Ask Ohio senators a legit question and it might come back to bite you | Opinion

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.​

The Ohio Senate’s leaders want Ohio’s voters to sit down and shut up when it comes to what’s in (and what isn’t) in the pending state budget bill.

That cat leaped out of the bag last week when Sen. Jerry Cirino, the suburban Cleveland Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, told two women testifying on behalf of the Ohio Association of School Business Officials that they should support Senate Republicans’ proposed school funding plan, cleveland.com reported.

“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 — in Colums’, Ohi-a, Yew Ess Ay, not a puppet-show parliament in a Soviet-style “republic.”

So much for the Ohio Constitution, which guarantees everyone the right “to petition the General Assembly for the redress of grievances.” (BTW, that’s the Ohio Constitution that Cirino and every other member of the General Assembly swears she or he will uphold.)

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Cirino, of Kirtland, apparently first entered public service in 1992, when then-Gov. George V. Voinovich appointed him as a trustee of Lakeland Community College. Cirino resigned as a trustee in 1997. More recently, Cirino was a Lake County commissioner and is said to be aiming to succeed term-limited Sen. Rob McColley, a Napoleon Republican, as the state Senate’s president.

Statewide, 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. Since then, “Ohioans and their elected representatives have killed enough solar development to roughly power the state’s three largest cities,” Jake Zuckerman, then of cleveland.com, reported earlier this year.

Attack on the libraries

McColley demonstrates the deafness that selectively strikes key state senators when there’s something they don’t want to hear.

Henry is McColley’s home county. Of Henry County’s four public libraries, voters have most recently approved levies for three of them, with the “yes” margins ranging from 59% to 70%. (Data for a fourth library weren’t immediately available.) And you’d think someone with political ambitions — maybe to be GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s running mate next year — might listen to his hometown constituents.

Nah: State Senate Republicans’ proposed rewrite of the House-passed budget worsens the financial damage that House Speaker Matt Huffman’s budget rewrite does to Ohio’s nationally renowned public libraries, offer every Ohioan — rich, poor; black, brown, white; urban, suburban.

DeWine proposed allotting $531.7 million for the Public Library Fund for the year that’ll begin July 1, then $549.1 million for the year beginning July 1, 2026. Those represent a longstanding state law requirement that state aid to public libraries must equal 1.7% of annual state General Revenue Fund collections. For the year that’ll end June, the Public Library Fund will provide an estimated $504.6 million for public libraries statewide

Huffman’s House, and McColley’s Senate, junked the GRF earmark.

They instead directly allotted $490 million for Year 1, then $500 million for Year 2.  Those are steep reductions. This year, state Budget Office estimates, public libraries will have received $530 million from the Public Library fund.

But the Senate additionally aims to deduct from its library allotment $10.3 million each fiscal year for items previously budgeted separately, such as the State Library of Ohio and the Ohio Public Library Information Network.

According to Ohio Library Council data, the Senate plan would reduce state aid to public libraries to $479.7 million on July 1 for the new fiscal year.

If they allow themselves to be questioned, President McColley and Speaker Huffman might admit that the games they’re playing with library funding (and other vital services) are schemes to scrounge money to (a) fund skyrocketing private-school tuition and (b) cut income taxes for the wealthy.

Trouble is, if state 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% of the U.S. per capita?

But — to protect yourself — please don’t ask the Ohio Senate’s Finance Committee about that. Why?

Because “things could get worse for you.”

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.​