Meet the candidates for Ohio House District 94

ATHENS, Ohio — Two Athens County residents are running for the Ohio House seat being vacated by Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville) due to term limits.

Wenda Sheard, of Ames Township, is unopposed on the Democratic primary ballot to represent Ohio House District 94, which comprises all of Meigs and Washington counties as well as western and southern Athens County, excluding the city of Athens. 

Mark Harris, of Athens, is unaffiliated and running under the Forward Party. The Independent was unable to contact Harris in time for publication.

The only contested primary for the seat is on the Republican ticket, where Washington County Commissioner Kevin Ritter, of Marietta, faces Shannon Walker of Pomeroy.

Athens County residents also are running for Ohio House District 95 and Ohio Senate District 30; the Independent will profile them in subsequent stories.

The last day to register to vote in the March primary is Feb. 20. Check your voter registration, update your address, find your polling location and more on the Athens County Board of Elections website.

Wenda Sheard 

Wenda Sheard is an attorney and trained mediator, with a Ph.D. in political science. In a statement posted on her campaign Facebook page, Sheard said that she grew up in the Cleveland area, where her parents were active in the civil rights movement. She became an attorney “because I wanted the tools necessary to make change, and the ability to help others make change.”

In 1979, she took a job in Athens County, where she met her husband, a science teacher. In over two decades of legal practice, she worked in Ohio courts for both Republican and Democratic judges.

Sheard is running for the Ohio House “because our current legislature has lost the ability to focus on the difficulties facing Ohioans,” she told the Independent in an email.

“The August and November 2023 elections prove that point,” Sheard wrote. “We need a legislature willing to focus on the difficulties facing Ohioans in their homes, schools and jobs.”

Sheard added that she believes “voters should have choices on their ballot. If we don’t have ballot choices, then instead of elections, we have coronations.”

Sheard believes the biggest issues in the district are “hungry families, long wait times to see medical specialists, drug addiction, underfunded schools, lack of affordable and reliable internet and phone service, and inadequate supplies of affordable housing.” She also cited climate change, which she described as “a threat so horrific that most people avoid even thinking about it.” 

“On the economic front, we have big corporations with wages set so low that families must rely on the government for food assistance and healthcare,” Sheard added. “We have unions that the Ohio legislature attempts to weaken, most recently with Senate Bill 83.”

She noted that Athens and Meigs counties rank near the bottom for per capita income among Ohio’s 88 counties. 

“The per capita income in Ohio isn’t pretty, either — 1969 was the last year that the per capita income here was 100% of the national average,” she stated.

Sheard plans “to address issues facing the people of our district by listening to those who are suffering, by brainstorming solutions with a variety of people, and by collaborating with other legislators, including those across the aisle.” 

The key to crossing political boundaries is focusing on shared values, “not political posturing,” she wrote. 

“For example … Let’s work together to improve access to birth control, to lift Ohio families out of poverty, and to attract obstetricians to practice in Ohio’s rural areas, so fewer people choose abortion,” Sheard stated.

Kevin Ritter

According to his campaign website, Ritter grew up near Detroit and played baseball for Central Michigan University, where he majored in history and political science. He also earned a master’s in political science at CMU. He later pursued a doctorate in modern European history at Western Michigan University, but dropped out after launching a sports marketing company.

He moved to Washington County in 2000, where he has taught at Ohio Valley University and Washington State Community College. He also co-founded the Veritas Classical Academy in Marietta, which follows a curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a private Michigan college with ties to right-wing politics. 

Ritter successfully ran for Washington County commissioner in 2018 and ran unopposed for re-election in 2022. 

“One of the things I quickly learned upon moving to SE Ohio nearly 25 years ago was that our corner of state did not historically seem to receive the same sort of attention as some of the larger urban areas,” Ritter said in a statement. “In just the last few years, we’ve been the beneficiaries of a significant amount of investment by the state. I have chosen to run for the statehouse in order to ensure we finish the job.”

