Innovation Ohio

What you need to know about Ohio Politics and Policy

At The Statehouse: Lawmakers Look To Grant Business Immunity

Both chambers are working on legislation to limit the ability for businesses to be sued for liability during the COVID pandemic emergency. A Senate committee will hold a third hearing and vote on that chamber’s version of the bill (SB308) while the House plans two hearings this week to consider the House Bill (HB606). 

Lawmakers last week introduced new legislation (SB311) to rescind current health emergency orders and limit the power of the Director to enact new orders. 
The House and Senate have session scheduled for Wednesday with an additional meeting of the House penciled in for Thursday if necessary.

New Legislation This Week

Several new bills were introduced last week that we will be monitoring. You can also view the complete list of bills we’re tracking.

  • House Bill 633 (Boggs) – Workers Compensation – To make COVID-19 contracted by specified types of employees an occupational disease under the Workers’ Compensation Law under certain circumstances and to declare an emergency.
  • House Bill 634 (Denson, Upchurch) – Marijuana – To allow for the cultivation and possession of marijuana, to modify possession and cultivation penalties, and to allow for the expungement of certain marijuana convictions.
  • House Concurring Resolution 27 (Russo) – Health Insurance – To urge the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to immediately issue a special enrollment period through HealthCare.gov for uninsured Ohioans who may be unable to access COVID-19 testing and treatment.
  • Senate Bill 311 (McColley, Roegner) – Health Orders – To rescind certain orders of the Director of Health regarding COVID-19, to require the approval of the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review for Department of Health orders to be effective for more than fourteen days, to require statewide Department of Health orders to include the Governor’s signature, to modify the Department’s rulemaking authority, to allow in-person high school graduation ceremonies, and to declare an emergency.

Statehouse Meetings and Events

Tuesday, May 12

Wednesday, May 13

  • 9 am – House Civil Justice – 4th hearing (all testimony, possible amendments, and substitute) on HB606 (Civil Immunity). Statehouse Room 116 (overflow in 114). Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 9:15 am – Senate Judiciary – 3rd hearing (all testimony, possible amendments, and vote) on SB308 (Civil Immunity). Senate South Hearing Room. Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 11 am – Senate Rules and Reference – meeting to set agenda for May 20 Senate session. Senate Majority Conference Room. No broadcast.
  • 11:45 am – House Rules and Reference – meeting to set agenda for May 21 House session. Statehouse Room 017 (overflow in Room 018). No broadcast.
  • 1 pm – House Session – agenda TBD. Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 1:30 pm – Ohio Senate – agenda TBD. Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 2 pm – Gov. DeWine Briefing on COVID-19 – Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 3 pm – Senate Local Government – 2nd hearing (all testimony, possible amendments & vote) on HB242 (Plastic Bag Ordinances). Senate South Hearing Room. Watch online at ohiochannel.org

Thursday, May 14

  • 1 pm – House Session – agenda TBD. Watch online at ohiochannel.org.
  • 2 pm – Gov. DeWine Briefing on COVID-19 – Watch online at ohiochannel.org.

Friday, May 15

  • 2 pm – Gov. DeWine Briefing on COVID-19 – Watch online at ohiochannel.org.

Higher Education in Ohio’s State Budget

Historically large investments in higher education, not enough yet to overcome a decade of neglect.

The July passage of House Bill 166, the state’s two-year operating budget, included record funding for higher education. However, much work remains to make Ohio’s public colleges and universities more accessible and affordable for more of Ohio’s students, especially those from traditionally underrepresented populations most at risk for not exploring post-secondary educational options.

As we reported last year, Ohio faces large and widespread challenges to achieve its stated goal of 65 percent post-secondary degree or credential attainment by 2025. In response, we authored a report identifying 10 ways the state budget could help alleviate these barriers.

House Bill 166 adopted many of those recommendations and put our state on a more hopeful path toward achieving this goal, helping to reduce barriers for students to attain these post-secondary degrees. However, there’s much more that needs to be done to move our state toward reaching the 65 percent goal on time.

Here are the primary benefits provided in the budget:

  1. Ohio’s Higher Education budget grew by 8.3% – a record $220 million increase.
  2. Of the 75 budget line items for higher education, 63 either stayed the same or increased. – Of the 12 line items cut, some were simply relocated elsewhere in the budget.
  3. Ohio’s State Share of Instruction (SSI) – the state’s higher education funding formula – will see a two-year increase of 3.1 percent to $2.04 billion a year, a strong reversal for a line item that had been funded at lower levels than 2010, adjusted for inflation.
  4. The amount of funding provided to students who qualify for the Ohio College Opportunity Grant (OCOG) – the state’s primary need-based aid program – will nearly double from a $1,500 maximum award to $2,500 by the second year of the budget thanks to a 51.6% increase.
  5. In one of several examples of micro-targeting more investment to at-risk populations, a program focusing on educating rural, Appalachian members of the workforce will see a $3 million a year increase, helping rural adults attain more certificates and degrees to aid in their career advancement.
  6. For the first time in state history, specific funding was set aside for state investment to increase the state’s FAFSA completion rate, a key driver of college participation among lower-income students.

