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About two dozen Clintonville residents sat attentively in a meeting room at the Columbus Metropolitan Library Whetstone Branch Tuesday as Columbus City Councilwoman Nancy Day-Achauer and her legislative aid, Jacob Dilley, fielded questions about the city's deer population.

One woman in the audience leaned forward.

"We truly have a problem when 10 deer cross High Street all at once in the — I'm going to say "ravine area" — between Clintonville and Worthington, right there, near St. Michael's," the woman said. "Ten at once on a Sunday morning. They were not going to church."

This election day, Ohio voters will darken bubbles next to names for gubernatorial and senate seats. They’ll narrow the fields in races for county commissioners and the secretary of state.

And in Richland County – tucked between Columbus and Cleveland – they’ll decide on the future of large-scale wind and solar developments.

Last summer, Richland County commissioners took a step that has become increasingly common across rural Ohio: they voted to ban large-scale wind and solar projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships.

That’s allowed because of a law passed five years ago: Ohio Senate Bill 52. Among other provisions, it gives commissioners the authority to restrict big renewable energy developments in a county’s unincorporated areas.

The midterm elections often go well for the party not in power. With that and low approval ratings for President Trump, political analysts are predicting a blue wave across the country this fall. And Ohio Democrats are hoping they can also make inroads in rural areas to try to win in November.

The party’s rural caucus recently put out a report on findings from community meetings in small towns and agricultural areas throughout Ohio. And they hope it will show them the way.

The Community Crisis Response Amendment expands response options for 911 calls for behavioral health, homelessness and substance use — among other things — and establishes a formal city division and an advisory board to oversee crisis response.

Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin said Columbus already puts around $6 to $7 million toward alternative crisis response programs. Those include having a social worker from Columbus Public Health in the 911 call center, and the city’s Mobile Crisis Response Unit that pairs health clinicians with police officers and refers those in need to follow-up services.

The Community Crisis Response Amendment would bring those programs together under one department and lay the groundwork to further expand them. Hardin expects funding to increase as programs grow.

How many ALPR cameras are in Franklin County? WOSU filed public records requests with local police departments which confirmed contracts for a total of 305 of Flock Safety’s AI-powered ALPR cameras across 15 departments. The contracts total nearly $2 million.

A number of private businesses also contract with the company and several police departments did not respond to records requests, which means the true number of ALPRs in Franklin County may be a lot higher.

DeFlock.org is an organization that has led a grassroots effort to log the locations of Flock and other ALPR cameras, knowledge they say the public has a right to know. DeFlock has mapped around 500 cameras in Franklin County.

“I started mapping the things on my own for the better part of two years,” said Bob Smetana, who developed a mobile app for DeFlock. “It eventually got to a point where I opened up the map and I went, this is getting ridiculous and they're going up like gangbusters.”