Narration, as voiced 241 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
Drive south out of Geneva, Ohio, down Route 534, past the vineyards and the grain, and the land flattens into the kind of rural township that looks the same as it did forty years ago. Farms. Two-lane roads. A scatter of houses. And then, without any transition at all, a sports complex the size of a regional airport. Seven hundred and fifty thousand square feet. Indoor track. Olympic pools. Courts and fields and dormitory-scale buildings, set down in the middle of agricultural land in one of the poorest counties in Ohio. It is called Spire. It was built to be a destination — and for years it lost money. By 2019 it was a struggling asset in a rural county, which is to say it was cheap. In December 2019, a private equity firm out of Baltimore called Blue Ocean bought it — the whole campus, for seven million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Less than ten dollars a square foot. The man behind Blue Ocean is named Jonathan Ehrenfeld — you saw that name on a donor list in Episode Two. In 2021 he explained the bet on camera: sports campuses were out of favour, so you could buy for a very low valuation, invest in it, build a business in it — and, in his words, 'hopefully will be a good return at the end of the day.' He told the township himself: the sports don't pay the bills. By his own count, the campus he bought was a hundred and seventy-five acres. Today the county's parcel map shows fifteen companies holding seven hundred and sixteen acres, around the campus and at the lake. Jonathan Ehrenfeld signs for every one. And he did not do it alone. A township changed its zoning so he could build, and used its power to tax to help him borrow. A county fund meant to create jobs for low- and moderate-income households lent his companies nearly a million dollars. A million-dollar federal grant went straight to another. It began with his plan — a sport hospitality empire: the events, the visitors, the lodging — which required something the complex did not have. Housing. A senior living complex of forty to sixty rooms, and forty more rooms for workers. On farmland beside the campus. There was one problem with that plan, and it was total. It was illegal. That farmland was zoned R1: single- and two-family homes. No senior complex. No block of workers' rooms. Not discouraged. Prohibited. Under the zoning as it stood in January 2020, the Blue Ocean housing was dead on arrival. This episode is about what happened next — and about the fact that nobody had to break that law. They changed it.
Act II 4:04
Zoning in an Ohio township is controlled by the township trustees. Under Ohio law the zoning commission can propose it and a landowner can apply for it — but only the trustees can adopt it. Not the county. Not a petition. Without that board, nothing moves. The board that mattered was Harpersfield Township. That is where the Spire campus sits — all nine parcels on the deed recite it: situated in the Township of Harpersfield. And there was no election. There was never going to be one. Under section 519.12 of the Ohio Revised Code, a township zoning amendment is adopted by the trustees themselves. It reaches a ballot only if citizens organise, gather signatures, and file a referendum petition within thirty days. Nobody did. Which means the change that made Ehrenfeld's development legal was made by three men, in a township meeting room, in front of whoever happened to be in the chairs. Here is the chain, and every date is read from the township's own minutes. The seventeenth of October, 2019 — the Harpersfield Zoning Commission meets and drafts the amendment. The twenty-eighth of October — the Ashtabula County Planning Commission convenes a special meeting and votes to recommend approval. The sixth of November — the Zoning Commission holds its public hearing and recommends it again. And that same evening, the trustees hold theirs. The hearing runs five minutes. Seven o'clock to five past. Now — three questions. Who moved it. Who seconded it. Whether anyone declared an interest before voting. The minutes answer all three. Mr. Pristov made a motion to approve the zoning text amendment to Article 8, Schedule 820.2, to add "C," conditional, for warehouse storage under the RAD district. Mr. Henry seconded. The Board voted thusly: Mr. Pristov, yes. Mr. Henry, yes. Two votes. A five-minute hearing. And a third trustee who was not in the room — for a reason the chairman put on the record. Cliff explained that Trustee Ray Gruber Junior was absent from the public hearing because he has been advised by the Ethics Commission to recuse himself from anything pertaining to the Spire Complex, because he sits on multiple boards that would make it a conflict of interest. Read that twice. The Ohio Ethics Commission — a state body — told a sitting township trustee to stay away from anything touching Spire, because holding more than one seat made it a conflict. One of those seats, the township's own minutes say, was on the county's Port Authority board — and the Port Authority had lent five hundred thousand dollars against campus land the winter before. In 2019. In this county. On this property. That is not this series alleging a conflict of interest. That is the State of Ohio identifying one, in advance, and an official complying with it. Hold onto that: the structure this investigation describes is not a theory. A state ethics body warned of it here first.
