How virus will affect Ohio and its finances

Given the circumstances, Gov. Mike DeWine was duty-bound to cancel Tuesday’s statewide primary election and aim to re-schedule it for June 2.

Even so, what Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, the governor’s fellow Republican, said is correct: “Legal authority to change the date rests with the Ohio General Assembly – not the courts and not via executive fiat.” That’s why the legislature, this new week, may do what it should have done long ago: Create a mechanism to re-set the date of an election in the face of a catastrophe. The legislature should also create a kind of statewide central clearinghouse court for election disputes like last week’s.

As Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye said, in refusing to postpone the primary, “There are too many factors to balance ... to say that we ought to take (setting an election date) away from the legislature and elected statewide officials and throw it to a Common Pleas Court judge in Columbus with 12 hours to go before the election.”

Then there’s this: Citing public health as a reason for regulating or banning something is a necessary part of confronting disaster – in this case, a pandemic. In the right hands (and Mike DeWine’s hands are the right hands) that’s essential to protecting the public.

Still, in the wrong hands, and for the wrong reasons, that power can be misused. Some day, for example, people who want to limit gun ownership may try to overcome Second Amendment arguments with public health arguments. The two things aren’t directly comparable, but public health arguments have been a decisive tool for restricting tobacco sales and use.

It’d be easier to have confidence in General Assembly action on the primary election’s date if legislators would act rather than talk.

For instance, if you haven’t heard from your school superintendent about the financial mess your district faces thanks to Ohio’s school voucher circus, you haven’t been listening.

What’s more, the General Assembly has long failed to bolster Ohio’s unemployment compensation fund. Making that even more irresponsible given that unemployment is skyrocketing thanks to the coronavirus plague:

For the first three days of last week, Ohioans filed 77,817 claims for unemployment compensation, according to the Job and

Family Services Department; during the same three days the previous week, Ohioans had filed 2,905 claims.

The Statehouse tradition has been for business and labor to fashion “agreed” unemployment compensation laws. Given those statistics, though, buck-passing on unemployment compensation is the very definition of Statehouse irresponsibility.

There’s this, too, looming on Ohio’s horizon: The same slowdown that’s boosting unemployment compensation claims will almost certainly stress Ohio’s budget. The current budget, passed last summer, runs through June 30, 2021.

At the end of February, state tax collections, fiscalyear-to-date, were about 1.6 percent greater than the amount that legislators estimated when they wrote the budget (House Bill 166), according to the state Budget Office. True, filing deadlines are a way off, but state revenue from Ohio’s income tax, year to date, was $17.6 million (0.3 percent) below the estimate used to write the budget.

True, if Donald Trump’s administration does send each taxpayer a $1,000 check (which “works out to the equivalent of one week of pay for the typical American,” the Washington Post reported, citing Labor Department data) that’d likely boost Ohio’s sales tax collections. So far so good. But it’s hard to imagine that could offset the hit that coronavirus layoffs and furloughs would make in Ohio income tax collections. And layoffs and furloughs will ding an Ohio unemployment compensation system that legislature needs to bolster – now.

Citing public health as a reason for regulating or banning something is a necessary part of confronting disaster – in this case, a pandemic. In the right hands (and Mike DeWine’s hands are the right hands) that’s essential to protecting the public.

Thomas Suddes is an expert on Ohio politics who has written for 35 years. Send email to tsuddes@gmail.com.