(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.
Ohio's general Assembly has been busy in the last months, the past few weeks, lots of legislation.
Here to kind of bring us up to speed on what's been happening in Columbus and what it will mean to us as citizens in the State of Ohio is the host of the State of Ohio, Karen Kasler.
And Karen, thank you again for being here with us to bring us up to speed on what's happening in Columbus.
- It's always great to talk to you.
- Yeah, it is.
And I think the thing that we're talking about too, obviously the budget is in play.
We'll get to that probably a little bit later.
But one of the things that has been lingering, of course for some time now and is coming to sort of a resolution will be what's going to happen to the two main people that have been convicted of racketeering in House Bill 6.
So, kind of talk about where we are right now with that, because obviously Householder and Borges are going to be in front of a judge to get sentenced sometime in the next few days, probably maybe before this actually airs.
But where are we now with House Bill 6?
It lingers on, even though there wasn't really any closure on it, typically at this stage looks like.
- Well, Larry Householder, the Republican former speaker of the Ohio House, and Matt Borges, the former Republican Party chair of Ohio, are being sentenced this week in federal court.
They were convicted back in March of racketeering.
The total sentence for each of them could be as much as 20 years.
And prosecutors have asked for 16 to 20 years for Larry Householder.
They'd asked for much less time for Matt Borges, saying that Householder was really the mastermind in the whole House Bill 6 scandal, which as you'll recall, was a scheme to try to get Householder elected speaker so that he could pass House Bill 6, which was a sweeping energy law that not only provided subsidies for Ohio's two nuclear power plants owned by city area FirstEnergy, but also made some big changes to energy efficiency programs and allowed for subsidies for two coal-fired power plants, including one that's in Indiana.
So, the allegations, and the jury went along with this, was that Householder participated with FirstEnergy and a dark money group to become speaker, pass this piece of legislation, and this was racketeering.
And Matt Borges played a lesser role in the whole scheme, but still was convicted along with Householder.
And prosecutors had wanted less time for him because they said Householder was indeed the guy in charge, the mob boss in a sense of this whole thing.
So, we're waiting to hear what that's going to be like.
Householder's people have asked for a lot less sentence time, saying that he's a broken man, he's been humiliated, which it's hard to believe Larry Householder as a broken man because he is such a confident figure.
And then of course, Matt Borges as people have asked for a little less money, or a little less time rather.
So, let's talk about House Bill 6 though.
You asked about that.
- Yeah, because even though the main part of it has been repealed, a lot of it's still in place.
And you mentioned the fact that the renewable energy pieces of that, things like that that were going to change the way Ohio looked at renewable energy, all of that still remains in place, that hasn't been repealed, correct?
- Right.
And it seems very unlikely that some of those pieces will be repealed.
The whole idea of bringing the energy efficiency programs, House Bill 6 gutted those, and part of that reason of bringing those into the House Bill 6 legislation was to try to get more Republican votes.
This was a bill that passed in a bipartisan way, not all Democrats, not all Republicans, but some Democrats and some Republicans put together, created House Bill 6.
And so there's these elements of energy efficiency programs, renewable energy standards, which are the green energy standards that utilities were required to get a certain percentage of their power from green or renewable energy resources.
Those were gutted in House Bill 6.
And also these two coal-fired power plants.
One of those two coal-fired power plants is in Indiana, like I mentioned.
The other is in the district that is represented by House Speaker Jason Stephens.
So, it seems unlikely that maybe there'll be major changes to some of these things, but certainly there are people who are saying, "Hey, there's a taint that comes with House Bill 6 that if lawmakers really want to get away from the corruption that surrounded House Bill 6, they should repeal the whole thing and pass individual sections, individual laws in a way that's a little bit more above board, so to speak.
- Yeah, because basically, wipe that all out.
Let's start with a clean slate, and if this is really good legislation, then have each piece stand on its own versus it now kind of under this, as you said, this sort of dark umbrella of House Bill 6, because it does make it seem like, are any of those pieces legitimate, because they came through that situation.
