We would be surprised if any state legislator has read the entirety of HB 96, but the ballooning breadth of these omnibus bills isn’t nearly as troubling as the penchant for lawmakers to cram in as many controversial amendments and provisions as possible to avoid public hearings ― and scrutiny.
The state budget is arguably the most impactful and important piece of legislation for Ohioans over the next two years, yet the process of how this bill becomes a law would make even a veteran sausage maker’s stomach churn.
So, what’s included in HB 96 and will it help or hurt the Miami Valley?
You had one job
As House Finance Ranking Member Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake, told this outlet, the budget is the vehicle in which Ohio lawmakers fulfill the legislature’s only explicit constitutional duty: funding the state’s K-12 public schools.
Indeed, Gov. Mike DeWine’s initial budget proposal emphasized the importance of public education and advocated for the final phase of the state’s so-called fair school funding plan, designed to get the state’s public school funding less reliant on property taxes and planned to be implemented over three budgets.
However, the version that passed the House falls far short of fully funding the last two years of the plan. The House version does increase the funding, but it is significantly less than schools would have received under the original plan. Where the House had the option to implement the final stages of a fair school funding plan that would make schools less reliant on property taxes, they chose not to.
Worse, a strange new proposal in the budget would require each public school district to charge less in property taxes for the next school year if the district’s carryover balance exceeds 30% of the district’s general fund expenditures.
This could impact 47 of the 57 school districts in Butler, Clark, Greene, Miami, Montgomery and Warren counties, according to an analysis by this news outlet of data provided by the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission — to a total of $553.7 million.
In a letter to DeWine and the Ohio House and Senate budget committees, Xenia schools said if the state budget provision is passed, they would see more than a 50% decrease in property taxes collected for one year, while Xenia cash reserves diminish.
“It’s a state-level overreach into a local jurisdiction,” Xenia school board member Joshua Day said. “Our citizens vote for the taxes they’re willing to pay or not pay, and it’s up to them to approve it. It’s not up to the state to tell them, and to regulate our community on what they’re willing to do.”
Even county auditors across the state hungry for property tax reform – that the cash reserve provision is ostensibly intended to achieve – have come out against it.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, a Republican and longtime advocate for property tax reform, said this provision is “out of the blue” and could easily backfire.
“How are school districts supposed to budget with that, can they even keep their bond rating with their cash so low?” Nix said. “Then it just promotes all kinds of shenanigans, to move monies in irregular ways. I don’t understand this at all, that’s not property tax reform.”
The charter school effect
While we support and respect school choice, the state budget has, for years, continued to move funding toward charter schools at the expense of our public schools. Shifting budget priorities, combined with one particularly onerous requirement for public schools, has led to an untenable situation for public school districts.
Section 3327.01 of the Ohio Revised Code requires public school districts to provide transportation to students attending charter schools. In Dayton and Harrison Township alone, there are more than 20 high schools, but Dayton Public Schools only operates six.
More students going to private and charter schools has increased the amount of money a district has to spend to make sure students get to school safely and on time. That expense has, for years, been too high for Dayton Public Schools to afford yellow buses for all of its high school students.
The alternative has been to rely on public transportation. The April 4 tragic fatal shooting of Dunbar student Alfred Hale near the Greater Dayton RTA’s downtown transit hub underscores the need for dedicated school transportation — as well as the inadequate state funding needed to address the issue.
A hastily proposed solution was rushed into the House version of the budget as an amendment that, if passed, would prevent schools from transporting kids down to the bus hub to make another connection.
Rep. Phil Plummer, who co-authored the amendment, said DPS is responsible for school transportation and the district must get its students back on yellow school buses.
We agree. However, neither the amendment nor the proposed budget offer any way to address the problem beyond forcing students out of the bus hub.
After Gov. DeWine’s budget was proposed, public schools implored lawmakers to evaluate school transportation costs. That request clearly didn’t affect the House version of the budget, in which public school funding would receive disproportionately less of an increase than charter schools and voucher programs, according to the Legislative Service Commission, a nonpartisan office for Ohio lawmakers.
Over the last several budgets and with this budget proposal, both charter funding and enrollment have gone up to such a degree that the ORC requirement for public districts to foot the charter school transportation bill has become financially burdensome - if not impossible.
Public school critics call for districts to dip into their reserve funding to allow for yellow bus transportation, despite districts like DPS claiming those reserves will be depleted within five years. This method would be especially unsustainable if the proposed holdover cap passes and non-public school enrollment continues to increase — public districts would then be on the hook for paying an increasingly larger amount of money each year to transport non-public school students for no benefit to their own students or finances.
With so much additional funding going to non-public education, it is not unreasonable to ask these charter to start to provide their own transportation.
All aboard the omnibus
Public school district funding is just one of an incredible number of priorities that get stuffed into Ohio’s behemoth biennial budgets.
There’s a grab bag of assorted other amendments and provisions that find their way wedged into the thousands of pages that no one will read, including:
And, from this point of the process on, there’s even less public involvement and more opportunities to hide individual lawmakers’ responsibility.
After its passage, the House GOP caucus created a 12-page budget “highlights” list, but it doesn’t list the authors of any of its amendments.
We join the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s call that “Ohioans must insist that the General Assembly’s budget-writing committees – most critically, budget-crafting conference committees – reveal the authentic authors of budget amendments."
As we have written many times before, we strongly believe in open and honest governance at every level.
The state budget is likely the most critical single piece of legislation for Ohioans over the next two years. Its many authors should be proud of their accomplishments - not attempt to hide their involvement.
Veto power
The Statehouse doesn’t have the final say in how the budget becomes law. The Ohio Constitution gives the governor’s office line-item veto power on the budget and any other bill that makes fiscal appropriations. In effect, it allows DeWine to strike out provisions added by the legislature that he doesn’t like.
“Our children are our future,” said DeWine said as he unveiled his proposed budget in February.
To protect that future and the future of all Ohioans, we ask that Gov. DeWine veto poorly conceived, last-minute provisions and amendments such as the 30% holdover cap and the RTA bus hub restriction, should they survive in the Senate version of the budget.
Legislation that will have a significant impact for Ohioans deserves to be thoroughly vetted in public hearings. Even the most thought-out legislation runs the risk of unintended consequences. Rushed, knee-jerk proposals only increase that risk.
Auditor Nancy Nix raises valuable, unanswered questions, as do many of the opponents and proponents of the myriad issues buried in the budget – they will not have the opportunity to provide critical testimony.
Skipping the public hearing process by burying these provisions at the last minute in thousands of pages of an omnibus bill silences Ohioans’ voices.
Let these consequential proposals be heard - in the open, in public, on the record - and judged on their merits, not as a footnote in the budget process.