(upbeat bright music) - Hello, and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

It's been a busy 20, we only one for the state legislature and for Governor DeWine.

A lot of important issues being addressed by the legislature and the governor in Columbus, sometimes not always in a cooperative manner.

Here to get us caught up on what's going on at the state house is the Host of the State of Ohio seen at Sundays at noon here in WBGU-PBS, Karen Kasler, welcome to The Journal, Karen.

Thanks for being with us again.

- Always glad to talk to you.

Thanks for the invitation.

- Yeah, now, as I said, there's a lot been going on in this first quarter of the year, this opening session of 2021.

The biggest thing and of course it's usually the most contentious thing is the state budget, but, and that's, that's in process and being hammered out basically, and almost with seemingly without a lot of a lot of issues, which is unusual.

- Well, it's interesting because when Governor Mike DeWine delivered his first budget, his introduction, a couple of weeks ago and then it went over to the house and the house made some major changes to it.

For instance, they added a 2% income tax cut and that would cost the state about $380 million over the two year budget cycle.

That was, a tax cut was not something that was part of DeWine's initial budget.

The house also added in an overhaul of school funding and we've talked about school funding.

- Sure.

- And the process of trying to bring Ohio to the point where it could potentially be in line with the constitution as seen by the Ohio Supreme Court which ruled back in 1997, that the state was too reliant on property taxes to fund its public schools.

So, there was a plan that passed in the session, in the house session last year that never went forward in Senate.

And that's now been folded into the budget.

It's a $1.8 billion overhaul of school funding, and very, very, very simply put, it would allow for a calculation of state aid for all school districts to be based on 60% property taxes and 40% income taxes.

There's a lot of other things involved, but that's the basics of it.

And that's kind of what passed the house last time.

It got over to the Senate, the Senate was concerned about the cost of it, and now the house has been trying to deal with that cost.

And there's some real questions here about exactly how this would be phased in over six years, 'cause that's the house plan.

And there are $150 million in the second year of this budget to start that phase in of a hundred, $1.8 billion.

A lot of that's left to future legislatures to figure out.

(Steve chuckles) And so that's an interesting proposal when you come up with something that you say is overhauling a major issue and then leave most of it for future lawmakers to deal with.

- Yeah, yeah.

For someone else to actually do, yeah, yeah, fine.

- Exactly.

- They solve the, they get... Find the money, let them find the money down the road somewhere, hmm, interesting.

- Exactly, there's some other things about that school funding proposal that have some lawmakers concerned.

'Cause again, it's passed the house.

It passed on a mostly party-line vote.

It's now over in the Senate and for this past weekend state of Ohio show, I talked to Senate Finance Committee chair Matt Dolan, who says he's very concerned about the cost.

And one of the things he's concerned about is that the governor had set aside a certain amount of money, little over $1.1 billion for wellness dollars.

These are a wrap-around services for low-income, economically disadvantaged kids who need extra help.

They need tutoring, they need food services, they need some other things that schools can bring in to help them.

The governor had earmarked that money just for those kinds of things.

That $1.1 billion has now been folded into the overall school funding formula in this overhaul.

And Dolan says, he's very concerned about that because the money was supposed to be used for these particular purposes, yeah.

- Yeah, very specific things.

And now it's become part of the general fund of, general school funding piece.

Yeah.

- Exactly, and then there's also and that's money that not necessarily will be part of a governor's budget every year because, you know, if DeWine is not reelected or if he doesn't wanna do wellness funds next time around.

That's money that the legislature would have to fill in.

But also there's a question about schools losing money.

I mean, everybody agrees that the funding formula doesn't work right now.

- Right, right.

- Because most schools do not get, they either get more than funding formula says they get or less than the funding formula says they get.

So everybody agrees on that.

But the question is whether school districts would lose money under this new funding formula.

And the backers of it have said over and over that no school district will lose funding over the six year phase in.

Well, documents on the house finance committee's own website show that 96 districts will actually lose money.

And so it's been very difficult to get any sort of confirmation and explanation about why those documents show the districts will lose money when the backers of this say that no districts will.

- Yeah, and, and that, and that leaves an open question there as to if this is going to solve the issue, it appears that it doesn't really solve the...

I guess the last thing you wanna see is districts get less money than they've been getting 'cause they don't believe they're getting enough now.

Even the ones that are (indistinct).

Yeah, it's that typical conundrum.

And of course the question has always been cost.

Do you go back to '97?

That's always been the hurdle and here we are, again.

I guess that's the, that's the discouraging part of it that we have a solution but we don't really have a solution kind of, and that's what that's, what's kind of disconcerting about it, but they're going to keep hammering.