Act III 7:33
There is one more voice in those minutes, and it does not belong to Harpersfield Township at all. Ashtabula County Commissioner Casey Kozlowski voiced that the Commissioners are in support of the proposed text amendment, and hope that the Board of Trustees will approve it to further economic development and to assist the prospective buyers of the Spire Complex to have other avenues for financial purposes. The prospective buyers. On the sixth of November, 2019, a sitting county commissioner stood up at a township zoning hearing and asked the two trustees in the room to change the zoning — to assist a buyer who did not yet own the land. The deed transfers on the thirteenth of December. Five weeks later. Now step back from that hearing. Geneva Owner LLC registered to do business in Ohio on the seventeenth of September, 2019. The township's zoning commission did not draft the text amendment until the seventeenth of October — a month later. Nobody registers a company to buy land it cannot use. Nine weeks after that hearing, on the seventh of January, 2020, the Board of Commissioners passed its annual organisational resolution. Among Casey Kozlowski's appointments for the year: Representative — Geneva Regional Sewer meetings, JEDD One and Two, Three. One line further down the same list: Representative — Consolidated Transportation. The Geneva–Harpersfield Joint Economic Development District. The district that Harpersfield's special zoning classification exists to develop. He is the county's man on both. And the following day, the eighth of January, the Geneva Area City Board of Education met for its organisational meeting. The superintendent reported that he had met twice with the new owner, and that there had been a Harpersfield Township Trustees meeting two days earlier regarding the Spire property. Blue Ocean Realty and MV Residential Land, LLC were proposing a senior living complex of forty to sixty rooms, with an additional forty rooms for workforce, that would require a zoning change. A school board, taking minutes about a housing development, recording that a zoning change would be required. In January 2020. Almost a year before it happened. Because it did happen. The Harpersfield Zoning Commission gave legal notice of a hearing on the thirtieth of November, 2020: a proposed amendment to the township zoning map. Change the following parcels from R1 district to RAD district — seven of them, along Clay Street and on South Broadway, beside the complex. R1 is single-family residential. RAD is the Recreation Athletic Development district, and the zoning text states its purpose plainly: the coordinated development of the township's portion of the Geneva–Harpersfield Joint Economic Development District. In RAD, dormitories are permitted as a conditional use. Hotels don't even need that. They are allowed outright. On the twenty-eighth of December, 2020, the trustees met at one in the afternoon to adopt it. Jonathan Ehrenfeld attended by telephone. The neighbours came. Mr. Querry, whose house backs onto the parcels, asked what would be built behind him. Jennifer Restad raised four-storey buildings. Both of them raised the same objection, and the clerk recorded it exactly: population density, which will have no restrictions after re-zoned. Ehrenfeld offered deed restrictions. A five-hundred-foot buffer for a four-storey building. Two hundred feet for a two-storey. Setbacks from a driveway. And one more: no commercial uses. He offered them out loud, in a meeting. The county recorder's records for those seven parcels show twenty-three recorded instruments since 2010, not one of them a restriction — and not one deed written since the rezoning carries one either. Those promises are still a sentence in a set of minutes. The board was unsure how to proceed, so it telephoned the Assistant County Prosecutor, Catherine Colgan, who gave verbal instructions on how to modify the resolution. Then Ray Gruber made the motion. The same Ray Gruber who, thirteen months earlier, had been absent from the Spire hearing on the advice of the Ohio Ethics Commission. Jim Pristov seconded. Gruber, yes. Pristov, yes. Spoor, yes. Nothing in the record explains what changed between those two meetings. The township's own minutes give him the same outside seats for 2020 and for 2021 — a JEDD board among them. Six weeks after the hearing he sat out, the board made him its chairman. Two months after it, he was the one briefing the school superintendent on the trustees' meeting about Spire. In August 2020 he voted to create the special district set up to help Spire borrow, and moved one of its three resolutions. What the minutes show is a trustee told to stay away from anything touching Spire who chaired the township through a year of Spire business — and then moved the Spire rezoning. So count what it took. One five-minute hearing. Two votes. A county commissioner speaking for a buyer who had not closed. A second hearing, thirteen months later, three votes, and a promise made aloud. A state ethics warning that was observed once and then wasn't. And seven parcels of ordinary residential land converted into a district built for a sports complex. On the day of the vote, one of his companies already owned the largest of the seven. Within fifteen months his companies, or he himself, held all or part of the other six. No ballot. No referendum. No election of any kind. The public was never asked. All of it is in writing, and almost nobody has ever read it.
