Ohio Municipal League
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Columbus, Ohio 43215

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Legislative Inquiries
John Mahoney
General Inquiries
info@omunileague.org

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Legislature to Return.

Following a two-week recess, the Ohio General Assembly will return next week. While other committee work is scheduled, most attention in the Senate will be on the Finance Committee’s ongoing hearings on the budget. This week, that panel began hearing from state agencies on their reactions to the House version of the budget. Because of cuts made in the House, much of the testimony from those agencies asked the Senate to restore their funding to the levels found in the Governor’s budget.

The House has scheduled a full committee schedule, including a couple of bills of interest to municipalities (see committee schedule).

E-Commerce Bill Stuck in House Budget.

As we mentioned in our last Bulletin, there are a couple of other issues, beyond municipal income tax changes, local government funds and estate taxes, in the House budget that we will be working on in the Senate. One of those items is a bill that was stuck in the House budget late in the process that would essentially transfer ownership of the public’s records to private companies.

Dubbed the "e-commerce bill," this legislation has nothing to do with the budget and was just stuck in the budget as a rider, without any public hearings. The bill attempts to stunt the growth of such public programs as the Ohio Prisons Industry, which, through the work of inmates, produces functional furniture sold mostly to public agencies. Proponents of the bill say this program competes with private industry and shouldn’t happen. Opponents say this offsets costs of imprisonment for the state GRF, supplies training for the inmates and should be allowed.

The more important part of the bill for us is that if two companies think of a way to organize and sell the public’s records before a public agency thinks of a way to provide the public with their records in the same way for free, the public agency can’t provide that service unless it gets permission from the State Controlling Board. The State Controlling Board is a seven-member Legislative/Executive panel that sorts out the need for certain unbid contracts and other esoteric state agency spending.

We thought we were working with the sponsor to address some of our concerns and the concerns of many other public agencies, but evidently we weren’t working fast or well enough. In principle, we can understand the position that the public sector shouldn’t compete with the private sector. Ironically, we also live in a state which the people guaranteed that there would be some of that public sector competition through their Constitution. In that Constitution, the people of Ohio gave great latitude to municipalities to provide all sorts of public utilities, regardless of what the private sector was providing. Where the line between the public and private sector should be is a complex issue and changes over time. However, we’re pretty sure that saying a public agency can’t provide public records to the public if someone is already profiting from those records isn’t right.

We will seek deletion of this provision of the House Budget in the Senate.