Watch out: Ohio’s next budget has money aplenty
You have to wonder if Statehouse debate on Ohio’s pending state budget – for the two years beginning July 1 – will produce a Spring Surprise in May or June, given the bulge in state revenue.
Elected state officeholders, such as Gov. Mike Dewine and the General Assembly’s incumbents, would rather say “yes” than “no” to fellow Ohioans at budget time, especially when she or he will be seeking re-election in 2022. And it looks like Ohio’s gravy boat might be running over. How that translates into a better Ohio is hard to know, pending budget passage.
The budget debate has been obscured by legislative publicity stunts and mindless blather over the COVID-19 vaccine, which some General Assembly members imply is just another sinister tool fashioned by the Master Conspiracy that aims to take over the world.
Meanwhile, the assembly hasn’t fixed school funding. And, headlined Statehouse hype aside, the legislature still hasn’t fully repealed House Bill 6, which still requires Ohio’s electricity consumers to subsidize two coal-burning power plants (one of them in Indiana).
On that front, Ohio consumers might care to know that Columbus-based American Electric Power Co., and Akron-based Firstenergy Corp., were among 55 corporations that “paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year,” according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington think-tank.
At the Statehouse, Ohio’s finances are in more-than-decent shape. For the seven months ending on Feb. 28 – latest data available at deadline – state tax receipts were $1.3 billion (or 8.3%) more than during the comparable 2019-2020 period. And total state revenue, including federal grants, was $2.3 billion (or 10.1%) more than the comparable 20192020 period – amid the worst pandemic in more than 100 years.
Meanwhile, year-to-date spending from Ohio’s General Revenue Fund, the state’s main checking account, was nearly flat. It rose only 0.4% over the same seven-month period. Yet for 12 months through February, the Consumer Price Index, all items, “increased 1.7% before seasonal adjustment,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ohio bucked that trend.
So, Ohio’s piggy bank has grown plump under Dewine. That might seem paradoxical, given COVID-19. But as a very shrewd bystander recently said, voters might forget that Dewine furloughed about 16,000 non-union state employees last year for 10 workdays, “the equivalent of a 3.8% pay cut,” cleveland.com’s Andrew Tobias reported. Earlier, Dewine cut state spending. And Ohio’s “rainy day” budget fund, which totaled almost $2.7 billion on June 30, remains untouched.
There are pluses and minuses to having a big cache of spending money. As noted, politicians would anther rather says yes than no to constituents. But there also is this paradox for Ohio governors: His or her toughest financial duty, but maybe the most critical, is to say “no” to General Assembly members who think Ohio taxpayers should fund, say, a new horseshoe pit for West Jerkwater (including a bronze plaque ballyhooing that great legislator’s name).
Typically, legislative brainstorms are much pricier than that, or they start out, like Ohio’s charter schools, as “pilot projects” that balloon in successive budgets into must-fund entitlements.
In that connection, a minor Statehouse mystery of the last six months or so is the sudden scuttling, by the state Senate, of a school funding plan that, after almost 24 years, looked as if it might actually comply with the 1997 Ohio Supreme Court’s school funding order.
You have to wonder if in the back of some sly Statehouse mind was a hunch that, pandemic or not, there might be extra cash sloshing around in the state’s checking account when – complete coincidence! – Dewine and the General Assembly would be crafting a two-year budget whose spending – another darn coincidence – would kick in during Campaign ’22.
And if, perchance, that spending could be packaged as getting Ohio’s public schools closer to school-funding Nirvana? And if – also – General Assembly incumbents will be running in redrawn districts?
The pending budget, funded with help from the state revenue bump that Dewine has banked in Ohio’s treasury, might just script another GOP sweep of Ohio’s Statehouse in November 2022.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.
tsuddes@gmail.com