Moving day at the Statehouse
Lawmakers last night wrapped up their busiest part of the year in what was their last scheduled session until the post-election, lame duck frenzy.
They passed a $3.7 billion capital budget, put voter ID on the November ballot in an effort to get it in the state constitution and cracked down on Medicaid providers amid disputed accusations of fraud. A much-discussed data center reform bill got sidelined, though, after the House once again couldn’t agree on what to do about the state data center tax credit that’s mushroomed in recent years.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Jon Husted has been quietly distancing himself from President Donald Trump, the undisputed center of gravity of the modern Republican Party, amid some ominous polling data on his first solo statewide election bid in more than a decade.
Let’s unpack it all.
Voter ID, through the mail and in the Constitution
Ohioans soon will be required to provide a photo ID when voting by mail – a major change to a voting method that previously had been exempted from the strict voter ID requirement Republican lawmakers passed following the 2020 presidential election.
Republican lawmakers unveiled the new photo ID requirement for mail voting on Tuesday before swiftly approving it in the House and Senate the following day over complaints from bipartisan election officials.
The requirement would take effect ahead of the November 2027 election, so voting this year will remain unchanged.
The new legislation, officially called House Bill 472, accompanies a separate but related voter ID measure that Republicans fast-tracked this month. The House also approved Senate Joint Resolution 10 on Wednesday, which would amend Ohio’s constitution to add the state’s existing photo ID requirements for in-person voting.
HB 472 is headed to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk, while SJR10’s passage places the amendment on the November ballot for voter approval.
Read more about the changes here.
Data centers keep their tax credits
Last year, state officials exempted data centers from $1.6 billion in state sales taxes and another $446 million in local taxes. And some of those exemptions – agreements between the state and some of the biggest companies on the planet like Amazon, Google and Meta – run through the 2050s.
This new data has shocked some policymakers in Columbus who dramatically underestimated the extent to which the state has subsidized the increasingly unpopular data center industry here. And it spurred interest in nixing the sales tax exemption altogether.
But this week, lawmakers sent clear signals of backing down. House Speaker Matt Huffman said it’s “perhaps even impossible” at this point to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a legislative effort to end the credit. Another Republican told Jake that the House doesn’t have the 60 votes it would take.
Late Wednesday night, the House backed off plans to approve a bill eliminating or reduce the size of the tax credit. That plan called for a reduction of the size of future tax breaks for the industry, without addressing previous ones. It also contains other provisions designed to prevent a shifting of electric infrastructure costs from the industry onto the ratepayers, and for utility officials to more carefully monitor the data centers’ water consumption.
House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn summed up his caucus’ position well.
“It is probably better than doing nothing,” he said to reporters. “But it’s still not great.”
A surprising bipartisan vote on Medicaid fraud bill
The House meanwhile approved another law on Wednesday meant to crack down on fraud in the state’s massive Medicaid program, which provides healthcare to millions of poor and disabled Ohioans.
What became Senate Bill 315 got its start as a response to a series of articles written by the Daily Wire, a conservative news website. The bill requires what’s called electronic visit verification – basically a GPS-enabled timeclock system – for workers providing nonemergency transportation and nonmedical home care.
SB 315 also contains other anti-fraud measures, like requiring state officials to use technology meant to detect suspicious billing activity and giving extra legal authority to the state attorney general and auditor’s office to demand records as part of their fraud investigations. And, the bill also contains an entirely different portion meant to prevent fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by requiring the state to replace Electronic Benefit Transfer cards with a security chip similar to those in modern credit or debit cards.
The bill got surprising buy-in from Democrats, who went from questioning the motives behind the bill to eventually voting for the final product. Their approval came as Republicans stripped out hotly controversial language to ban family members from billing Medicaid for care.
The proposal had attracted hours of emotional testimony from advocates, including people with disabilities and family members who described quitting their careers to help care for their disabled children. The testimony moved one Republican lawmaker to tears, and, ultimately, Democrats said, led them to backtrack on the idea.