I know that over the course of time, and one of the main people in this that kind of exposed this was a whistleblower that worked for the FBI.
And I know in seeing the times that you've interviewed him, he was very clear that he had had discussions with some of the players that we've talked about in the past.
And this, when this kind of came up, it had a different feel to it.
And he was like, "I've been around, I've know how this stuff works."
But the reality was, he said, "This is what different approach than I'd ever been, come before me in terms of the way the House Bill 6 was discussed and things that could happen.
If you can provide me with this, then we can take care of that."
It was just almost more blatant than even he had ever seen in his career working in Columbus and working with the legislature.
- Yeah, he had just, this is Tyler Furman, he was a Republican strategist.
He'd worked for Republicans and Republican causes.
And so when he was approached by Matt Borges, who he described as his mentor, to give information about the campaign to try to repeal House Bill 6, which was going on after house Bill 6 passed, there was an effort to try to repeal it and put it on the ballot so people could vote on that.
He said he was approached by Matt Borges and who wanted what he felt was inside information.
He felt that Borges was using their relationship to try to intimidate him.
And at one point Borges made a comment about, "Hey, if I hear about this in the media, I'm going to blow up your house."
Furman said he didn't take that as a joke, he took that pretty seriously, and he started working with the FBI.
He was so concerned about what he was hearing that he reached out to the FBI and said, "There's a problem here."
And he ended up telling a lot of his story to me in this conversation that we had on the State of Ohio last weekend that he had been wanting to say for a long time, but hadn't been able to during the trial.
And we talked right after the trial, you know, to try to clear his own name.
He felt that he had been really maligned and spoken against by the two main figures in this, because Larry Household or Matt Borges were not quiet during this whole process about they felt that they were innocent and they wanted people to know that.
- Right, and you made a good point when you talked about Larry Householder.
He is not somebody who is a, you know, a wallpaper in the corner, he's the main man.
He was very dynamic.
He was very confident.
And even up until the decision in the trial, he was still appearing to say, "Look, I'm going to be found not guilty here.
I didn't do anything wrong.
This is the way."
And I think the line probably isn't direct quote, but the implication was that, "This is just how we do things in Ohio."
And I think a lot of people took offense at that to some degree.
Well, now wait a minute.
We all don't, this is beyond what you know, I know that people think of politics and go, "Well, there's always some things that may not look good in transparency."
But the reality is, as you said, even for Tyler Furman, this was a step beyond anything he'd ever seen before.
- Yeah, and the jury, I think it's really interesting that the jury came into this trial not knowing about all of this.
And that's the whole point of having a jury that doesn't have preconceived notions.
And they believed and convicted these gentlemen on racketeering, because racketeering, you had to agree with two of the crimes that prosecutors had presented, and the crimes were bribery and some of these other things.
And the jurors said they believed it, and it didn't take them very long to return that verdict.
Now, of course, there's a very good possibility, I would almost bet on it, that there's going to be appeals here, no matter what the sentence is going to be.
And certainly, again, Borges and Householder have both maintained their innocence, and Householder I think has even suggested that there were other cases across the country where public officials were sentenced to a couple of years.
And so that's kind of what he's seeking.
But I think the other thing that really stands out here is, who is left who could possibly also face charges?
I mean, none of the first energy executives were ever charged.
Sam Randazzo, who was the Public Utilities Commission chair at the time, his house was raided by the FBI, but he was never charged.
But there's still some people out there who you wonder, "Did they play a role and will they potentially face charges?"
- So, the total story's not over on House Bill 6 by a long shot.
- I don't think so.
- Okay, well, we come back, we've got a lot of notes.
- I will say one thing though.
The effort to try to take FirstEnergy's name off Cleveland Browns Stadium, that has happened.
And that was a naming rights deal that the two parties came to an end with in April.
- So, little by little pieces of it are being set in place.
Back in just a moment.
We've got a lot of things to talk about, 'cause Columbus has been busy, obviously they're still trying to work toward finishing a budget for the state.
We'll talk about what the prospects are for getting that done on schedule when we come back.
Back in just a moment with the host of the State of Ohio, Karen Kasler here on "The Journal."
Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal."
Our guest is the host of the State of Ohio, which you can see every Sunday at 12 o'clock here on WBGU-PBS, Karen Kasler.
One of the other things of all the many things going on, obviously both the House and the Senate and the Governor have been working toward the always targeted deadline of June 30th to get the state's budget done.
What's going on with that right now?
Obviously, House and Senate have versions.
The governor, of course submits something early on, and then the two parts of the General Assembly then proceed to assemble and disassemble parts of that.
So, where are we right now with that?
And we can talk about whether or not we're going to make June 30th or not.
- I think it's pretty unlikely that June 30th is going to happen as a deadline, because there's just so much work to do.
I could be wrong, of course, but we're talking about a budget that's hundreds, or tens of thousands of pages long.
Well, no, thousands of pages long, let's go there.
And there are hundreds of differences between the House version of the budget and the Senate version, and some of them are pretty significant.
In fact, I've heard there's a record number of differences between these two budgets.
There is a document that is prepared by the researchers who do work for state lawmakers, and it just compared the differences between the House and Senate budgets.
And it goes for 800 pages.
Just those differences.
So, there's a lot here.
The House has kind of acquiesced to this and is working on an extension of the current budget for one week.
The Senate does not want to do this.
In fact, Senate President Matt Huffman did not want to go to conference committee.
He was hoping that the Senate version of the budget would be adopted by the House and there would be no conference committee at all.
And that didn't happen.
But 23 Republicans in the house did vote for the Senate budget, so there was certainly some support for the Senate budget there.
Governor Mike DeWine has said he wants to see a budget done.
He hopes both sides, said in a statement that both sides should keep working and that he's confident that they'll come to an agreement.
But again, the differences are so big, just a couple of them.
The House budget includes an income tax cut, the Senate budget broadens that income tax cut and also makes big changes to the Commercial Activity Tax, which is the state's main business tax, essentially making it by the end of the budget that 90% of businesses in Ohio would not pay the Commercial Activity Tax.
There are some big cuts in social spending from the House budget to the Senate budget, and that's of course got a lot of those groups very concerned.
Big changes in education.
The House budget includes more money for education.
The Senate budget takes away some of that money.
Education groups are furious about that and also about the expansion of vouchers.
The expansion of vouchers does exist in the House budget, but it's even bigger in the Senate budget.
Basically expanding to virtually any family in Ohio who wants a private school voucher could get one.
Though the more money you make, the smaller the voucher.
- It's like a means testing, I know that because- - Yes, ... Matt Dolan who of course is a Senate candidate, I believe a U.S. Senate candidate was talking about, "Yes, there's means testing."
And so that's a political issue for him and obviously something you would assume he's going to tout as he runs on the Republican side for the primary, for that U.S. Senate seat coming up.
The governor's budget, of course, that he submitted, does it even resemble any of this compared now after the House and Senate have both looked at it and then come up with their own versions?
- It's interesting because when DeWine, and we're all, everybody here's a Republican, all the leaders are all Republicans, of course.
- All the main players, sure.
- So, when DeWine's budget first came out, Democrats sounded somewhat supportive.
I mean, they didn't like some of the things, but there was no income tax cut in the budget.
And there were some other things that were like, there was a tax cut for the elimination of taxes on baby products, for instance.
And some scholarship money for kids and some things that have since been removed or moved around.
And so Democrats had been somewhat supportive of DeWine's budget.
But yeah, it changed a lot.
Democrats were supportive though of the House budget.
In fact, all but two Democrats in the House voted for the House budget.
So, that really implies that there was bipartisan support.
When it got over to the Senate it changed so dramatically that there was no democratic support for the Senate budget, and the Senate leadership spokesman even called the House version of the budget a radical democratic budget.
So, there's some real sticking points here that I think are going to be very difficult to work out in a short period of time.
And honestly, having the budget be late is not ideal, but it's not the end of the world for state government because we've had, if this budget's late, two of the last three budgets have been late.
- Ah, okay.
- Because the first budget that DeWine proposed, he signed on July 18th when happy fiscal New Year is actually July 1st.