Ritter stated the region has “basic infrastructure needs, education needs, and workforce needs that still must be addressed if our region is to see its full potential.” He identified the district’s two biggest issues as “housing and retention of young workers.”

“The need for additional housing is an issue throughout Ohio but the shortage in our area is particularly acute,” Ritter added. “The state recently invested $30 million in an expansion of our local hospital system. It is important [that] the new medical staff attracted by that investment live in the 94th district, not across the river in West Virginia.”

Ritter noted that while real estate and cost of living are “attractive in our area … it takes more than that to attract and/or retain individuals and businesses. To be competitive, we have to be able to offer some of the amenities that people routinely find in other parts of the state.”

On the other hand, Ritter said he also supports the district’s agricultural traditions and that “we need to do whatever possible (reducing taxes, reducing regulation, etc.) to make it more attractive to young people who might be thinking of leaving the family farm, to instead remain in our area.”

Ritter also hopes to “see the state adopt a higher threshold for ballot initiatives and for amending the Constitution” — such as Issue 1 in the August 2023 special election, which Republican leaders hoped would prevent Issue 1 (amending the Ohio Constitution to protect abortion) in the November 2023 election from passing. 

Ritter said he supports “school choice” — charter schools — though he said “I believe we have to have a variety of good schools if that choice is to mean anything.”

Posts on his commissioner’s Facebook page support state restrictions on gender-affirming care for youth and bans on trans girls and women in school and college athletics, as well as proposed state restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities. 

Shannon Walker

Walker’s campaign site says he was born and raised in southeast Ohio by a “poverty stricken family due to drug and alcohol abuse.” He was a police officer in Pomeroy from 1999 to 2005; according to his campaign bio, a back injury led him to switch to corrections for three years. He left corrections because “the pain from the back injury was too great.”

He trained in tattooing and opened his own studio, That Guy Ink, in 2018. When Gov. Mike DeWine ordered tattoo studios to close during 2020 COVID lockdowns, “Walker took a stand and re-opened after three weeks,” his campaign website states. 

“And they threatened me with fines, jail time, and in the end, they called me and dismissed everything,” Walker told the Independent in an interview. 

Walker became a Republican in 2006, according to his website, which describes him as a “constitutional conservative.” In the interview, Walker said he would work in Columbus to “stand up for our constitutional rights, and actually remove some of the laws that are violating our rights.”

He said he disagreed with the passage of Issues 1 and 2 in November 2023. Regarding the passage of Issue 1, he said the Ohio Constitution is “not a living, breathing document that should be changed lightly.”

“It’s being abused, that power is being abused — like adding the abortion, adding the public safety issue … That’s all stuff that could have been done through legislation, not to the Constitution,” Walker said.

Posts on Walker’s official campaign Facebook page supporting state restrictions on gender-affirming care. A post lauding the legislature’s override of Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of HB68 describes such care for youth as “physical mutilation” and “chemical castration” and refers to trans girls and women as males.

For Walker, the biggest issues for folks in his district include the economy, living wage and “the border issues.” He believes in eliminating the state income tax and “getting parents back in charge of what the schools are teaching — getting the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion out, the social emotional learning, the critical race theory.”

“We got to get our schools back to teaching reading, writing, math, history, science, and patriotism,” Walker said. “We’ve got to put a love in this country back in the students at a young age so they fight for the same freedoms that I’m wanting to get into the statehouse to fight for.”

Walker said he would not cross partisan lines to work collaboratively with constituents.

“I’m pretty firm in my beliefs, so if they want to work with me, and they want to cross that line, and come over, and start doing what’s right for the state, and what’s right for the people this state, because I feel that a lot of the left’s agenda is diminishing patriotism,” Walker said. 

“We need to get back to our founding roots, the godly values that created this country and I feel like they’re trying to pull us farther away,” Walker said. “I don’t think it’s really possible to work across lines unless they’re willing to give.”