Read more here.
$3.7 billion in capital projects goes out the door
While the more divisive stuff (see above) has taken up most of the oxygen in the room, lawmakers on a bipartisan basis passed a $3.7 billion capital budget Wednesday. This is the primary legislative vehicle for brick-and-mortar builds in the state each two-year cycle.
As we wrote last week, that includes hundreds of millions for new schools, infrastructure, behavioral health hospitals and prisons. Then there are chunks like $2 million for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and $1 million for Playhouse Square in Cleveland. And then there’s $200 million for things like pickleball courts, pools, bike paths and state parks.
If you want to know what your county gets, the Legislative Service Commission made a nice list of it all here.
Trouble in paradise
Andrew has been looking for signs of whether Ohio Republicans might distance themselves from President Donald Trump if this year’s election climate gets too rocky.
A vote last Friday from Sen. Jon Husted, who’s facing what looks like a tough election this November against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, offers a possible early example.
Per The Hill, Husted and five other Republicans joined Democrats in voting for a measure forbidding the Trump administration from reviving the “anti-weaponization fund” the president had proposed as a way to direct his $1.776 billion legal settlement with the IRS to his supporters. The specific roster of Republicans Husted joined is notable – a mix of outgoing senators whose careers Trump helped end (Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina), and senators who, like Husted, are running for reelection this year in battleground states (Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.) The amendment, part of a larger funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, failed.
Days ahead of the vote, Husted told Signal Statewide he had “serious concerns” with the anti-weaponization fund, but he refused to elaborate. The Trump administration ended up dropping the idea in response to pushback from Senate Republicans.
A spokesperson explained Husted’s vote in a statement: “Democrats were using that issue to distract from our goal of funding federal law enforcement and homeland security. Given the Acting Attorney General said that they weren’t pursuing the fund any longer, Senator Husted felt we should take the distraction off the table.”
Husted also voted Friday for another failed amendment that would have repurposed the fund to pay for the anti-fraud crackdown led by Vice President JD Vance.
Both votes came the same day Fox News released a poll showing Brown leading Husted 53% to 45%. The poll also showed Democrat Amy Acton leading Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in the governor’s race 50%-49%, an effective tie.
In the news
An Ohio sheriff will deploy helicopters to find illegal marijuana grows with an additional $70,000 grant. The Ohio Controlling Board released money for the Ohio Attorney General’s office to contract with the Butler County Sheriff Office’s aviation unit. Read more from Jake Zuckerman.
Absentee ballot applications: A state spending panel voted Monday to approve spending $2.5 million on the universal absentee ballot application mailing, which Ohio has done in every even-year general election since 2012. Read more from Andrew Tobias.
Don’t dis data centers: Gov. Mike DeWine has a message for cities and towns about data centers. He says don’t close your borders and instead cut a deal with developers. DeWine offered that advice to local governments during a conversation with reporters on the sidelines of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Big Bets for America summit in Cleveland this week. Signal Cleveland Government Reporter Nick Castele was there.
Central State University set to get $29 million in Ohio capital budget – with a catch. The state’s only public historically Black university, long battling financial challenges, is the only campus to receive this type of red tape around its funding. Learn why from Amy Morona.
It’s been nearly a year since Senate Bill 1 became law. Signal Statewide Reporter Amy Morona would like to hear if it’s changed your college experience. Share your thoughts here.
U.S. cities dust off statues they hid away in 2020: A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is back up in Charleston, S.C., and a giant Columbus awaits a return in Ohio’s namesake capital. Read more from Cameron McWhirter with a Columbus dateline in the Wall Street Journal.
Central Ohio becomes hub for tech and manufacturing: Tech titans and Silicon Valley transplants changed the Columbus area, but not everyone is thrilled about the rapid transformation. Read more by Farah Stockman, also with a Columbus dateline, in The New York Times.