- So that's, yeah, so we're not in uncharted territory here.
We've been- - Not at all.
- We've been here before.
You know, and part of this too, when you talk about the education budget, because I know in this part of the state, there's several school systems saying, "Well, we're preparing to deal with what we have to do for school levies in November, but we don't know exactly what to do yet because we're waiting to see what this budget looks like, what it's doing for K-12, because it does have a lot of changes in it."
And I know that, and especially whether it's even the ed choice part of it, but just the funding that's going to be set aside, those are somewhat different between the House and the Senate, which of course always makes it difficult for people who have to do their own budgets.
They can't just plug that number and say, "Well, we know we're going to get this from the state."
That's not the case right now, because that budget's not final yet.
- Yeah, and the Senate budget cuts the House budget's education spending by about a half a billion dollars.
It increases private school voucher funding by 372 million.
And that is from a group, the Ohio Education Policy Institute, which is contracted by school boards and school groups to analyze school funding.
And one of the things that I thought was interesting in their budget or in their report, it actually said that, "If indeed the Senate budget goes forward, and that's the final education spending plan, then Ohio's reliance on property taxes really kind of goes back again," which was the whole basis of the lawsuit to try to declare Ohio's public funding of schools unconstitutional.
- Unconstitutional.
- Because they said that the state share, if the Senate budget goes forward, the state share of the foundation funding is only about 38%, which means the rest is left to local communities.
- To locals.
- And so that kind of goes right back to where we were in 1997 when the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that you can't have property tax based way of paying for public education and still be considered constitutional.
- And yet we're back to that again.
And obviously too, we could probably expect then that there would be some discussion lawsuits coming up, things like that.
But yeah, it's sort of like, school funding in Ohio is the thing that never, ever goes away either in terms of- - It never, ever does.
- what's constitutional and what version we're dealing with this year, so.
- Well, and it's such a huge part of the budget, and it's so important because it touches everybody in Ohio.
You live in a school district, if you have kids, they go to a school district, they might go to private school, but you're still part of a school district.
And all of this really comes into play when we're talking about the budget.
And school districts really depend on that foundation funding that states share to build their budgets and fund the programs that they need to fund.
- So this is, it's funny.
I say this is the same discussion we've had, as you said, since 1997, how is the state going to fund education and can they come up with a mechanism?
And there was a thought, I know we talked maybe a year or so ago when they put that plan in place.
I'm forgetting now the two gentlemen who did it, but it was a bipartisan, it was a Democrat and a Republican and they came, well- - It was Robert Cup and John Patterson.
Bob Cup and Patterson who had, and even then they, I guess the legislation, "Well, we'll do it.
We'll fund the first year or two years, but not downstream."
And so that becomes questionable now too, whether that will be in play.
Obviously, this budget doesn't extend that part of it, I don't think.
- Well, it does in the sense that it uses some salary and spending criteria to determine the base cost in the school funding formula.
And again, I'm dumbing this down a lot because it's so complicated.
- It's just, yeah.
- And, but you know, the idea of funding this long term has been a real question, because the Cupp-Patterson Fair School funding plan, as it was also known, would take so much money to fully implement that there was a discussion about it being a six-year phase in.
Well, legislators only do two-year budgets.
So, a six-year phase in is really hard to get.
- For them to digest.
- Everybody to commit to.
- Yeah, so.
Well, when we come back, obviously the other thing that's out there too is we're going to have an August special election after we thought that was no longer going to happen in the State of Ohio ever again by virtue of what the legislature did.
But obviously, we're going to have an August special election, so back in just a moment with Karen Kasler, host of the State of Ohio here on "The Journal."
You're with us here on "The Journal."
Our guest is the host of the State of Ohio, Karen Kasler.
Something else that we thought we would be probably through with, we talked about school funding always being an ongoing thing.
There was a thought that maybe even just a few months ago that never again would be an August special election in the state of Ohio.
And obviously, in 2023 we're going to have an August special election on August 8th.
So, talk about that whole process and where we are.
We've got about five or six minutes.
