland-made Hugo Boss suit, Brown says President Obama’s policies have saved and created manufacturing  jobs in Ohio.   

But he says corporate interests want Ohio’s Senate seat because Brown has been trying to end tax breaks for oil companies, break up the largest Wall Street banks, and eliminate tax deductions for companies that move jobs to other countries.

Plain Dealer publisher is stepping down
The Plain Dealer is announcing that its publisher, Terrance Egger, is retiring.
In a note to the paper’s staff, Egger says it “has not been an easy decision to leave a career and industry that I love.”
He’s 55 and became the Plain Dealer’s chief executive in 2006. Before that, he was publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Supreme Court says dumps are subject to zoning
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court says local officials can control landfills through zoning.

Rumpke Sanitary Landfill wanted to expand its dump outside Cincinnati to an area not zoned for landfills. It won its argument to an appeals court that landfills are public utilities and therefore exempt from township zoning rules.

But the state high court reversed the appeals court. A decision written by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor acknowledges some parallels with utilities: Rumpke largely has a monopoly on trash collection in Hamilton County and provide an essential service. But, the decision added, no governmental body regulates Rumpke the way the Public Utilities Commission regulates rates for other utilities.