General Assembly should thin Ohio’s bureaucratic thicket
The General Assembly doesn’t seem to understand that its job isn’t to limit women’s options about pregnancies, nor to require everyone in Ohio to pack heat.
Instead, Ohio’s state senators and state representatives are supposed to be Brush Hogs, hacking and thinning Ohio’s bureaucratic thicket. Too bad they don’t.
A good place to start would be Ohio’s bloated K-12 bureaucracies. Ohio ranks No. 34 among the 50 states in geographic size. Ohio has 609 school districts, not counting vocational districts. Texas ranks No. 2 (after Alaska) among the 50 states in geographic area. Texas has 1,029 school districts, according to the Texas Association of School Boards.
There’s a lot not to like about Texas, whose Legislature makes Ohio’s General Assembly look like a chapter of Mensa. But does anyone honestly think Ohio, whose population isn’t really growing, needs 609 school boards?
Likewise, if COVID-19 has taught Ohio anything (besides the fact vaccines don’t magnetize the human body) it’s that Ohio’s public health laws need a rewrite. Their basic framework was hammered together in 1919 by a General Assembly that rural Ohio then dominated. Health boards and their staffs should be regionalized at least, which is about the best you can expect of a legislature that thinks Ohio’s Health Department is a dictatorship in waiting.
Then there’s the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio which, depending on the day of the week, either plays helpless bystander when the electric and gas companies raise rates, or cheers them on.
The panel, created just before the First World War, is even older than Ohio’s health boards . ...
According to the Office of Consumers’ Counsel, Ohio electricity consumers have paid the three Ohio utilities more than $153 million so far in coal plant subsidies. And attempts to repeal those subsidies is stalled – big surprise – in the legislature.
Meanwhile the legislature is also dawdling over a bill to abolish Ohio’s no-refund legal policy when Ohio’s Supreme Court overturns a Puco-approved rate boost.
The legal rigmarole behind that rule, which dates to a Cincinnati Bell rate case in the 1950s, is kind of like what the British diplomat Palmerston said about a complicated German-danish dispute: Only three people understood it, he said: One died, one went mad, and the third, Palmerston himself, had “forgotten all about it.” But utilities’ lawyers haven’t forgotten the Keco case, as it’s known, which is why utility refunds are comparatively rare.