PIONEER, Ohio — From the beginning, it seemed like a long shot.
But Pioneer Mayor Ed Kidston dared to dream big.
Defying his critics, he pressed onward with his plan to transform his hometown of 1,400 residents into an aquaculture powerhouse.
By recruiting Maynard, Mass.-based AquaBounty Technologies to come into northwest Ohio less than five years ago, Mr. Kidston wasn’t looking for it to build any run-of-the mill fish farm.
He was promised the company would build one of America’s largest indoor salmon-rearing facilities on the east side of his village, thereby putting Pioneer on the map as one of the nation’s largest producers of genetically modified fish.
Amazing promises were made.
AquaBounty said it would produce more than 22 million pounds of fish annually at the future Pioneer site. Only one other salmon farm in the United States, in South Florida, had that kind of capacity.
The company promised 100 to 120 new jobs for the tiny village and said it could produce $15 million over 15 years for schools, primarily those in the North Central Local School District.
The private, nonprofit JobsOhio promoted AquaBounty’s potential job creation in a 2021 post on its website.
It all seemed too good to be true. By the time AquaBounty announced a pause on construction in June of 2023 because of financial problems, though, reality began to set in.
Now that the massive project appears to have come crashing down, Mayor Kidston and a long list of ardent supporters who have lined up behind him during his 28 years in office aren’t talking publicly about how the village might pick up the pieces and move on.
The result, according to Mr. Kidston’s detractors, has resulted in a fractured community filled with anxiety about the village’s future.
“He’s got something up his sleeve,” said a suspicious Richard Schmucker, 76, an antique shop owner and lifelong resident.
Yearning for simpler times
Mr. Schmucker was elected to the Pioneer council in 1989 when the village had Mr. Kidston’s father, Bruce Kidston, as mayor.
Mr. Schmucker served 24 years on the council, through 2013. He said he liked Pioneer “the way it was” when he was a kid.
Times were simpler then. The village had three neighborhood grocery stories, two drug stores, barbershops, taverns, clothing stores, and more, he said.
Most of all, it wasn’t split apart by small-town politics and people taking sides on a grandiose industrial project.
“I miss the old Pioneer,” Mr. Schmucker said.
Ken Coy, owner of Coy’s Towing Service, agreed Pioneer has seen better times.
He said the AquaBounty project “has caused so much controversy in this community.”
“This has cost the village a ton of money,” Mr. Coy said. “Profit’s not a dirty word, but this guy goes on and on.”
Another Pioneer businessman, Jim Fee, owner of Jim’s Gym and Jim’s Barbershop, said Mr. Kidston’s style has divided the community, which he said is overwhelmingly Republican but split over whether it supports him.
“I just wish things would settle down and we could get back to a normal life,” Mr. Fee said.
Lack of response from others
Most Pioneer officials, including Village Administrator Anthony Burnett and a majority of the village councilmen, aren’t talking.
Neither is Michael Bute, the superintendent of Pioneer-based North Central Local Schools, which has lost multiple millage requests and hasn’t had a new tax approved in 20 years. The district was counting on revenue from the AquaBounty project to support operations.
It has another millage request on the May 6 ballot. This one, however, is for a 1 percent earned-income tax levy, not a property tax levy. The district estimates it could raise $943,904.
Mr. Kidston’s son, Michael Kidston, president of the Pioneer Area Chamber of Commerce, isn’t talking, nor is Williams County Economic Development Executive Director Ashley Epling.
Pioneer is a little more than an hour’s drive west of downtown Toledo, near the spot where Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio come together.
Surrounded by an idyllic, wide-open countryside, it’s not in an area where people usually think of salmon farms.
But conventional fish pens weren’t in AquaBounty’s plans to begin with. It was hoping to build an indoor facility where it could continue to raise genetically modified salmon it developed through scientific research years earlier, hoping they would catch on in supermarkets as an alternative protein source.
They didn’t.
AquaBounty’s struggles
AquaBounty stock closed at only 65 cents a share Friday, far below Nasdaq’s $1-a-share minimum. It has until July 15 to get its stock up to $1 or more a share for at least 10 consecutive days or be removed from Nasdaq listings.
The company, which also has declined interviews, announced in December it was laying off most of its staff, undergoing a management shakeup, and ceasing all of its remaining fish-growing operations.
In February, it auctioned off equipment and supplies previously delivered to the Pioneer site.
Most recently, it sold off its Canadian assets to Kelly Cove Salmon Ltd. of New Brunswick.
