(instrumental pop music) (bubbles popping) - Hello, and welcome to, "The Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.

The Ohio legislature and the Governor are getting back into action after the first of the year.

There's some unfinished business, and there's a lot of new business headed for both of them.

And here to get us caught up in what's going on in Columbus with the legislature, and the governor is Karen Kasler, the State House Bureau Chief for the Ohio Channel, and host of the, "State of Ohio," which you can see every Sunday at 12:30, here on WBGU.

Karen, let's talk about the first thing.

One of the things they have to get on pretty quickly is the state's budget, so, talk a little bit about where they are with that, and some of the items that are gonna be maybe a little controversial as part of that budget.

- Well, one thing I want to say real quick is while this show may be on the Ohio Channel, the Ohio Channel is the Ohio C-SPAN, essentially.

So, what we do as journalists at the State House News Bureau is different than what the Ohio Channel does.

So, I just want to clarify that because it's really easy to get confused.

But the journalists at the State House News Bureau have to follow what the legislature and the Governor have been doing, and yeah, it was a little bit of a break, of course, for the holidays and that sort of thing, and now we're back with a brand new session.

The Governor is in the second part of his four year term, and the budget is the big deal that's coming up.

The budget should be introduced sometime between late January, early February, and we're expecting that any moment though.

The last time he introduced a budget, the deadlines were a little fluid.

I mean, there were four budgets introduced in his first year in office: the transportation budget, the Bureau of Workers' Compensation budget, the Industrial Commission budget, and then the big general fund budget, and three of the four of them were late.

In fact, the general fund budget didn't pass until 17 days after the deadline.

But that was because there were some things that were going on that were being worked out between state lawmakers and the governor.

And remember, the legislature is dominated by Republicans.

The Governor's a Republican, so this is all being worked out amongst Republicans here.

However, the relationship has changed a lot, I would say, between what happened in 2019 and 2020.

In 2020, as the pandemic was going forward, and Governor DeWine was issuing these public health orders, some state lawmakers were pushing back on those.

There were bills that were introduced that would curb his authority to do those public health orders.

And so as we go into this budget process, there's less money to deal with, there's a lot of big problems in a lot of different areas, so I'm really wandering what kind of a relationship these two groups have, the Republicans who run the legislature, and the Governor.

- Yeah, and we talked about that the last time we spoke that the relationship between the legislature and Republican governors has been a little testy at times, and going back to John Kasich, almost as testy it was if you had a Democratic governor, and a Republican legislature.

They seem to be at at odds more than you would think, given they're all from the same party.

But the Governor seems to be a little more toward the center than maybe some of his colleagues in the legislature are, and that seems to be where it creates the sort of bumpy ride that they've had.

- And that's interesting because when you think about Mike DeWine, in years past you wouldn't necessarily think about him as a moderate, as somebody who's a centrist.

I mean, he's extremely conservative.

Very proudly pro-life all these sorts of issues, but yet coming up against some of the members of the legislature, that's true.

And in fact, Ted Strickland, the former Governor who served from 2007 to 2011, he had a budget that passed, actually, almost unanimously.

There was trouble then when Kasich came into office, especially in the last part of his last term where lawmakers were really pushing back at him for a number of proposals.

This was a time though, when Kasich was actively expressing an interest in being president of United States.

So, when the transition came from Kasich to DeWine, it was a real hope that there would be more of a collegial relationship.

But once again, this pandemic has really shown some big splits.

I mean, you had articles of impeachment that were drafted against DeWine.

Now, those were drafted by four very right wing Republicans.

Two of them were term limited, and are now gone.

I don't know that DeWine certainly has hard feelings over that, because that wasn't going to go anywhere, but it does show that there's a real pushback here.

And DeWine actually vetoed a couple of the bills that some of these lawmakers passed, because he felt that they unfairly restricted his ability to do what he's doing in trying to control the pandemic.

