Credit the two chambers’ GOP budget skippers, state Rep. Scott Oelslager, of Canton, and state Sen. Matt Dolan, of Chagrin Falls – a U.S. Senate candidate – for helping get that tough job done.
Could Ohio’s “process” be improved? Sure thing. A good start would be reining in the power of Senate-House conference to amend a budget with huge “omnibus” amendments which have hard-to-determine authors.
Another improvement would be following the parliamentary convention that conference committees shouldn’t act like a third legislative chamber, adding amendments that neither the Senate nor the House passed in the first place.
But conference committees’ … elasticity … will continue until the Ohio Supreme Court stops playing helpless bystander to the General Assembly’s parliamentary antics – not just conference committees with Spandex agendas but also the often-breached “one subject” rule that’s supposed – supposed – to limit each bill to one subject.
Still, if people in Congress were as interested in getting things done, budgetarily, as they are in grandstanding, they could learn a lot watching the General Assembly craft a budget for Ohio – without, incidentally, the power to print money, a federal prerogative.
What passed at the Statehouse last summer was an operating budget. It pays state employees and earmarks money for state operations, led off by Ohio’s share of the federal-state Medicaid health care program for low-income Ohioans, and state aid for K-12 schools.
Sometime this new year, the legislature will act on another two-year budget – the bricks-and-lumber “capital improvements” (state construction) bill.
So-called “capital” bills are debated and passed during Ohio election years. That allows for timely groundbreakings back home in General Assembly members’ districts: Shovels-and-hard-hats make nice photos in county seat papers when the local squire seeks another two- or four-year term at her or his favorite Columbus bistro.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
According to the state’s Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents Ohio residential electricity customers in utility rate cases and such, Ohio customers of American Electric Power, Duke Energy and AES Ohio (Dayton Power and Light) have – since Jan. 1, 2020 – been forced to pay $166.07 million to bail out investments the stockholder-owned utilities have made in two coal-burning power plants, one of them in in Indiana, the other in Southern Ohio. The subsidies are tapping Ohioans’ wallets and checkbooks because the General Assembly has so far refused to fully repeal scandal-scarred House Bill 6. That bill originated in a bid by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. for a ratepayer bailout of two nuclear power plants. (The coal subsidy may have been tucked into HB 6 to get other electric companies to go along with the bill.)
Thomas Suddes is an adjunct assistant professor at Ohio University. He covered the Statehouse for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer for many years.
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