Kelly Cove Salmon also has not responded to a request for an interview.
AquaBounty secured many of the permits it needed to build its massive project in Pioneer and was backed by a Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority agreement to sell up to $425 million in bonds to help finance construction. Holly Kemler, the port authority’s spokesman, has said that agency never got to the point of selling bonds, though.
But it still doesn’t have the permit it needs to dig up land along a one-mile route to install a crucial pair of pipelines.
The need for those pipelines
It needs a right-of-way permit along Williams County Road S to move water from a Madison Township field to its property in Pioneer and a discharge pipe to send treated wastewater into the nearby St. Joseph River, a Maumee River tributary.
Two 20-inch lines along the south side of County Road S are proposed.
AquaBounty paid Mayor Kidston almost $2.1 million for the land it needed to build its salmon-rearing plant. He bought the property — an 81-acre farm — from an elderly man for $600,000, netting nearly a $1.5 million profit.
Chris Keiser lives in a home built in 1913 along that County Road S route just east of the village, where the pipelines would be laid.
He told The Blade he’s fine with new industries coming to Pioneer. He’d like to see the village’s job base expanded and more tax revenue created.
But Mr. Keiser said he draws the line with plans such as AquaBounty’s, which he calls “pump and dump” projects.
AquaBounty has received authorization from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to withdraw up to 5 million gallons a day of groundwater for its operations in Pioneer, should it ever build that indoor salmon facility.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is taking public comment on the proposed discharge permit through April 6.
Right-of-way permit remains a priority
AquaBounty’s bleak financial picture and its companywide decision to cease operations have not diminished the village’s desire to obtain the permit to install those two pipelines.
Mr. Burnett has informed the Board of Williams County commissioners that the village still wants the permit but won’t say why.
Commissioners were withholding authorization until courts ruled on a lawsuit brought against them by the village and by AquaBounty.
On Tuesday, the board agreed by a 2-1 vote that it would not try to have the case heard by the Ohio Supreme Court.
The case centers around whether the would-be pipeline operator would meet the legal definition of a public utility. A state appeals court recently agreed with a trial judge’s ruling in favor of the village and the company.
“It doesn’t pass the smell test in my opinion,” Commissioner Bartley Westfall, the lone dissenter, said during a break from a previous board meeting on March 6.
Commissioner Scott Lirot, who cast the deciding vote in favor of ending litigation, said he had reservations about the pipeline controversy until becoming convinced himself that Williams County has “a crazy amount of water” beneath its surface.
‘A lot of emotion in this’
Mr. Lirot said he believes Mr. Kidston has been such a polarizing figure that it’s been hard for some people to look at the case objectively.
“What I was finding in my research was the hate for Ed Kidston,” Mr. Lirot explained to The Blade Tuesday night after his vote. “There are people who are jealous, I don’t know why they didn’t like him. They didn’t want him making money and that’s his business, water.”
“All I was getting was that ‘We don’t like Ed Kidston.’” Mr. Lirot continued. “And even if I don’t like the guy — I think he’s arrogant, condescending, and kind of an [expletive] myself — you know what I mean? — but I’m not going to, like, make that drive my decision. That’d be selfish of me to make a decision because I don’t like somebody, wouldn’t it?’”
Mr. Lirot expressed similar thoughts on March 6 during a break from the commission meeting while a reporter from The Blade and other media outlets were in the room.
“There’s a lot of people who have a dislike for Ed because he tried to sell Toledo [suburbs] water,” Mr. Lirot said. “There’s a lot of emotion in this.”
Lingering anger over courting Toledo-area suburbs
In 2018, before the AquaBounty project surfaced, Mr. Kidston floated the idea of having his company, Artesian of Pioneer, pipe groundwater across northwest Ohio to Perrysburg, Maumee, Sylvania, and other Toledo-area suburbs that were, at the time, engaged in heated negotiations with the city of Toledo for renewed, long-term service.
His efforts drew protests at village council meetings and in downtown Bryan at the Courthouse Square. The protests included candlelight vigils. Several people at those events accused Mr. Kidston of having a conflict of interest between his role as mayor and his business proposals with Toledo-area suburbs.
Some of those suburbs had reservations about continuing to pay Toledo for service, though. They often were charged higher rates and felt helpless by the disruption caused by the city’s 2014 water crisis. An algal toxin made the city’s tap water unsafe to drink or touch the first weekend of August that year, costing Toledo and its suburbs millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The controversy ended when the communities agreed to form the Toledo Regional Water Commission, the metro area’s first regional water authority. Negotiations that resulted in that commission brought more parity in rates and gave the suburbs a voice in management issues, including those at the city’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant.
