It’s been a productive year for Ohio lawmakers, who passed bills dealing with redistricting, budget revisions and red light cameras. But many bills that got a lot of attention with the end of the two-year General Assembly didn’t pass.
At the beginning of 2014, Governor John Kasich laid out an update to his two-year state budget. It included a severance tax on gas and oil drillers and a tax on cigarettes to offset tax breaks for small businesses and Ohioans in all income brackets. The legislature passed the tax breaks, but the tax hikes hit roadblocks. The House passed an oil and gas driller tax increase that Kasich called “a joke”, but neither chamber even considered the cigarette tax increase. Kasich is promising to fight for the severance tax, and also to bring back the cigarette tax proposal.
“Why should taxes on tobacco not be higher to pay for reductions in the income tax,?” Kasich said. “I’ll tell you why – lobbyists – that’s why.”
At the end of the summer, all eyes were on Northwest Ohio where the water was not fit to drink for days due to algae blooms, raising questions about farm runoff in the Maumee Bay. Kris Swartz, a local farmer, said it was time to set rules on runoff for farmers.
“We obviously want to do it voluntarily before some government entity comes in and mandates changes on us because I don’t think any farmers are going to like that,” Swartz said.
Ohio lawmakers added the issue to an agriculture bill related to the governor’s budget update. But the huge bill ended up addressing many other issues too. And in the end, it didn’t pass because lawmakers said there was simply not enough time left in this General Assembly to give it thorough review. But lawmakers are expected to reconsider the issues in the bill in 2015.
During the fall, there were two words that were dominating political discussions around the water coolers and the Statehouse – Common Core. Some lawmakers were backing a plan to allow Ohio to opt out of the national Common Core education standards. Republican Rep. Gerald Stebelton said the attempt to repeal the Common Core was political and linked to an unpopular president, and he laid a lot of the confusion at the feet of national radio talk show hosts.
“Glenn Beck is one,” Stebelton said. “He was the initial perpetrator of a lot of misinformation and a lot of intentional disinformation.”
In the end, the bill to do away with Common Core died due to a lack of enough support from state lawmakers. Glenn Beck took an even more active role in another bill being considered in Ohio. Beck promoted a rally at the Statehouse to draw attention to the so-called Heartbeat Bill, a measure that would ban abortion at the point a fetal heartbeat can be detected.
Heartbeat Bill backers showed up to sing and pray – led by anti-abortion activist Janet Folger Porter, who’s been pushing for the Heartbeat Bill for the last three years.
But the prayers were not answered, at least not this year. The bill that passed the House and stalled in the Senate two years ago came up in the House at the last minute – and in a rare move for recent legislation, it didn’t pass.
Among the other bills that were proposed but failed: one that required voters to have a government photo ID, another that would eliminate private insurance coverage for IUD birth control devices, one that would allow businesses to deny service to gay and lesbian Ohioans, and another that would mandate drug tests for welfare recipients and a follow up that would require drug tests for state lawmakers. Democratic Sen. Nina Turner was the sponsor of that bill.
“It is my hope that people will see it is patently unfair to just single out poor people,” Turner said.
As 2015 starts, Republicans still dominate Democrats in the Senate 2-1 and there will be a historic 65-member Republican majority in the House. And it’s expected that some of the controversial bills that didn’t pass this year might be reintroduced and passed by the new General Assembly.