- Exactly.

- I guess they're gonna keep working on it.

But yeah, you know.

- Well, and I know that there's a real worry that you know, that the state is so close to coming up with a school funding formula that would work.

That would work not only for wealthy districts but also for poor districts.

That it's so close but it's gotta be the right formula if you wanna carry it through for the next six years.

- Sure.

- And spend this kind of money.

Couple other things in the budget, the house while adding in the school funding formula overhaul and adding in an income tax cut also took out some things.

DeWine had proposed some elements of a gun law plan that he had initially proposed after the date and mass shootings in 2019.

That bill, to kind of put those things into law which would be a system to do background checks on private gun sales.

Something like a red flag law that allow for seizures of guns.

People who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, that bill never passed.

It never really even got more than a couple of hearings.

Dewine tried to put that into his budget.

The house took that out and the Senate Finance Committee chair, Matt Dolan, who was the sponsor of DeWine's bill, he says he's not gonna bring those things back.

So there's not gonna be any sort of gun law changes in DeWine's budget.

But one other thing that a DeWine had put in the budget that got a little bit of a pushback, was a $50 million ad campaign trying to sell Ohio to people who are considering leaving the state or people who have left the state and maybe try to get them back.

And my colleague, Jo Ingles had asked DeWine about that at his initial, one of the first press conferences after that, why do you need $50 million to do this?

And Democrats have said, part of the problem people are leaving the state and younger people are not wanting to come back is because of policies on abortion and gun laws and things like that.

And DeWine responded by saying that Ohio is actually a really progressive state.

Which got a lot of people reacting in kind of an amused way.

But he had put that campaign in his budget.

Well, the house took that out.

So there will be no $50 million campaign try to sell Ohio to former Ohioans or people who we wanna keep here.

- Yeah, and I guess if you look at, you try to define progressive, I suppose it's relative.

Yes, we probably are progressive compared to some places or some states, but not necessarily, you're right.

I don't know anybody that would really categorize Ohio as this cutting edge progressive state now because of some of the things you mentioned and when we come back I know we touched a little bit on the gun laws.

The state, actually, the legislature actually is moving or has moved to the stand your ground laws, have been sort of loosened up, I guess, if that's the right way to put it.

So, maybe we can touch on that briefly when we come back and then get into some of the other things besides the budget that has been going on in Columbus.

So, back in just a moment with Karen Kasler, Host the State of Ohio here on The Journal.

Thanks for staying with us on The Journal.

Our guest is the host of the State of Ohio seen every Sunday at 12 o'clock here in WBGU-PBS, Karen Kasler.

And we're, we're going through the legislative update.

What's going on in Columbus.

You touched a little bit, you know, the governor says, you know, Ohio is a progressive state.

Let's talk a little about gun laws in the state because there was a push.

The governor of course, was really looking to, as you said, make some adjustments in gun laws with red flag laws and things of that nature that make it easier to prevent guns from getting into people whose hands we don't believe should have guns.

That didn't go, but then there's also been a move in the state legislature to loosen up how stand-your-ground is defined which again is a very controversial old item in every state where it comes up.

So talk a little about the gun environment down there, the firearms environment in the state legislature.

- Well, the stand-your-ground law or so-called stand your ground.

It eliminates the duty to retreat.

And DeWine had seem to be hinting that he was not going to sign it back at the beginning of the year and that he might veto it.

So, there was, I think a little bit of a surprise when he did indeed sign it.

Though he had said during his campaign in 2018, when he was running for governor, that he did support stand your ground.

But there was some real concerns and some questions about stand-your-ground and how it would actually work and what message it was sending in essence.

And just over this past weekend and interestingly enough, there was a plan to have a rally with Georgia Member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, talking about gun rights and specifically backing police in controversial shooting incidents.

And also at this event was supposed to be a U.S Senate candidate, Josh Mandel.

And it was supposed to be a pretty big deal from this group, Ohio Gun Owners, which is a group that really essentially advocates for no regulations on guns.

They don't want any sort of rules or, you know, any sort of regulations at all.

And this was canceled basically the last minute on Friday afternoon, citing some concerns about security, interestingly enough.

I mean, this was, it's supposed to be an armed rally and the people who were planning the rally then said that they felt they were having some issues with the security concerns.

(Steve chuckles) But one of the proposals that's come out fairly recently and gotten a little bit of attention, would be a plan to declare Ohio essentially a sanctuary state for the second amendment.

And its sponsor who is a Youngstown Republican named Mike Lloyd Check, who's a freshman here, calls it a safe-haven law.