Odors alleged
Mr. Keiser was hoping the Williams County commissioners would have taken the Pioneer-area dispute over the right-of-way to the Ohio Supreme Court.
He and his wife, Donna, claim they began noticing odors coming out of their faucets and laundry machines after a test well was drilled.
The couple has lived in that home along Williams County Road S for 78 years and said they never had such a problem before. Odors have subsided some with filtering and other adjustments, but still exist to some degree, they said.
“You can smell it when running the bath water even today,” Mr. Keiser said.
Todd Roth, Williams County engineer, said his primary concern is making sure the county has reasonable “guarantees in place” for repairing any land that heavy machinery tears up once the permit for laying pipelines is issued.
“We just want to make sure it’s taken care of and properties are put back in place, just like the way they were when it started,” he said. “I'm comfortable at this point we'll have something in place.”
He said he also wants Pioneer officials to know that “if something happens to the waterline, it’s the village’s responsibility.”
Mr. Lirot said the county engineer will want a performance bond on the contractor doing the work.
Policy group is puzzled
While some people have come to question why Mr. Kidston courted AquaBounty, Greg LeRoy also wonders how the project ever got so much interest from the state of Ohio, the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, and others outside of Pioneer.
Mr. LeRoy is executive director of the Washington-based Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center that promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development.
Among other things, the group provides trackers for violations and subsidies.
“The product was so speculative, it was a risky thing to begin with,” he said. “We understand economic development officials feel a lot of pressure to make something happen. That doesn’t mean you don’t kick the tires first.”
Kristan Wong Karinen, one of the group’s research analysts, agreed.
“It’s a rural area,” she said. “This was a massive deal. It should have been vetted much more vigorously.”
One of the lessons Pioneer should learn from this is transparency, Mr. LeRoy said.
“If this had been public record, this might have turned out much differently,” he said. “You get better deals when more people are engaged.”
A ‘clubby political structure’
Mr. Schmucker and Mr. Coy were part of a room full of about 30 people in attendance at Monday’s monthly Pioneer Village Council meeting, many of whom were buzzing about village politics while told to wait outdoors during three executive sessions that were closed to the public.
There was no question-and-answer period on the agenda. When Mr. Coy tried to raise a question, stating he was a citizen who has a right to talk, Mr. Kidston cut him off and said nobody talks at council meetings who are not on the agenda.
Mr. LeRoy said Pioneer needs to get away from its “clubby political structure.”
“Some deals don’t pan out,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong about that. It’s just reality. But people should be able to see what happens.”
Attempt to change ethics law fails
Mr. Schmucker said he and other residents were upset to learn about Mr. Kidston’s apparent attempt to change an Ohio ethics law in late 2024.
Such laws have been in place for decades to keep village mayors and other small town officials from engaging in business practices that can be perceived as conflicts of interest.
The attempt to create such an exemption would have the first substantial weakening of state ethics laws dating back to 1974, according to Ohio Ethics Commission Executive Director Paul Nick.
“When the legislature passed these laws, it was to prevent public dealing by small town mayors,” he said.
In an interview with The Blade, Mr. Nick said the ethics commission was taken aback when it learned about the last-minute House Bill 315 substitute amendment that was inserted on the final day of the lame-duck session.
“We didn’t know it at the time this was passed,” he said of the amendment that would have rolled back ethics laws.
It was in a bill that passed in the Ohio House by a 76-7 vote and in the Ohio Senate by a 27-1 vote, both on Dec. 18, and went to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature.
The Ohio Ethics Commission, though, caught wind of that amendment before Governor DeWine signed the bill.
Mr. Nick and Ethics Commission Chairman Merom Brachman urged Governor DeWine in writing on Dec. 23 to exercise his authority to veto the last-minute language.
The governor did just that.
“Under current law, public officials are subjected to ethical restrictions and requirements to ensure transparency and proper use of taxpayer money. This provision would exempt some officials from these requirements,” Governor DeWine said in his prepared statement, concluding that his veto “is in the public interest.”
The governor’s press secretary, Dan Tierney, declined further comment.
Mr. Nick said it was the most unusual language he’d seen inserted into a legislative bill during his 30 years with the Ohio Ethics Commission, the last 14 as executive director.