But it's interesting that yes, we are indeed going to be voting on August 8th in Ohio.
In fact, early voting will start relatively soon.
- Yeah, early voting starts in the next week.
And so, well, early part of July, July 11th, I believe.
But the whole idea of an August special election, there was a bill that passed in December during the lame-duck session of the legislature.
It would have gotten rid of almost all August special elections.
And the testimony was that they are costly, that nobody turns out.
And so why do we even have these?
And this is an effort that had happened for several years to try to get rid of most of those August special elections.
That was passed, signed into law.
Right after it took effect though, republicans in the legislature who were unable to put this constitutional change, this resolution that would, this amendment that would make it so that it would be harder to amend the Constitution, they were not able to put that onto the May ballot.
They wanted to put it on the next ballot, which they determined it would be the August ballot.
So, there were some real questions there about, "Hey, how can we have an August special election when a law was just passed and signed that said there will be no August special elections for the most part?"
Well, that was taken to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled straight on a party line vote that that law really did not apply to amendments that were proposed by state lawmakers.
And of course, this is an amendment proposed by state lawmakers that would require 60% voter approval to win the Constitution.
I should be clear, it doesn't mean that you have to pass this amendment by 60%.
This amendment would only have to pass by a simple majority- - Majority, - but all future amendments would have to pass by 60%.
And it's very clear, this is all targeted at a potential ballot issue in November that would guarantee abortion rights and reproductive rights in the Ohio constitution.
Republicans have been very clear, they don't want this piece of legislation in the Ohio Constitution.
And so they have decided they want to raise that threshold.
The typical line you hear is, "We don't want out-of-state special interest buying their way into the Ohio Constitution."
- But- - But the effort to push this August special election was really spearheaded by a Republican billionaire from Illinois.
So, that kind of makes that argument really interesting to think about.
- And a little part of this too that kind of flies below it is, it does make it more difficult, if I understand it correctly, to bring an initiative and a constitutional amendment to a vote.
It requires a different way of gathering signature or a much more extensive method than we currently have.
And that kind of flies below the radar in this other part.
But it is interesting, because obviously, and back in the state budget, the Senate version, $16 million has been set aside to deal with this special election in August.
And it is kind of interesting, as you said.
The idea was that these were not considered to be great times to do any kind of balloting.
And yet here we have a rather important one in an election in August, which is typically low turnout, doesn't gather any attention from anybody.
And that was the reason why they wanted to do away with these.
And yet now we've got this very important change to deal with the Ohio Constitution on an August ballot.
So it it is rather- - Yeah, critically.
It's critically important.
It will change the future of constitutional amendments in Ohio.
And as you just said, it would also change the ability for citizens groups to put constitutional amendments for, because they would have to get signatures from all 88 counties.
- Right.
- Which is very difficult, right now it's 44 counties.
And the whole idea of this being decided in an election will have very low turnout, has really gotten a lot of people upset.
I mean, this is the coalition that is opposed to issue one on the August ballot is enormous.
I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
Hundreds of groups.
You've got Ohio's four living ex-governors, You've got five former attorneys general from both parties.
You've got a lot of groups and individuals who are opposed to this saying, "If you want to do this, now is not the time to do it on a ballot that people aren't going to be paying attention to and turnout's going to be low and that was just gotten rid of just a couple of months ago."
- For those exact reasons that you just stated, because, well, nobody turns out, and because there was this, you know, I know we're running out of time here, but the idea was that it seemed that the state legislatures looked at that and said, "Having local entities put things on in August doesn't allow the voters to really deal with the issues the way they should."
And, yet this is what we're going to do with, as you said, with this critical important situation with the Ohio Constitution.
So, we'll have to leave it there, but obviously, more to come on that, and we'll see where the state budget ends up in the next week or two hopefully and go from there.
So again, thank you, Karen, for being with us here on "The Journal."
- Great to be here, thanks.
- You can check us out at wbgu.org.
You can watch us every Thursday night on WBGU-PBS at 8:00 p.m.
I want to say, see you again next time.
And good night and good luck.
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