Narration, as voiced 183 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
December 24th, 2024. Christmas Eve. Across Ashtabula County, people are already somewhere else. The county's offices are closing early for the holiday. People are wrapping presents and driving to family. It is one of the days of the year when almost nobody in a county of ninety-seven thousand people is paying attention to county government. The Board of County Commissioners is in session anyway. Regular session, second floor of the Old Courthouse in Jefferson, working through a year-end stack of resolutions. And in that stack is Resolution 2024-580. It is one page. It renews an equipment lease — the lease that puts the operating fleet of the Ashtabula County Transportation System, the public bus system, bought with public money, in the hands of a private company. The rent, written into the instrument: one dollar. Per vehicle. Per year. Understand what that fleet is before you hear anything else. The Ashtabula County Transportation System serves the whole county — ninety-seven thousand people, more than fifty thousand rides a year. Not tourists. Not commuters with a second option. In a rural county stretched across seven hundred square miles, these buses are how people get to dialysis. To work. To the pharmacy. For the people who ride it, the bus is not a convenience. It is the only way out of the house. Now — the word that matters in that resolution is renews. Because this was not the day the buses changed hands. That had already happened, quietly, the year before: the original lease passed on December 19th, 2023, another December meeting at the end of another year. The Christmas Eve vote extended it. Another December after that, they renewed the one-point-four-million-dollar contract that goes with it. And that January, the lease itself — backdated to New Year's Day. This is not a heist. It is a ritual. Every year, as the county winds down for the holidays, the arrangement comes up for renewal — and every year, it is renewed, unanimously, three votes to none. Hold that. Because the story of this county is not one shocking night. It is the same quiet vote, over and over, and a public that has never once been in the room to see it.
Act II 3:24
A transaction has two sides. The county's side has three names on it. The Board of Commissioners is a three-member body — the county's financial gate. Very little public money moves in Ashtabula County without passing through it. On Christmas Eve 2024 its members were JP Ducro the Fourth, Casey Kozlowski, and Kathryn Whittington. The minutes record all three present. The resolution passed without a no. The other side of the transaction has a name too, and for a long time the earlier telling of this story failed to say it. The company is called Sunset Transportation Partners. And its owner signed the lease himself, four days before the vote. The signature on the executed instrument is his own: David McGrath. Owner. Who is David McGrath? Two answers, and both are true at once. Just a few years before the county's buses came to it, Sunset was one vehicle and one driver — that is what its own federal carrier filing says, in September 2019. Around Geneva-on-the-Lake, the origin is remembered even more plainly: by local account, before the vans there was a golf cart, working the strip. A small operation, in a small resort town. That is not said to diminish anyone. It is said because it is a measurement. Remember where it started, because in Act Three you will watch the county's evaluation committee weigh it against two of the largest transit corporations in America — and choose it. And the second answer: David McGrath is a public official. In November 2023, the voters of Geneva Township elected him trustee. His first roll call was January 10th, 2024. So run the dates in order, because the order is the finding. The county awarded his company the transit system on November 14th, 2023 — one week after the voters elected him. The original dollar-a-vehicle lease passed that December — weeks before he was seated. And every renewal since — Christmas Eve 2024, December 2025, January 2026 — has been granted to the company of a sitting township trustee. A township trustee does not vote on county contracts. He did not need to be in the room. What the record shows is simpler and stranger: a man became a public official and the public's bus fleet was handed to his company for a dollar a vehicle, in the same season, and the arrangement has been renewed every year since by a board that has never voted no.
Act III 6:33
Here is where a one-dollar lease stops being strange and starts being real money. The county did not hand over its buses and walk away. The county kept paying — because a fleet without drivers and dispatchers is just metal in a lot. Alongside the lease sits a second instrument: a Contract for Transportation Services. The figure is on the county's own resolution: one million, four hundred twenty-eight thousand, nine hundred seventy-five dollars a year. Twenty-one thousand nine hundred service hours, at sixty-five dollars and twenty-five cents per vehicle-hour. It began at that figure, and every year since, the county has renewed it. On August 9th, 2023, the county issued a request for proposals. Three companies answered. Two of them you may have heard of: VIA Transportation of New York, and MV Transportation of Dallas — one of the largest paratransit operators in North America. The third was Sunset. A committee was formed, the resolution says, and recommended Sunset as — quote — the most advantageous to the county. That is the entire official record of the evaluation. Three bidders. A committee, unnamed. A conclusion, in six words. The scoring sheets that would show how a company with a one-van federal filing outweighed two national corporations have never been published. They exist — an evaluation that produces a recommendation produces paper — and under Ohio law, they belong to the public. What the state's checkbook does show is that Sunset was no stranger. The county had been paying David McGrath's companies since October 2019: two hundred and ninety-three thousand dollars in 2021, seven hundred and forty thousand in 2022, more than a million one hundred and fifty thousand in 2023. And that one competition settled five years. The local paper reported the terms the day after the award: a one-year contract, with four one-year renewals. Not re-bid. Renewed. So follow the money in both directions, on the instruments' own terms. Out of the county treasury: one point four million dollars a year, to Sunset. Into the county treasury: nine dollars — and not even that, because of a clause you will hear in Act Five. The public bought the buses. The public pays to have them driven. The company maintains them at its own cost. But the capital, the fleet, the largest cost in the transit business — the public carries that, at a dollar a vehicle a year, for the benefit of a private operator whose owner holds public office.