And it, what it would basically do is put up what he says are roadblocks in case the federal government does decide to issue rulings or executive orders or pass laws that would allow for certain seizures of guns or restrictions on guns.

And the problem is it really doesn't work quite that way because when the federal government says something it's not like a state law and just overrule that.

- Right.

- But certainly it sends a message about what this particular lawmaker and people who support this bill believe that Ohio should be doing when it comes the second amendment.

It's not the only state that's done this.

Several other states have done something similar and some of these laws have not held up in court.

But it's interesting as we've been talking about police shootings and we've had several down here in Columbus that have been high-profile, including one the day of the verdict in the George Floyd killing.

- Right.

- The conviction of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer.

There was a police shooting that afternoon in Columbus.

- Right.

- And so with all of these high profile things that have been happening for some people changing gun laws like this and further expanding gun rights really has some, has them a little bit concerned.

And that includes a Governor Mike DeWine.

- Right, right.

- Like I mentioned, he tried to put some things in the budget but they're not going to go anywhere.

- And it does, because this is, this is another topic that's been going on for years and years and years.

And there's usually a spike in activity when there's a tragic incident of some kind, whether it's a police shooting, or a mass shooting of some kind or whatever.

And there's always talk about, okay, we've got to do something about it but then it eventually trails off into the dust somewhere.

And then we get the opposite effect as you just described.

That instead of more closely monitoring things, we're going to actually loosen up some of the restrictions and the governor himself who seems to go a little back and forth on this, it is what it is.

Now, police policies and police tactics, and you mentioned Columbus they seem to have had some issues.

Obviously they've had some incidents.

And as you said had one the day of the Derek Chauvin verdict.

That's something else I know the governor has talked about.

And at the federal level, I know our US Senators have talked about better police training, different police, psych, you know, just how do we look at how we police and how do we make it functional for everybody, not just the police, but the citizens they serve.

And that's something else that seems to get a lot of talk, but not a lot of traction sometimes.

So, talk a little about how that's residing in the legislature right now.

- Well, DeWine had wanted to see some measures come about from a Republicans who had talked about police reform proposals.

And there's one that's out there, that's still being worked on by a couple of Republicans, a former Montgomery County Sheriff, Philip Plummer, and also someone else with a police background Cindy Abrams, who's from the Cincinnati area.

And they've proposed an idea for a professional licensing and oversight board for police officers.

Also a statewide database of officer discipline.

So, if an officer is disciplined in one department he can't necessarily go to another police department and get a job there.

A statewide database of all use of force reports and also study committee to find a way to pay for more mandated training.

And DeWine actually put it in his budget to $15 million for a pilot program for police training and also $10 million for body cameras.

And the issue with body cameras is not only that not all police departments have them, but there's no real statewide policy on when they should be on and how they should be used.

And so that's another thing that DeWine has talked about for years that he wanted to see some sort of a policy.

Going back to when he was attorney general on how departments will use body cameras because there's so many stories of the body camera not being on, the body camera being turned off when an officer arrives at a circumstance.

And that's one thing in Columbus, the shooting that I referenced before the day of the conviction of Derek Chauvin, Makia Bryant, a 16 year old girl here in Columbus, who was shot and killed by a police officer.

The police officer's body camera video was released almost immediately by Columbus Police.

And granted there were other angles and the story is still developing and everything, but that was something that really showed what happened right away within hours of that shooting.

- Right - And I think potentially diffuse some of the anger and frustration that's still out there of course, but kind of gave an explanation of what was happening.

And there's been a lot of national looking at that video, from people saying that perhaps this police officer did what he had to do.

That that was the right choice for us.

Again, investigations continue.

We don't know the final on that.

- Sure.

- Democrats though, have a proposed their own series of bills that would deal with police reforms.

And a democratic leader, Emilia Sykes, in the Akron area said, "gross misconduct would never fly at your job.

So, it shouldn't fly for law enforcement."

And that's the attitude behind their bills that would do some of the same things but go a little bit farther in terms of really trying to crack down on what people will universally call bad cops.

And how, how do you, how do you prevent some of these terrible things from happening and trying to come up with a way that they can be controlled at least at the state level.

- Right, and it is interesting that there is no statewide uniform body cam usage policy because that would seem to just be something that should be a no-brainer but every department, every jurisdiction, every agency has their own set of policies.

And that leads to then, as you said, in one case, in Columbus where yes, the video was there right away and it helped at least mitigate some of the reaction, but where there is no policy to release it then people wonder, oh, well, what did happen there?

Because you can't see that.

So, yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

- There was also, there's also a question about police training and just how do we train police and what should we be training for?

