Gov. John Kasich signed a $130.3 billion budget bill Tuesday that will govern Ohio’s spending the next two years, but not before using his line-item veto to eliminate 44 provisions.
Among the items Kasich eliminated from the spending document were provisions that would have required the Ohio Lottery Commission to add electronic keno and bingo games for bars and restaurants and efforts to limit the authority of the state controlling board — the panel that cleared the way for Medicaid expansion.
Among the proposals that survived were two new restrictions on the state’s seven abortion clinics — one day after the U.S. Supreme Court put a hold on similar requirements Texas is trying to enact and less than two weeks after a Lucas County judge struck down related language that was in the budget two years ago.
While the abortion rules remained in the budget, Kasich struck down several other provisions that had stirred debate. Among them:
- The second year of adjustment for school districts to compensate for lost revenue from the phase out of the tangible personal property tax.
- A provision that would have exempted private schools from participating in Ohio’s College Credit Plus program.
- A provision that could have limited notifications about the release of various substances in the event of an emergency involving oil and gas drilling.
- A guarantee of state revenue to wealthier school districts based on their property values.
- An item that would have exempted electrical generation plants from the public utility tangible personal property tax, shifting the tax to the transmission and distribution systems.
Projected state spending for the entire budget grows an average of 2 percent each year. That’s consistent with previous budget years since Kasich took office, which saw average growth of 2.2 percent a year over four years.
That’s lower than the average for the 12 preceding fiscal years — eight years under Republican Gov. Bob Taft and four years under Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland — when the average annual growth rate was 4.2 percent.
The budget is a result of nearly five months of debate, public hearings and behind the scenes negotiations that began when the Republican governor unveiled his executive budget proposal Feb. 2.
Along the way, House and Senate Republicans who control the General Assembly scaled back the governor’s plan to reduce the income tax by 23 percent and shelved his requests for increases to sales taxes and the state’s severance tax on oil and gas drillers. But leaders pledged to review them with a bipartisan panel with members from both chambers.
The GOP-authored budget — supported by just one Democrat, Rep. Martin Sweeney of Cleveland — provides a 6.3-percent, across-the-board state income tax cut as well as tax deductions for business owners. That reduces Ohio’s income-tax rate from 5.33 percent to 4.99 percent for residents making more than $200,000 per year — a top rate not seen since 1982, according to lawmakers.
The tax breaks are paid for in part by raising Ohio’s cigarette tax to $1.60 per pack, a 35-cent increase.
The budget increased state aid for K-12 education by about $950 million. But there again, the final language was a compromise. Kasich proposed boosting aid to poorer school districts while reducing guarantees to more affluent districts. His plan would have bolstered funding by $700 million to districts and charter schools.
The final budget raised the base per-pupil aid rate, but it also guaranteed that no district would lose money from their 2015 funding rate.
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