While many of these victories for Ohio students and families will undoubtedly make a difference in their ability to afford and maintain their post-secondary educational options, Ohio had fallen so far behind that it will take a concerted, well-coordinated, long-term effort to build upon these initial foundations. This budget, while signaling a welcome shift in higher education policy focus, remains well short of the investment necessary to achieve our state’s lofty post-secondary attainment goal.

Download the full Report

Innovation Ohio’s New Report Finds Exploding Voucher Payments, Return to Lax Oversight of Charters in Ohio Budget

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 2019
Contact: Michael McGovern, mcgovern@innovationohio.org
 
Columbus, OH – A report from Innovation Ohio focused on the state’s new budget finds a huge increase in spending on voucher payments to private schools and a return to lax, pre-ECOT scandal charter school oversight. This is the latest budgetary explosion for a voucher program that has increased more than 600% since 2011.
 
“Given the ECOT scandal, it is astounding that statehouse leaders would loosen rules around failing charter schools that suck money out of Ohio public school classrooms,” said Innovation Ohio Education Fellow and report author Stephen Dyer. “What we need is closer scrutiny and reigning in these payments to private schools.” 
 
The report highlights four key giveaway to poor-performing, privately run schools: 
1. Weakening rules to automatically close failing charter schools
2. Lowering standards for dropout recovery schools
3. Weakening oversight of charter school sponsors, many of whom are for-profit companies
4. A huge increase in public dollars flowing to private schools via vouchers
The voucher expansion alone could cost Ohio public school districts another $73 million over two years, on top of an already ballooning $389 million per year private school voucher program.
Over the last several years, Innovation Ohio has been leading the fight to expose Ohio’s failing charter school system and sounding the alarm bells around expanding voucher programs. 
 
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How the Latest State Budget Impacts Ohio’s Women and Working Families

Read the full analysis of the Ohio budget through a gender lens on the Ohio Women’s Public Policy Network’s website.

Ohio’s new two-year state operating budget brought numerous improvements for the livelihood of women, but that’s not to say there weren’t plenty of drawbacks and lack of action on key issues as well.

Progress was made to improve the quality of childcare in Ohio. But there’s more work to be done.

The new state budget allocates $198 million to improve the quality of Ohio’s publicly funded childcare system. This increase in funding will allow improvements in ensuring that workers within the childcare sector are paid fair wages, and will also help to facilitate professional development and facility improvements.  Where the budget falls short is allocating resources to increase the access and affordability of childcare. By increasing the accessibility of childcare, children would enter school well prepared, and parents would have the opportunity to participate in the workforce.  While the DeWine Administration stated that increasing eligibility for childcare was a policy priority, ultimately no funds were allocated to support this endeavor. 

After attempts to restrict access to Medicaid via the inclusion of the “Healthy Ohio” Program in the budget, Medicaid services were ultimately left unharmed.

The provision of the so-called Healthy Ohio Program would have required premiums to access Medicaid, which would have had crucial implications on women, who comprise more than half of Ohio’s Medicaid population. Medicaid has long been a lifeline for women, and the legislature’s decision to ultimately remove the “Healthy Ohio” language was crucial to protect access to the program.

Progress was made towards addressing wage theft, an issue that faces many working-class Ohioans, particularly women and people of color working in low-wage jobs.

When workers are paid less than they were contractually promised, it is known as wage theft. Whether it be through violation of minimum-wage laws, not getting paid overtime, or forcing an employee to work off-the-clock, Ohio clocks in with the second-highest amount of wage theft among the ten largest states. Additional funding was allocated to the Ohio Bureau of Wage and Hour to help address this issue.

The state budget also codified some policies that we expect to negatively impact Ohio women and working-class families. 

By continuing to support a business tax cut known by many public service advocates as the  “L.L.C. loophole,” Ohio loses out on about $528 million per year or $1.1 billion for the duration of every state operating budget where it remains intact. There is little evidence to suggest that this tax break for L.L.C.s has created any significant number of new jobs in the state. Ohio is missing out on billions of dollars of revenue that could have been allocated towards programs to address our school funding crisis, increase childcare assistance eligibility, or invest in a refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (which we’ll discuss in just a moment), to name only a few ways this money could be better spent. 

