But DeWine issued 67 line-item vetoes before signing the budget, some of which the GOP supermajority in the Ohio General Assembly may work to override with a three-fifths vote. This is particularly true of several measures aimed at property tax relief.
Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, called taxes “kitchen table issues for every family.”
DeWine points to funding for child care, adoption, workforce training and infrastructure in the budget. “We are investing in the people of Ohio, not just today, but for generations to come,” he said.
The budget saw unanimous opposition from Ohio’s Democratic lawmakers. They criticize GOP lawmakers cutting taxes — eliminating over a billion in state tax revenue over a two-year period — while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Cleveland Browns stadium and paving the way for reducing Medicaid rolls.
“Make no mistake: this budget continues to reward the interests of the wealthy and well-connected over the needs of everyday Ohioans,” said Senate Democratic Leader Nickie J. Antonio, D-Lakewood.
Property taxes
DeWine vetoed multiple proposals dealing with property taxes sought by Statehouse Republicans after they faced criticism of legislative inaction amid ballooning tax bills.
“The DeWine-Tressel Administration recognizes the great need for property tax reform in Ohio and will convene a working group that will include legislators, agency officials, school officials, community members, and property tax experts to ensure this critical topic is given the attention deserved,” DeWine wrote in his veto message.
DeWine axed provisions that would have given taxpayers any financial reserves a school district maintained above 40% of its prior year’s expenses; allowed county budget commissions to unilaterally lower certain property tax rates; and prohibited certain types of property tax levies, including emergency levies, from appearing on local ballots.
“I am in the process of talking with members of our caucus, many of whom have already expressed an eagerness to return to the Statehouse soon to consider veto overrides,” House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, said in a statement. “Particularly in the area of property tax relief passed by the legislature, our caucus is mindful of the urgency many Ohioans are feeling.”
One county auditor, Christopher Galloway of Lake County, called the governor’s vetoes “tone deaf.”
“Budget commission reforms were going to give local control and authority to local elected officials with an expertise in property tax budgets the ability to analyze need. Instead, the governor chose the status quo of lack of clarity,” Galloway wrote.
Cleveland Browns money
Other criticisms have been hurled at budget provisions that are now to become law.
This includes granting $600 million (from a $3.7 billion pot of Ohioans’ “unclaimed funds”) to partially fund the Cleveland Browns’ new stadium project in Brook Park.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, unsuccessfully lobbied DeWine to veto the legislature’s plan to leverage Ohioans’ unclaimed funds to help out professional sports teams.
“Billionaires should finance their own stadiums — full stop," Yost said in a letter. “The $600 million handout for a single professional sports facility raises serious concerns about fiscal sustainability and fairness. While public-private partnerships can sometimes support community development, this provision risks prioritizing one private entity over more urgent statewide needs — such as lowering child care costs to boost workforce participation or easing the property tax burdens that weigh heavily on every Ohio homeowner."
DeWine’s sentiment on the matter echoed what GOP leaders in the House have been saying for months now: “This is a win for taxpayers and will provide significant money for things that improve the quality of life in Ohio.”
Medicaid trigger language
Public health advocates, such as Planned Parenthood of Ohio, knocked Ohio’s budget for its inclusion of “trigger language” that could cancel Medicaid coverage for — according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio — some 770,000 Ohioans (aged 19 to 64 who make under 138% of the federal poverty level).
The budget bill specifies that if federal lawmakers cut funding for Medicaid expansion, the state will back out of the program.
“Creating unnecessary and detrimental barriers to health care will deepen the state’s public health crisis,” said Erica Wilson-Domer, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, “including high maternal and infant mortality rates and sexually transmitted infection rates, and disproportionately harm at-risk groups, such as people living with disabilities, caregivers, and people with low incomes. And it will roll back the progress we’ve made to reduce the state’s uninsured rate.”
Library provisions
Other lawmakers, like Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, have honed in on the removal of a provision that would have required public libraries to move all material “related to sexual orientation or gender identity or expression” to an area of the library “not primarily open to the view of a person under 18 years old.”
DeWine said the provision was “not workable,” as it legally required librarians to make judgment calls on the material content of books in libraries’ children and young adult sections.
“I think as parents and grandparents, no one wants their child to have a book or something that is inappropriate, something that is obscene, but I just felt that the language simply did not work,” DeWine said.
Click, a pastor, posted on X shortly after the vetoes dropped: “To be clear, this is what (DeWine) is keeping in the children’s section of the library.” He attached excerpts of a children’s book that reads, in part, “Some babies grow into a different gender than the one that grown-ups called them. There are lots of different genders that people grow into.”
The budget also changes Ohio’s model for funding public libraries, taking their share from a simple 3.5% of state general tax revenues to a line item to be determined by the legislature every two years.
Other budget highlights
Other major items in the budget include:
• Tweaking Ohio’s “Modell Law,” which generally prohibits professional sports organizations from moving their teams, to expressly allow those teams to relocate as long as they remain in the state.
• Putting more state dollars into public schools while simultaneously backing out of the third and final stage of a so-called fair school funding plan, which would have awarded public schools hundreds of millions of dollars more than what’s included in this budget.
• Eliminating the Ohio Elections Commission, once responsible for overseeing certain election disputes, and transferring that authority to the partisan-elected Ohio Secretary of State.
• Prohibiting Dayton Public Schools high school students from transferring bus lines at the downtown RTA bus hub.
• Codifying in state law that there are only two sexes, male and female, which are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
• Prohibiting government buildings from putting menstrual products in men’s bathrooms.
• Requiring driver’s training for all Ohioans under 21 before obtaining their license.
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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