Campaign should comes second for state lawmakers
Ohio lawmakers are itching to get out of town and start campaigning for fall elections; this is the final week on their in-session schedule until the fall. We suggest they worry less about the time they’ll have to campaign and work harder on having some accomplishments to tout.
The Senate is flirting with changes to a Housepassed bill on payday lending that would undo much of its effect, and Republicans in the House need to attend to a bill that would put some muscle into state regulation of online charter schools.
The General Assembly owes Ohioans their best effort on these critical issues. This is especially true of the House of Representatives, which sat idle for seven weeks while Republicans waged an intraparty war over who would replace Clarksville Republican Cliff Rosenberger as speaker after he resigned amid an FBI investigation into his travel.
Rosenberger’s departure probably spurred House members to pass House Bill 123, the payday-lending bill, which protects borrowers with limits on total loans costs but wouldn’t put small-dollar lenders out of business. One of Rosenberger’s questionable trips included a lendingindustry lobbyist, and the bill had been stuck in committee throughout his term of leadership.
After Rosenberger resigned, the House passed HB 123 free of some proposed amendments that would have weakened it.
In the Senate, however, Republican Sen. Matt Huffman of Lima appears intent on appeasing the lending lobby with proposed amendments that would leave desperate borrowers still exposed to practices designed to trap them in a ruinous cycle of debt.
The House-passed bill would limit total loan costs — interest plus fees — to 50 percent of the loan amount and would limit minimum payments to no more than 5 percent of the borrower’s income. It would force payday lenders to abide by those terms by prohibiting their current practice of simply doing business under different sets of rules.
Huffman’s proposed changes would remove all those protections and allow annual interest rates of up to 360 percent.
A $500, six-month loan under HB 123 could not cost the borrower more than $250, while the same loan with Huffman’s proposed changes would cost $635.
In the House, members should focus on desperately needed improvements to oversight of e-schools to prevent the highway robbery of taxpayers that the now-closed Electronic School of Tomorrow appears to have committed.
Existing charter-school law provides no sensible way to measure what e-schools are delivering for the millions they collect in tax dollars. House Bill 707, introduced last Tuesday, would create a panel to study and recommend better ways to measure “attendance” and determine fair funding.
Just as important, it would require greater transparency when schools are operated by for-profit companies, including more disclosure of the subsidiaries and subcontractors involved and how much they are paid.
House Speaker Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell, has said he expected a vote on the measure before the campaign break. The bill is no longer on the relevant committee’s schedule, but word is that the bill’s concepts will be worked into other legislation.
We hope so. ECOT might be history, but the e-schools that remain stand to collect millions in taxpayer dollars. The General Assembly shouldn’t let another school year begin under the current system.