The focus of politic in Ohio after the election

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

The tradition hereabouts is, just before Election Day, to avoid writing about candidates and ballot issues until the votes are counted Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Still, whichever party captures the governorship must, by mid-winter, propose a state operating budget for the two years ending June 30, 2025.

Likewise, whichever party captures a majority of the Ohio House of Representatives’ 99 seats must select a speaker to preside over that chamber, and its budget debates, through 2024.

That is, what’s really climaxing this week are decisions by Ohio voters over who should run a state of 11.8 million people for the next two years – and how to run it.

Lectern-pounding aside, we’re talking about managing a $76 billion state general revenue budget in an economy that ranks 21st worldwide, the Legislative Service Commission reported in 2020. (Ohio’s economy ranked just below Switzerland’s, ranked 20th.)

Whoever Tuesday’s victors are, at least at the Statehouse, Ohioans are, in effect, hiring or retaining budget managers.

Balloons, confetti and Election Night speeches are part of the pageantry of politics. But come Wednesday morning, it’s back to checkbook registers, and bookkeeping ledgers, and state budget office spreadsheets.

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Cross-party agreement in the Statehouse

For all the sweat and gore of Campaign ’22, what often gets lost in it is that people in Ohio politics do periodically reach across the General Assembly’s aisle to promote the public good.

Excellent examples are Ohio’s best-in-the-nation public libraries, a feature of community life statewide often take for granted. True, Ohio long has had a kind of civic conscience about good libraries, reaching back to when the first Bob Taft was in the legislature, in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But what really assured Ohio libraries they could offer communities great cultural and reference resources was a bipartisan effort – in the mid-1980s – that guaranteed public libraries a percentage of statewide revenues in Ohio’s two-year budgets.

The same is true of some other public policy accomplishments at the Statehouse, starting with a de facto Statehouse consensus that favors (all things considered) common-sense state budgeting. Yes, there are the usual ifs, ands, and buts – but without cross-party agreement, there’d be conflict rather than at least periodic agreement when Ohio legislators craft a state spending plan every odd-numbered year.

The current state budget, enacted in mid-2021, won approval by an all-but-unanimous margin in the state Senate and with only 12 “no” votes in the 99-seat Ohio House of Representatives. The contrast with federal budgeting is stark, thanks to people of both parties in Columbus who take a long-term view of Ohio’s finances.