Act IV 9:50
A publicly funded bus fleet, in the hands of a private company, is allowed on public routes and nowhere else — the county's own contract says any other use draws penalties. This series charges that Sunset Transportation Partners uses it for private work anyway — carrying athletes to and from a private sports complex in Harpersfield Township called Spire Academy. A whole episode is coming on Spire and the people who own it. And the proof is not locked in the company's files: every month, Sunset must hand the county the miles and hours on every bus. But notice what has already been established without it, on the county's own record. The public bought the fleet. The public pays to operate the fleet. And the county never gave up control of that fleet: it keeps the title, the inspections, the monthly logs and the penalties. Whatever those buses are used for, the county answers for it — and every year, it signs again. What you are looking at, by this point, is a three-cornered arrangement, and the investigation that produced this series has a name for it. The power triangle. One corner is capital — whoever owns the asset that needs people moved to it. That corner is the subject of Episode Three, and we will leave it there. One corner is the operator: David McGrath, who holds the public office and owns the company that does the moving. And there is a third corner, the quietest one, whose name is on none of the county's transit paper. That corner is Kathryn Ward. Her name is on a different list: the campaign donors of the commissioner who moved this lease's renewal. It is at the top of it. It is a role worth naming, because a deal like this does not survive on one vote alone. Somebody has to keep the people who cast it in office. And when we get to the second and eighth episodes of this series, you are going to want to remember whose name is at the top of that list.
Act V 12:11
Everything you have heard so far rests on the county's own paper. Now read it. Four instruments define this arrangement. The executed resolution. The equipment lease. Schedule One — the list of vehicles. And the services contract carrying the money the other way. For a year, the claim was that most of these could not be found. Here is what this investigation finally established: all four sit on the county's own public web portal, and they were there the entire time. Nobody withheld them. Nobody had looked in the right place. Both halves of that sentence should embarrass somebody. The lease, then — a plain county document with a matter number and a lawyer's name at the bottom. Equipment Lease Agreement. Entered into by and between the Ashtabula County Commissioners and the Ashtabula County Transportation System — the Lessor — and the Lessee, Sunset Transportation Partners, Incorporated. Paragraph one. The Lessor will lease to the Lessee the Lessor-owned fleet vehicles identified on Schedule One — for one dollar per vehicle, per year. Paragraph three: Title to the equipment shall remain with Lessor. The county did not sell these buses. It kept the title, and handed over the keys. Paragraph four: the Lessee maintains the fleet at its own cost, repairs over a thousand dollars on written notice, the county and the state deciding together whether a bus gets fixed or scrapped. A real obligation, stated plainly, because the argument does not need it to be otherwise. And the signature block. Dated December 20th, 2024, four days before the vote, routed for electronic signature: David McGrath. Owner. Then the county's three, dated December 30th. A public fleet, countersigned into private hands as the year ended. Now Schedule One. Revised the sixth of November, 2024 — forty-eight days before the vote. Nine vehicles. Eight Ford cutaway buses and one van. The oldest a 2016, the newest a 2021, eight hundred and thirty-two thousand miles between them. One bus carries a hundred and fifty-three thousand miles and is listed, that November, as Active — still running, still carrying people to dialysis. Nine vehicles. At one dollar per vehicle. Nine dollars. And then paragraph ten, where the arithmetic stops being merely small and becomes something else. The Lease Charges will be deducted from the invoice. Read that again. Sunset bills the county about a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars a month for running the buses. The nine dollars is not paid to the county — it is subtracted from the county's own bill. The public does not receive nine dollars for its bus fleet. The public simply owes nine dollars less to the company driving it. No money changes hands at all. That is the whole file. Nothing hidden in those four — every one of them signed, scanned, and posted by the county itself. Which leaves two things still unpublished: the scoring sheets from the evaluation that started it, and Sunset's winning proposal — which the contract writes into the deal. The two documents that would explain why.
Act VI 16:11
Return to Christmas Eve. Three commissioners — Ducro, Kozlowski, Whittington — meet in regular session on Christmas Eve, with the county closing early for the holiday, and renew, without a word of dissent, an arrangement under which a publicly owned bus fleet works for the company of a sitting township trustee at a dollar a vehicle a year, while the county pays that company one point four million dollars annually to run it. The year before, the same arrangement, another December, unanimous. The year after, the same. The year after that, the same. The county's own prosecutor signed off on the lease's legal form, and no one has ever found a single piece of it unlawful. That is not a defence of it. That is the finding. This is what capture looks like when it is working properly. Not briefcases of cash. Not a conspiracy that would collapse if one person talked. A competition held once, its scoring never shown, and a contract written to renew four times without another. An official on one side of the county, a company on the other, and a board in the middle that renews everything, every year, three to nothing. And that raises the question this series spends the next nine episodes answering. Not one vote of this story — not the award, not the lease, not a single renewal — has ever drawn a no. When this investigation counted the board's signed votes — five and a half years of them — it found nine thousand yes votes. And four noes. Every one of the four lost. How does a county government come to agree with itself about almost everything, year after year? There is a mechanism. It is written into the rules, it is almost the only move anyone on that board ever makes that is not yes, and it lets an official step away from their own money while the money still moves. It is called abstention. And it is the subject of Episode Two.