Act IV 14:27
Up to a hundred rooms of housing needs water. It needs sewer. At the scale Ehrenfeld was planning, it needs high-capacity lines run out along Clay Street, on the campus's north edge, into Harpersfield farmland. That infrastructure is expensive. It is also, ordinarily, the developer's problem. Here, the public had already committed to the pipe — for somebody else. In 2020 the county ran a water main down Clay Street: three hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars, two hundred and fifty thousand of it Appalachian grant money. It was approved in 2019, for thirty residents and a small airport. Within eight months of the contract, Ehrenfeld's companies owned two of the farms along it. The pipe was approved for thirty residents. The land beside it went to a Baltimore private equity firm. That same year, the county arranged to test the ground for a water tower on the campus owner's own land. In May the commissioners accepted a grant for the tower; their own paperwork says it will serve forty businesses and a hundred and ten residents. Then, in the commissioners' own notes: 'Spire wants us to look at an alternate site because it's going to negatively affect the visibility of their hotel site.' The same note says who would set up the call with Spire: 'Casey' — Commissioner Kozlowski. In 2022 the county bought a lot a sixth of a mile from Spire's entrance. The tower contract came to three point six million dollars. On the campus, lodging never needed a rezoning: the district there already allowed hotels outright. The vote was for the land next door: seven more parcels — the two farms along the new pipe among them — moved into the district where hotels go up by right. Public money. Private land. Private profit. And there is a second channel, and it runs through the tax bill. On the seventeenth of August, 2020, Harpersfield's three trustees used the township's power to tax to help Spire borrow money. They created a special district that turns Spire's loan payments into a charge on its property tax bill, collected by the county treasurer like any other tax. Their own minutes say why: to assist Spire with obtaining a loan. Then Ray Gruber moved to seat the other two on the district's board — by 2021, its chairman and vice-chairman. The chairman, Ed Spoor, holds a second job at the county's water department — its 2025 plans list him as director of field operations. In May 2020 he was the one who told his fellow trustees the county had started engineering a water tower on Spire's property. By 2025 it was collecting eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year from three properties on and beside the campus. On one of the hotels, that charge is nearly eight times its ordinary property tax. And the hotels got a tax break too. In September 2021 the commissioners drew a tax-abatement zone around the campus. That December they cut the property tax on the new Marriott in half, for ten years. In 2024, the Wyndham: half, for seven years. In 2025, the Chipotle on his land: half, for seven years. Four votes, and one man made the motion every time: Casey Kozlowski, whose campaign Jonathan Ehrenfeld funds. Ten months after the last one, his company sold the Chipotle for two point eight seven five million dollars. And the federal money came to him directly. A million-dollar Rural Development grant went straight to Ehrenfeld's Geneva Sports in December 2023, and two hundred and six thousand, five hundred more to the campus hotel and Geneva Retail in 2024. So count what Ehrenfeld had been handed by the end of 2020. The law changed so he could build. A township used its taxing power to help him borrow, and two of the men who did it sat on the board that runs it. A public water main, approved for thirty residents, ran past the farms he was buying. And the county's own loan fund had not yet written his companies a single cheque.