There were also some issues facing Ohio women and their families that the state budget failed to address, entirely. 

Ohio’s Earned Income Tax Credit remains non-refundable.

One of these crucial areas of inaction was the budget’s failure to make Ohio’s Earned Income Tax Credit (E.I.T.C.) refundable, a policy that would have given a major economic boost to low-income families across the state. Nationally, the E.I.T.C has been crucial in lifting working families out of poverty. However, it is not without its limitations here in the state. The greatest shortfall of Ohio’s state E.I.T.C. is that it is non-refundable. If this gap in anti-poverty policy had been addressed, the state budget would have been able to put money back into the hands of working families. 

Despite the 2020 Census being right around the corner, the bill allocated no funding towards planning or conducting a complete census count in the Buckeye state. 

About $33 billion dollars in federal funding rests upon the outcomes of the U.S. Census, which determines how those federal dollars are dispersed, state-by-state. Without a correct and complete count, the well-being of women and historically undercounted communities, populations which rely heavily on these federal grant dollars, are undermined.

No efforts were made to create a framework for statewide paid family leave. 

Paid family and medical leave policies allow workers to address the needs of their families or their own health without risking their financial health. Currently, only 17% of American workers have access to paid leave through an employer, but lawmakers made no effort through the state budget to increase those statistics here in Ohio… To learn more about the push to bring paid family leave in Ohio, check out the Women’s Public Policy Network’s Paid Leave Advocacy page on their website.   

Read the full analysis of the Ohio budget on the Ohio Women’s Public Policy Network’s website.

Innovation Ohio Statement on Charter School Provisions in Operating Budget

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 17, 2019
Contact: Michael McGovern mcgovern@innovationohio.org
Columbus, OH – Today, Innovation Ohio President Janetta King issued the following statement regarding the charter school provisions in the state operating budget:
“It is disappointing that Republicans in the legislature have once again placed the interests of failing charter schools ahead of Ohio students and communities. The budget passed today weakens state oversight of charter schools like ECOT, which ripped off Ohio schools and taxpayers to the tune of $200 million. After the ECOT debacle, we should be strengthening, not loosening, the rules regulating charter schools. Ohio taxpayers – and more importantly, Ohio students – deserve better.”
Founded in 2011, Innovation Ohio is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that blends policy research and advocacy to fight for working families in Ohio.

10 Things Ohio’s Budget Needs to Get Right for College Students

Ohio is lagging far behind its stated goal of having 65 percent of our citizens attain post-secondary degrees or certificates. These post-secondary options must be more attainable for more of our students, especially those from at-risk populations. We will not reach the goal without significant improvement in attainment among our economically-disadvantaged, minority and first-generation students. These recommendations would all cut to the core of these issues, making colleges and universities more accessible and attainable for more students.

Our approach has the support of local, state and national advocates who see and recognize Ohio’s need to invest in its workforce through these types of initiatives. In addition, Ohio organizations representing professors, administrators, and students, support these efforts to expand workforce opportunities. Innovation Ohio offers these 10 recommendations for the state’s two-year budget that, if adopted, would make attaining the most valuable post-secondary credentials and degrees significantly more attainable.

What’s in DeWine’s K-12 Budget?

