“I would suggest, for your members and for the two of you, that you do everything you can to support the Senate plan, because as we go into (a Senate-House budget) conference, there’s going to be other competing viewpoints on how to do this, and it only could get worse for you,” Cirino said.
So much for the Ohio Constitution, which guarantees everyone the right “to petition the General Assembly for the redress of grievances.”
Cirino was a Lake County commissioner and is said to be aiming to succeed term-limited Sen. Rob McColley, a Napoleon Republican, as Senate president.
McColley may be best known for co-sponsoring 2021’s Senate Bill 52, signed that July by Gov. Mike DeWine, to hamper Ohio solar and wind energy projects.
“Ohioans and their elected representatives have (since) killed enough solar development to roughly power the state’s three largest cities,” Jake Zuckerman, then of cleveland.com, reported.
McColley demonstrates the deafness that selectively strikes some legislators when there’s something they don’t want to hear. Henry is McColley’s home county. Of its four public libraries, voters have approved levies for all of them, with “yes” margins for three systems’ levies ranging from 59% to 70%.
You’d think someone with political ambitions — maybe to be GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s running mate — might listen to hometown constituents.
Nah. Senators’ rewrite of the House-passed budget (HB 96) worsens the financial damage that Speaker Matt Huffman’s budget would do to libraries, which benefit all Ohioans, rich or poor; black, brown, red, white or yellow; urban, suburban or rural.
DeWine proposed allotting $531.7 million for the Public Library Fund for the year beginning July 1, then $549.1 million beginning July 1, 2026. Those totals meet long-standing, bipartisan budget rules, set by the General Assembly in the mid-1980s, that state aid to public libraries must equal a slice (DeWine’s proposed budget requested 1.75%) of General Revenue Fund collections. (The current biennium’s earmark: 1.7%.)
Thus, for the year ending June 30, the Public Library Fund will have provided an estimated $504.6 million for public libraries. But Huffman’s House, and McColley’s Senate, junked the GRF earmark, instead allotting $490 million flat for Budget Year 1, then $500 million for Year 2.
But senators also deducted from those sums $10.3 million a year for operations previously funded separately, such as the State Library of Ohio and the Ohio Public Library Information Network. That is, Senate cuts would hammer down state library aid to $479.7 million for the year beginning July 1.
McColley and Huffman could admit the shell games they’re playing with library aid (and other vital services) are schemes to scrounge money to (a) fund skyrocketing private-school tuition vouchers and (b) cut income taxes for wealthy Ohioans.
But if, as some Republicans claim, income-tax cuts are the medicine for what ails Ohio’s economy, why was 1969 the last year that Ohioans’ per capita personal income was at least 100 percent of the nationwide per capita?
Careful, though; you’ve been warned. It’s risky asking the Senate Finance Committee’s Republicans about politically inconvenient facts: “Things could get worse for you.”
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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