“For a substantive change in the law to be inserted in this manner was unexpected,” he said. “This caught us off guard and surprised us. We appreciate the governor listening and exercising the veto.”
House Bill 315’s primary sponsors were Ohio Rep. Thomas Hall (R., Middletown) and former Ohio Rep. and former majority floor leader Bill Seitz (R., Cincinnati).
Mr. Hall did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. But in a Jan. 16 interview, Mr. Seitz told The Blade that the late-minute amendment, which called for exemptions from certain ethics rules for village mayors and small town officials in certain circumstances, came from one lobbyist and no others, Jonithon LaCross, a lobbyist with Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP.
Paper trail reveals other inquiries
A state record dated Sept. 26 shows that Mr. Kidston’s company, Artesian of Pioneer, a supplier and installer of water-treatment equipment, hired Mr. LaCross to represent them. Mr. Kidston’s name, as well as his company’s, is on that document.
Mr. Seitz said he’s never met Mr. Kidston, and that he went along with the proposed amendment only because it pertained to business dealings in small towns where options for purchasing necessary equipment may be limited.
“Some villages are so small that a strict interpretation [of ethics rules] would make it virtually impossible to get supplies,” Mr. Seitz explained. “So the idea was as long as the mayor does not vote on it and as long as is as fair to the village, it would be OK. It’s not a blanket exemption. I thought we had very good guardrails around this provision.”
“Jonithon LaCross asked me to put it in,” Mr. Seitz added.
Mr. LaCross did not return messages sent to him via email and left on his voicemail.
An Aug. 5 letter from the ethics commission states that Artesian “is contemplating an expansion of its facilities” within Pioneer’s Enterprise Zone that the village created in 1993.
Businesses within it may qualify for tax abatements when they expand. But Mr. Kidston’s attorney was told in that letter he would not be eligible to receive a tax abatement from the village “because he would occupy a position of profit in a public contract in violation of [Section 2921.42 of the Ohio Revised Code].”
A ‘huge red flag’
“It should raise a huge red flag when a small town mayor uses one of his businesses to hire a lobbyist to weaken state ethics law meant to safeguard transparency and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money. A veto was a win for the public,” according to Sherry Fleming, chairman of the Williams County Alliance activist group.
Mr. Fee, the gym and barbershop owner, agreed.
“When the ethics commission came up, people were not happy with it,” Mr. Fee said. “We’re just glad the governor had the sense to veto it. They’re not doing themselves any favors by trying to change the ethics laws.”
Mr. Coy, another longtime member of Pioneer’s business community, agreed.
“The people who really cared were stunned,” he said.
Records show Mr. Kidston has contacted the Ohio Ethics Commission directly or through an attorney five times since 2020 for legal advice, including three times in 2024.
In each case, he was asking about limitations he faces as a village mayor with his business dealings.
His most recent contact with the Ethics Commission was on July 26, when attorney Scott North of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur asked if three parcels of land owned by the Kidston family could be annexed into the village. Mr. Kidston owns 11 percent of the land and is the managing member of the development company, Kidston Consultant LLC. The other 89 percent of the land is owned by his children and grandchildren, according to letters written by the Ethics Commission.
Mr. North was reminded in a Dec. 16 letter of an earlier opinion from the Ethics Commission that stated that Mayor Kidston “cannot use [his] position as village mayor, either formally or informally, in any matters involving the proposed annexation of the property, or to secure the annexation of the property.”
Mr. Nick said that Mr. Kidston has done nothing wrong by contacting the Ohio Ethics Commission on those five occasions and that, in fact, the commission urges public officials to seek its advice.
“He has asked for advice and we encourage that,” Mr. Nick said. “We do encourage people to ask. They may not like our answers, but we encourage them to ask.”
Two retirees, one common goal
Mr. Schmucker, the former councilman, said he has one of the largest collection of Pioneer-area antiques inside the home where he and his wife, Lois, began living in 50 years ago this year. Their house, built in the 1800s and a block from where village council meetings are held, is an antique itself.
He still operates his store, Schmucker’s Antiques, on Saturdays.
Mr. Coy stopped operating the service station and convenience store side of his business when he went to work as a mechanic for the Ohio Department of Transportation in 1991. He has kept the towing end of his business going in his retirement.
The two retirees are among the most regular attendees of village council meetings.
They yearn for better days, but know there’s a long road ahead.
“Everything about the situation is a mess,” Mr. Coy said.
First Published March 16, 2025, 12:00 p.m.