Like much of Gov. Mike DeWine’s budget, his K-12 proposals are underwhelming. No New Base Funding Schools see no new change to the school funding formula in the DeWine proposal, as he has left the heavy lifting to State Reps. Cupp and Patterson, who next week will release the most highly-anticipated school funding reform plan in a decade. As we prepare for next week’s proposal, it’s important to have some historical context. When adjusted for inflation, Gov. Kasich’s last budget left schools about $900 million short of what they received in the recession budget 10 years ago. If the state were to base school funding on the actual cost of providing a high-quality education to students, Ohio would currently be about $1.7 billion short, according to figures from the last serious attempt to reform its school funding formula. Thus, any serious new funding formula will require significant new revenue.  $300 million a year more for wraparound services This money would bring more mental health and other services to poor students, providing every district with at least $25,000, even if the district has only a handful of poor students, up to about $250 a student, which could make a real difference. There would be cause for concern if this becomes a substitute for adequately funding schools. Our students deserve the investment the state simply hasn’t made for 30 years. And every kid deserves that commitment. Even with $300 million more in the 2020-2021 school year, adjusted for inflation, districts would remain several hundred million dollars short of what they received a decade ago during the Great Recession. $30 million for high performing charter schools While Ohio absolutely should begin to differentiate between low and high-performing charter schools, creating a market based on quality rather than enrollment, DeWine is doing so by tapping into the state’s lottery fund, forcing cuts in lottery money headed to traditional public districts. At the end of this two-year budget, nearly $50 million will be headed to charters from the Lottery, which was supposed to go strictly to school districts. We need to be creating a charter school market that rewards success. But taking it out of funds voters created for school districts seems counterproductive. There is already $16.6 million in the current state budget for high-performing charters to receive capital funding. Not even 25 percent of that amount has been spent because so few charters meet the criteria. Adding $30 million which is limited to the few high performing schools operated in Ohio in hope that more will materialize prevents that money from going to kids in our traditional public school districts. Another big increase for the voucher program DeWine continues the misguided increases to the EdChoice, income-based voucher in this budget. EdChoice has actually been shown to harm student achievement. Pouring $24 million more into this program that has hurt the kids who take the vouchers makes little sense. We also need to review amounts going into the other voucher programs when the final budget documents are released to see how much total revenue meant for school districts will be going instead to private, mostly religious schools. Preschool flat funded This was actually shocking. Ohio’s struggles with early childhood education have been stunning, especially given how even conservative states like Oklahoma have created Universal Pre-K. And while there has been a lot of talk about beefing up our state’s early childhood program, this budget is not that. Significantly more charter school oversight DeWine increased the budget for ODE’s charter oversight office from $2.5 million to $7 million. That’s good, but still not enough to oversee an $889 million a year industry with a track record of fraud and underperformance. Workforce Development Much of DeWine’s workforce development agenda is funded within the K-12 budget, with new resources to help students achieve more industry-recognized credentials. Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of Ohio students leaving high school with an industry-recognized credential grew from about 4 to just over 6 percent. While that’s a significant increase, it’s still far short of what our students should be achieving. We need more details to understand whether the new money in this budget would be paired with programs to motivate more students to seek these credentials during high school. Conclusion Overall, this falls short of the “investment budget” that DeWine promised. There are some small benefits and a few districts will see significant increases to address the real challenges of their most needy students. But it’s neither enough money to overcome the needs of poor students in every district nor is it enough to overcome the last decade of Kasich budget cuts. All while charters more than double their money from lottery funds, vouchers continue to increase, and early childhood education is all but ignored.

Governor DeWine Outlines His First State Operating Budget

Last Friday we saw the first outlines of Gov. DeWine’s proposed two-year operating budget, which contains over $70 billion in annual spending authority for all of state government (except Transportation, which is handled in a separate budget. At first glance, it appears to offer small, but needed spending increases while failing to make significant investments in the things that suffered the most during the Kasich years; K-12 education, Higher Education and support for Ohio counties, cities, townships and villages through the Local Government Fund. The lack of meaningful investment is not surprising given that it is funded in the DeWine proposal exclusively through growth in the larger economy, and not with any new sources of revenue. No effort was made to close the unproven $1 billion LLC loophole, to apply a reasonable tax to oil and gas drilling or to restore the top tax rates on Ohio’s highest-earning individuals. The DeWine budget does make commitments to spend more in certain, targeted areas, including children’s services, opioid treatment and enforcement, restoration efforts for Lake Erie, in-school services for at-risk youth, kinship care programs and home visits for new moms and babies. In the absence of new revenue, the Medicaid program is tapped to pay for many of these priorities, raising questions about its impact on the traditional Medicaid population. Of the budget priorities we outlined last week, we are pleased to see the proposal includes wraparound services for school children, a small increase in child care, the preservation of the Medicaid expansion (paired with federal approval of Ohio’s proposed work requirements make this one bittersweet), a slight increase in funding for Ohio College Opportunity Grants . But, overall, the budget fell short of our expectations because it, unlike the Governor’s proposal for dealing with the state’s transportation funding shortfall, failed to fully solve the state’s problems created by years of tax cutting and underinvestment.

Innovation Ohio Response to Gov. DeWine’s Budget 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2019
Innovation Ohio Response to Gov. DeWine’s Budget 
Columbus, OH – Today, Innovation Ohio president Janetta King issued the following statement in response to Gov. DeWine’s budget proposal:
“Gov. DeWine has talked a lot about investing in Ohio’s future. But for an ‘investment’ budget, this is very underwhelming. Gov. DeWine has assumed office following eight years of massive tax giveaways to the rich – leaving very little left for everyday Ohioans. Without a real discussion of new revenue, this budget cannot be viewed as a serious investment in our state.”
Founded in 2011, Innovation Ohio is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that blends policy research and advocacy to fight for working families in Ohio.
Innovation Ohio’s 2019 budget priorities can be found online at: http://innovationohio.org/2019-budget-priorities/
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