One of the democratic bills would allow for more police training and specifically in de-escalation training.

And looking at just how police officers, how many hours of required training in Ohio there are, 737 hours of police training.

By comparison, to be a cosmetologist in Ohio you have to have 1500 hours training.

(Steve chuckles) So, and this is not unique though, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia have 800 hours.

So, just a little bit more than Ohio.

- Right.

- Pennsylvania has 859 hours, but Indiana and Michigan have actually fewer hours of required police training.

Indiana has 460 hours, Michigan has 594 hours for a police officer in required training for that position.

So, there's a real question now.

Not only are police getting all the training that they need but what kind of training.

So they be trained for instance, in first aid, like first responders, you know, EMTs are.

And, you know, these are the kinds of questions I think that are getting asked.

- Yeah, okay, when we come back, the other thing that's, you know, we're sort of working our way still through COVID-19, let's talk a little bit about the governor and the legislature and how that's been going for both sides of that issue.

So, back in just a moment with Karen Kasler, Host the State of Ohio, here on The Journal on WBGU-PBS.

Thanks for staying with us on The Journal.

Our guest is Karen Kasler, the Host of the State of Ohio, which you can see every Sunday at noon here in WUBGPBS.

One of the things that's been ongoing through the COVID-19 and we're in month 13 or 14, depending on how you want to define it.

Early on the governor seemed to have a pretty good support level from the legislature and things were, you know, everybody was basically happy with what he was doing.

As this one on and on though there's been some lessening of support shall we say, from the legislature.

So, talk a little about what the legislature, how they've reacted to what in some, their minds has been executive overreach in this and how they've responded to that with legislation.

- Well, I say this kind of carefully because DeWine is almost certainly, he says he's gonna run for re-election.

So, he's had fairly high approval ratings throughout this whole process from people not only from his party, but also from Democrats.

People who felt that he's handled things appropriately, but you're right, he's gotten pushback from Republicans in the legislature.

And it started early.

It started like in the middle of April, that the pushback really started coming because they were hearing from their constituents who were really upset about the closures of businesses, and specifically the closures of small businesses while large businesses that also sold food, something like Targets, Walmarts, things like that, were allowed to stay open.

And so that's been a continuing struggle and that kind of forms the basis of some of the legislative actions that have come out over the last year.

And again, we started a new session in January.

So, everything that did not pass at the end of December had to start over again or it wasn't going to go through.

But one of the proposals that did get through last time but didn't get all the way through, got through this time and got signed or, well, it got vetoed actually, was a proposal that would allow for state lawmakers to overturn the governor's health orders.

DeWine did veto that, the legislature came back and overrode his veto.

- Right.

- And so now this law takes effect sometime in the middle of June.

And I've talked to several leaders including Senate president, Matt Hoffman and others who've said that, yeah, they are prepared in mid June.

If this law does go into effect, it doesn't get challenged that they are prepared to lift various restrictions, the state of emergency that's been in place since March of 2020 would end.

The mask mandate that's been in place since July would be over.

They prepared to lift all of that.

Now, the law and this idea of the legislature having the ability to overturn the health orders from the governor and his health director had a lot of opposition from hospital groups, from the Ohio Hospital Association.

- Right.

- From doctors, from County commissioners and health districts who were very concerned about the legislature and potentially politics coming into play in health policy.

But right now the law has not been challenged.

So, it should take it should effect in the middle of June, as expected.

DeWine had said at one point that he was hoping if Ohio got 250 cases for 100,000 residents, that he would lift the mask mandates if Ohio could keep that level for two weeks.

Well, that's not happening back to where three times that level right now.

- Right.

- So DeWine is now looking at possibly tying, lifting the mask mandates to vaccines, and the number of people who've gotten vaccines.

We're about at 40% of Ohioans who have started the vaccine process.

That's overall Ohioans, not just vaccine eligible.

- Right.

- And then about 33% who have gone through the entire process.

So it feels low, but when you take out the people under 16, it's about 50% that at least started the process.

- So, yeah, we made some barriers, but it is, but it is an interesting situation where as you said the legislature is now injecting itself into health-related decisions, which I guess if you roll that out across other things what other executive powers, can they say, oh, no, we're gonna also be a part of that as well.

And some states have gone to, you know, two week reviews of things and that sort of thing but this is a no work I want to be in.

We're gonna be in charge of this sort of in the long run.

So, it'll be interesting how that plays out.

- The bill also would prohibit local health districts, local health commissioners from putting in executive orders and end mass band-aids and that sort of thing.

And that's a big deal, especially in a state that whole rule is considered to be the way things were run, that did.

People like the idea of local control of things.

