General Assembly Recesses (Sort of).
The General Assembly recessed last week, though work on numerous bills continued this week. The Assembly is scheduled to return to full session on December 2^nd and 3^rd. Additional session days are scheduled for both Houses on December 9^th and 10^th. The House has just scheduled additional session days for December 11^th, December 16^th and 17^th. At deadline, the Senate has not scheduled session for those additional dates.

The unexpected return of the General Assembly for an expanded December calendar is the result of several pending issues. Committees have been wrangling with several contentious issues with the hope of finishing up those issues prior to the dawn of an election year. Discount prescriptions for millions of Ohioans, tort reform bills and a compromise conceal-and-carry firearms bill are all on the list of bills under consideration. Also, there is a wild array of opinions on what should and what should not go into a bill regarding reform of Ohio’s public pension systems.

In addition, a proposal for video slot machines (VLT’s) at Ohio racetracks is still being fed hope from many quarters. For the House, the placing of that proposal on the ballot in March, 2004 would, by its passage, provide a means to eliminate the state’s temporary one-cent sales tax increase early. Under the Senate’s proposal, such a slot machine victory would provide for a new college scholarship fund. That difference in where to spend slot money is looming as a very large difference between the Houses. With a December deadline for placing the proposal on the March primary ballot, the argument between the two bodies over this issue promises to be less than pretty.

Adding fuel to that promise is the external efforts by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to pass petitions for the repeal of the sales tax increase altogether. That effort, if successful, would place before the General Assembly a choice to be in favor of ratifying their choice to raise taxes or repudiating that choice in favor of creating a large hole in the current state budget. It is, of course, not a choice the General Assembly would like to see before them in an election year.

HB 127 Passes.
HB 127, a bill which contained yet another tax loophole for those who receive their income from Sub Chapter S Corporations, passed both the House and the Senate last week. The League made progress on the bill, in the Ohio Senate, through an amendment adopted in that body.

Under provisions of the final version of the bill, the twenty Ohio municipalities that were successful in taking the issue of taxing S Corp. income to the ballot in November are held harmless against the provisions of the HB 127 amendment. In addition, communities which have been taxing S Corp. income may continue to do so until November of 2004. If those communities, at that time, wish to continue taxing such income, they must place the issue before the voters in the 2004 General Election. However, the issue placed before the voters, at that time, can only be a question of whether the municipality’s voters wish the municipality to continue taxing that S Corp. income that comes from an in-state S Corp. Taxing such income from an out-of-state S Corp. would not be permitted, except for those twenty communities which successfully went to the ballot this November.

There are still some funky, "in-betweener" kind of questions surrounding this amendment. What else would you expect from an S Corp. amendment? We will work to answer those questions quickly. However, we did take the position that this amendment was better than what came over from the House, did protect those that went to the ballot pursuant to SB 180 and bought other communities another year of S Corp. taxation. While we did not support the amendment, we did take a neutral stand on it.

Extra Municipal Holiday Bill Heard.
HB 262, which would, in part, require all municipalities and other political subdivisions, including schools, to pay their employees their regular wage, if an employee wanted Election Day off to work at the polls, was heard again last week. Under the relevant provisions of the bill, a public employee working at the polls would draw their regular salary and the election worker salary. A municipality would in turn have to pay the time-and-a-half salary of any replacement workers made necessary by this new form of double-dipping.

League staff testified against this portion of HB 262 and that testimony is available on our website (www.omunileague.org).