Act V 19:22
Now go up one level, because the county commissioners are not where economic development policy in Ashtabula County actually begins. There is a private non-profit called the Growth Partnership. It advises the Board of Commissioners on economic incentives — which companies should receive tax abatements, where development money should go. It is funded by public dues that the commissioners themselves authorise. And a sitting commissioner, J.P. Ducro, is on its board. So the county funds a body, sits on that body, receives that body's recommendations, and then votes to approve them. There is no point in that circle where an independent judgment enters. And note what kind of body this is. It is not a public agency. It holds no elections. It is not required to publish minutes. There is no public comment period. By the time a decision reaches a room the public can sit in, it has already been made somewhere the public cannot. Now go back to that January 2020 resolution. It made all three commissioners trustees of the Growth Partnership. It put Casey Kozlowski on the county's Tax Incentive Review Board — the board that reviews the county's tax abatements. And that year the county paid the partnership forty-five thousand dollars out of its economic development fund. The commissioners pay it, they sit on it, and one of them sits on the board that reviews the breaks. Their money. Their seats. Their review. Recommended by a body they fund and govern, reviewed by a board one of them sits on, approved by their own votes. It is the abstention economy operating one level above the county board — in a body with no election, no minutes requirement, and no public comment period. And the Growth Partnership does not sit alone. Its executive director is Greg Myers. In March 2020 the commissioners' own notes on a tax deal for Spire read: 'Call Greg Myers to be sure project is moving forward.' In December 2023 he called a Harpersfield trustee. Spire wanted seventy-five percent off the tax on the old Motel 6, for ten years. The township had its own tax district on that parcel, to pay its half of a sewer. Myers asked the township to cancel it. And he shares office space and board members with the county Port Authority and an entity called the 503 Corporation. Three organisations. One address. Overlapping boards. So look at what the corporation lends. The 503 Corporation holds federal money. Economic Development Administration money, and United States Department of Agriculture money, awarded to the county and the corporation as co-grantees. The audit states the purpose in plain words: loans to create jobs for persons from low-moderate income households. Between 2021 and 2024, in five loans, it lent four of his companies nine hundred and eighty-two thousand, four hundred and forty-six dollars. Donato Owner LLC. Weiss Owner LLC. State Road Owner LLC. Geneva Owner LLC. Jonathan Ehrenfeld signed every one. The same Jonathan Ehrenfeld who attended the Harpersfield rezoning hearing by telephone — and the corporation names him itself, on its own website, under testimonials: SPIRE Institute and Academy, Jonathan Ehrenfeld. Now take the largest mortgage and put it on the calendar you have already seen. Three hundred and three thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars, secured on fifty-six and a half acres. Parcel twenty-two, zero zero two, zero zero, zero zero one, zero one. That is one of the seven parcels. It is one of the parcels the trustees rezoned from R1 to RAD on the twenty-eighth of December, 2020, at one in the afternoon, with Ehrenfeld on the phone. Ehrenfeld signed the mortgage on the twelfth of January, 2021. Fifteen days. A fund that exists, in the county's own audit, to create jobs for low- and moderate-income households in one of Ohio's poorest counties wrote a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage against farmland a township board had made developable fifteen days earlier, to a company Jonathan Ehrenfeld signed for, in Baltimore County, Maryland. Every part of that sentence is a recorded instrument. And in the county's own appointment resolution, under Commissioner Ducro: 503 Corporation Revolving Loan Fund Committee. A sitting commissioner on the committee that reviews this fund's loans — a seat the county publishes every January — and a trustee of the corporation for nine years, every year it lent to Ehrenfeld's companies among them. The audits come back clean and the main fund is almost fully lent — none of it hidden, because none of it has to be. The dates are the dates, and the money is the money. There is a question with an answer, and the answer is written down somewhere: what jobs were created, for whom, and where is the yearly job questionnaire EDA's own rules say verifies them.
