Bureaucrats and elected officials in Columbus have gotten quite good at using public money to create what they want us to believe are “private” entities. OneOhio Recovery Foundation, for example, is registered as a private nonprofit organization, despite having been launched by Gov. Mike DeWine and state Attorney General Dave Yost to distribute the public money from settlements of lawsuits related to the opioid epidemic. That organization has rightly received challenges to its attempts to operate with less transparency than would be required of a public entity.

Another example is JobsOhio, formed in 2011 — also by state officials — to pull profits from the STATE liquor franchise into the coffers of what was labeled a private corporation. Its function was to distribute those public funds to bolster economic development, but still with little transparency.

JobsOhio’s operations are not always easy to sort through, without the help of Freedom of Information Act requests. But WFMJ in Youngstown discovered JobsOhio is granting more than $2 million in economic incentives to West Warren Development LLC to build an industrial park. One of the three managing partners of West Warren Development is Chuck George, who was recently been named board president of one of JobsOhio’s seven regional network partners, Lake to River.

Predictably, JobsOhio says it doesn’t see a problem with that, saying there is a distinction between George being on JobsOhio’s board and being on one of its regional partners’ boards.

That may be technically true, but it certainly is a bad look.

Meanwhile, after 13 years of JobsOhio distributing more than $1 billion in public money to support development, Ohio’s economic growth is fifth-worst in the country. Were JobsOhio subject to the same transparency rules as any other public entity, perhaps we would have a better idea why. We must remind our elected public officials that when they create an entity that spends public money then cover it with the word “private,” taxpayers and voters are forced to wonder: What are they trying to hide?