To our Franklin County neighbors,
Hello and thank you for taking the time to learn more about Franklin County and how the Board of Commissioners are working for our residents every day. The annual State of the County Report is our chance to update you on the challenges faced by our community, and the opportunities we see before us, and your chance to learn more about how county government works and what role you might play in it.
Many people don’t know much about what their county government does, but we’re confident that we touch the lives of every Franklin County resident in some way each year. As you’ll see in this report, we have a dedicated team of more than 1,600 employees who work hard every day to support local families and businesses.
In 2022, we created a historic new program to make high-quality childcare more affordable for Franklin County families while also supporting the wonderful teachers and childcare centers that our community relies on. We also allocated more than $50 million to affordable housing, support for the homeless, and to keep families in their homes, and granted millions to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective to help meet unprecedented nutritional need. We opened a cafeteria in the county courthouse that operates as a workforce development program to help justice-involved residents get experience in the hospitality industry, and opened a new shop that provides clothes for men to wear at work and in job interviews. We were the first local government to join Justice Counts, a national program to provide criminal justice statistics quickly and accurately and to improve public safety, and we made a grant to Ronald McDonald House to help support families at their time of greatest need. We also raised the minimum wage for county employees and started a new program to help get more women of color into the technology industry. There are so many exciting things going on in Franklin County, and we’ve got so much more planned for 2023.
Thank you again for your interest in your Franklin County government. You can find more detailed information, including about the county budget and the commissioners’ core principles of good governance on the commissioners’ website, and please don’t ever hesitate to reach out to our offices with any question or concern you may have.