Act VI 25:18
Return to Spire, because there is one thing Ehrenfeld still needs. Visitors. Athletes. On Christmas Eve 2024, the Board of Commissioners renewed the lease of the county's public bus fleet to Sunset Transportation Partners — David McGrath's company — at a dollar a vehicle a year. McGrath incorporated that company in August 2019, nineteen days before Ehrenfeld's Geneva Owner LLC registered in Ohio. You already know that transaction. Here is who moved it: Casey Kozlowski — the commissioner who stood up in Harpersfield for Spire's buyers, with McGrath's household and Ehrenfeld both on his donor list. And one more name. On Route 534 — the road you drove in on — the county's parcel map shows a lot held by two men together: David McGrath and Edward Andrus. Remember Andrus. That family is Episode Eight. And the housing that justified the rezoning in the first place? Six years on, the county auditor's records for those seven parcels read agriculture, residential, vacant. Not one room has been built. Three of them belong to a company called Geneva Workforce Housing LLC: twenty-one acres, and no workforce housing — its tax bills go to Reisterstown, Maryland. In June 2023 Ehrenfeld brought the trustees a new plan for one of the rezoned farms: a hundred single-family homes, with what the minutes call a ten-year, seventy-five percent tax abatement. What does get rented is houses, by the night. On Beringer Place, beside the campus, two companies named Geneva Houses and Geneva Houses 2 took seven houses. The state's filings for both carry one signature: Jonathan Ehrenfeld. On the mortgages he is 'sole member, manager'. The township's minutes record twenty-one complaint forms about what they call the 'Spire owned Airbnb's' on that street. In January 2026 the township's zoning board denied the permits, and Spire took the township to court. That spring his company sold three of the houses: a million and seventy-six thousand dollars. The township hired a lawyer from Akron, pays fifteen percent of her fees, and has shelved a cemetery project until it knows what the Spire appeal will cost. Six years was long enough for everything else. Stand at the campus driveway: a Starbucks and an eighty-nine-room Marriott on campus land where hotels were always allowed, a Wyndham in the old Motel 6, a Chipotle — and where Chops stood for years, somebody else's restaurant. None of it on the seven parcels. The neighbours were promised no commercial uses there. In 2023 Ehrenfeld told the Cleveland Jewish News that he had rezoned a lot of that acreage to make it more commercial zoning, for leases with Marriott, Starbucks, Chipotle and Cleveland Clinic. And around the campus runs a public trail: paid for with an Ohio Department of Transportation grant, on land Spire owns, under an easement the township holds for walkers and cyclists. Spire used it as a road. In November 2023 the county prosecutor's office — Colleen O'Toole's — wrote to Spire's chief executive, and he answered in writing: 'no SPIRE four wheel motorized vehicles are allowed on the trail at any time.' In August 2025 the township's minutes read: 'Spire has been using heavy equipment to go over trail.' In 2021 he and his two hotel partners offered to buy the county's own Lodge at Geneva-on-the-Lake. While the commissioners were still negotiating its future, their company bought the land beside it: two point two million dollars. Now stand back and look at the shape. The same ground. Seven hundred and sixteen acres now, under fifteen companies one man signs for. Look at the dates. 2019 and 2020: a township rewrites its zoning, twice, and lends him its power to tax. 2021: the county's loan fund starts lending, and the commissioners cut his hotel's tax in half. 2022: the Port Authority signs that hotel's mortgage: eleven point eight five million dollars. 2024: the commissioners call the county 'a partner to the Developer' on a state grant for a road on his campus. In September 2026 they approved the grant itself: one million and fifty-six thousand dollars. Every single one of them moves cost from a private balance sheet onto a public one, and every single one of them was taken by a body on which the same handful of people sit. That is what this episode is called. The geometry of capture. Not a conspiracy — a shape. And a question follows from it, which is the one that turns this series from money to people. A county that will move this much public wealth into private hands needs something to keep it quiet. It needs an enforcement apparatus. That is Episode Four.