For example, House Republicans, like medieval kings proclaiming what their subjects had to believe, declared, in budget analysts’ words, that Ohio “[recognizes] only two sexes, male and female, which are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Hey: Ohioans don’t need philosophers, theologians – let alone physicians and biologists – to debate gender when the legislature’s barbershop sages can easily settle that question.
Likewise, price tags for some budget changes House Republicans want are surfacing. Example: Sweet, in-term pay raises for Ohio’s judges. By the early 2030s, the cost to taxpayers of judges’ raises may reach an additional $29 million a year, atop their previously scheduled 2026 through 2028 raises, costing an estimated $9 million a year.
That’s pretty sweet, considering paltry annual pay raises rank and file Ohioans see. The state’s minimum wage for non-tipped employees rose to $10.70 on Jan. 1, an hourly raise of 25 cents over Ohio’s 2024 minimum.
The House GOP budget rewrite also repeals a current requirement that a contractor from whom the state or local governments makes purchases must have an affirmative-action program aimed at hiring economically disadvantaged Ohioans.
Oh, yes, affirmative-action in employment, like fairness generally, often draws fire from bitter-enders. But the international business consultancy McKinsey reported in 2020, companies with diverse executive teams, measured by ethnicity or gender, performed markedly better than non-diverse competitors.
You’d think Ohio’s supposedly thrifty legislature would want the state and its localities to deal with high-performing vendors and contractors. Uh ... no.
Then there’s the provision in House Republicans’ budget rewrite aimed at helping the Browns’ billionaire owner, Jimmy Haslam, build a new stadium not in Cleveland but in suburban Brook Park, then move the Browns there.
(House Republicans evidently don’t see eye-to-eye with their fellow Republican, Ohio Attorney General David Yost, who wrote in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed that “there are plenty of good-government reasons not to blow this money on a palace in Brook Park.”)
Then there’s also the House GOP plan to give Ohio homeowners a one-time property-tax cut by forcing prudent school districts to spend down budget reserves. That, nonpartisan budget analysts wrote, “may reduce tax collections for school districts by up to several billion dollars over a multi-year period.”
In plain English, when such one-time spend-downs of school-district budget reserves end, Ohio homeowners will land back on Square One, facing even more levy requests. Meanwhile, House Republicans (and their state Senate pals) refuse to fashion a fair, permanent fix for Ohio’s school-funding mess.
And, as previously lamented here, the House’s budget rewrite would all but destroy Ohio’s nationally envied system of state aid to public libraries. Now, the state’s bipartisan mechanism, devised in the 1980s, gives all Ohioans, no matter what their neighborhoods or bankrolls look like, excellent public libraries.
General Assembly mistakes that can inflict so much damage call to mind something the great novelist Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” about “careless people ... [who] let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Today, in Columbus, those words could well be applied to the General Assembly’s dogma-not-facts budgeteers, who aim to make big headlines rather than promote progress in Ohio.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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