Well, this bill would prevent local control.

And that's really important too.

When you look at Ohio's map, I mean, coronavirus.ohio.gov has maps all over the place showing the number of people and the percentages of people who have gotten vaccines, the number of cases and how it's distributed around the state.

Some parts of the state still have high case numbers and high incidence numbers.

Whereas other parts of the state don't, some parts of the state really aren't getting the vaccine like other parts of the state are.

And so while it's a state, it's not necessarily everybody operating altogether.

- Right, and it's interesting and you touched on this.

'Cause as you were talking about that, it reminded me that, yes, there is, and it's a show in and of itself I guess that the legislature talks about local control but then does seems to want to dip into that and say, yes but in this case we'll take control and we'll take the local control away from you.

And, but that's a discussion that has a lot of different, different pieces to it, but it does seem like on one hand they're saying one thing and then doing another, when it suits their purpose, whatever that purpose might be.

So that's, but yeah, it does leave the governor and the health director in a kind of a conundrum.

They really can't make that kind of a, a call now or if they can, the legislature is gonna immediately jump in and take that away from them.

So, yeah, interesting, interesting.

- Yeah, and that's, and DeWine had said he vetoed it not because he wanted to retain that power necessarily for himself, which certainly he would throughout the pandemic, but what does this do for future governors?

And this could potentially even affect like disaster declarations and states of emergency after tornadoes or flooding or any of these things that we see quite often year round.

I mean, we're in flooding season, we're in tornado season.

- Yeah.

- You know, if the governor puts an order out there and the legislature disagrees, they could reverse that order, throw that order out.

And so that was the reason why he had vetoed that but the legislature said, hey, we are most in touch with our citizens and yeah.

- Our constituents and yeah.

- So, they, they felt that they were in the right.

- Yeah, well, we'll, we'll see how that plays out.

Because, yeah, hopefully it won't have a negative effect in, in some ways but yeah, but the opportunity is there for, and I guess it leaves local officials in kind of a nowhere, no man's land because the, as you said, the governor might declare a state of emergency as a result of a weather related thing, and then a week later the legislators, no, no, nevermind, that's not the case.

So, it, it does sort of muddy the waters in that whole thing where no one, yeah.

Whereas it's only temporary.

The governor's power is only temporary apparently in some of those.

So, real quick and I know, and we've got just a couple of minutes.

House Bill 6, which of course remains that tainted, you know, law that went in effect.

And of course some parts have it have not been enacted now but the legislature seemed like its first duty was going to be to deal with the person who seems to be at the center of that Larry Householder.

And just briefly talk about where that stands right now because we're four months in and it seems like that's sort of back-burnered now, that any dealing with, with all of the things that apparently allegedly have took place during that.

- The House Bill 6, if you can't remember this one, this is the sweeping energy bill that would allow for subsidies for Ohio to nuclear power plants, as well as subsidies for two coal fire power plants.

It would change energy efficiency programs and renewable programs for utilities.

And so there was a lot of stuff involved here.

The legislature did go ahead and take away that subsidies (murmurs) the power plants.

The company that runs those two nuclear power plants, Energy Harbor, which used to be FirstEnergy Solutions.

- Right.

- Said it doesn't need the subsidies anymore.

And there were court orders saying that the statement collects the subsidies.

So, no more subsidies for the two nuclear power plants but the rest of the stuff is still in place.

- Yeah.

- Now the question of course is whether the legislature will do anything about the other parts of House Bill 6.

And of course, as you mentioned former speaker Larry Householder, who was indicted by federal prosecutors for his efforts to pass House Bill 6, they say it was a pay to play scheme in connection with some other people, some lobbyists, and a utility widely believed to be FirstEnergy.

Well, Larry Householder is still a duly elected representative for his district and he's even sponsored some bills.

- Right.

- That deal with transparency in government of all things.

- Yeah, accountability in government which seems rather.

(Karen chuckles) But, okay, it is what it is, it is what it is.

So, okay, yeah.

- But house speaker, Bob Kopp from (murmurs) has, we've asked him, reporters ask him almost every week, if there's gonna be any effort to remove Householder.

Because he had said last year, that yeah, they we're going to remove Householder or once he was reelected and so far nothing.

- Okay, all right, well, well I guess we'll have to leave the rest of it there and we'll, we'll have you back in again to give us an update again in a couple of months on what's transpired since we talk today, because there's always gonna be something brewing down in Columbus.

So, Karen Kasler Host of the State of Ohio, thanks for being with us on The Journal.

And you can check us out at wbgu.org, and of course you can see us every Thursday night on The Journal on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again, next time.

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