- Right, yeah, and because I know Senate Bill 311, SB 311, had a lot of pieces in there that were going to well, the discussion was they don't really restrict the Governor or the Department of Health from doing something, but it set it up for kind of like legislative review every time they did something, which isn't necessarily the case right now, and the Governor did push back on that a little and said, "Look, you're restricting our ability "to deal with any pandemic, or any public health crisis "if you do that."

So, that's still out there bouncing back and forth between them at this point, because he vetoed that, and I don't think they even tried to override his veto did they?

- No, they did not.

Though there were actually a couple of protesters who came to the State House, hoping that the Senate would start the process of overriding that because if the bill is to be overridden, the veto is to be overridden, it has to start in the House where it was first proposed, and like you said, this was Senate 311.

But the Senate didn't even take it up, so the House couldn't take it up.

But this was, once again, an example of a situation where DeWine said he felt that the legislature, while he wanted to consult with them on some of these public health orders, that that went too far.

That to allow the legislature to weigh-in so frequently, and to stop some of these things from becoming health orders unless the legislature signed off, would really hamper his ability to move quickly to try to control the pandemic.

So, that's where some of that pushback came from.

- Yeah, and one of the other pieces I think there was also within there, something that would have kind of relieved the intensity of the penalties, if you violated a public health order.

I think that was mixed in there too, and he vetoed that part as well and said, "No, no you're not going to roll back the penalties "for violating a public health order," to the extent the legislature wanted to.

- That's right, that was his first non-budget veto that would actually pull back on the attempt to try to eliminate those penalties if people violated public health orders, because those public health orders, I mean, when you think about going back to March, those were the things that shut down schools, those were the things that shut down businesses.

These, DeWine felt were important tools that he could use to try to slow the growth of the virus, the spread of the virus, and so he felt that if the legislature had to weigh-in each and every time, and legislature doesn't always move it to top speed, needless to say, that that would really make it very difficult to slow down the pandemic.

And I apologize, my cat is behind me.

I'm at home, (laughing) so my cat is jumping up and down in my studio here.

- Well, and it's interesting too, because as you said, the Governor tends to be, would have been seen in the past as being pretty conservative, but right now he's a very moderate person, at least in the eyes of some of the legislature.

So, when we come back, let's talk a little bit more about some of the other unfinished business, 'cause there's one big thing looming out there, which I know when we talked the last time, we said school funding, the impression we were getting outside of Columbus was that that was going to sail through.

Obviously, it has not sailed through, and they're going to have to go back and rehash that.

So, we can talk about that when we come back.

We'll be back in just a moment with Karen Kasler here on, "The Journal," WBGU PBS.

Thank you for staying with us here on, "The Journal."

Our guest is Karen Kasler.

You know her as the host of, "The State of Ohio" which you can see here at WBGU PBS every Sunday.

One of the things, Karen, that we talked about a month or so ago, when we were kind of wrapping up the legislative year in Columbus, was state school funding, and it was thought that there was a plan in place that a Democrat and a Republican, both from the House and the Senate, had kind of come together with this, what they believed was a plan that would pass muster, and it did in the House, but then it never really got any traction in the Senate.

So, talk a little about where school funding stands again in the state of Ohio.

- Well, it did pass overwhelmingly in the House.

It passed by a huge margin, and this was considered be a crowning achievement for John Patterson, the Democrat who was leaving office.

He was term-limited, and interestingly enough, he was diagnosed with COVID around that time, and ended up in the hospital, so this was a big accomplishment for him as he was leaving office.

The other half of that bill was Cupp, as in Bob Cupp, the Speaker of the House.

So, this is a priority for the House, definitely, to get it passed.

And this was the biggest overhaul we've seen in school funding, really since the Supreme Court decisions in the nineties, and it really would have changed the formula by which schools are funded, and make some major changes in some things that aren't working in the formula, because really about 80% of Ohio's schools are not getting the money that the formula says they should get.

They're either getting less than the formula says they should get, or they're getting more than the formula says they should get.

So, it's pretty much agreed that the formula is broken, but the question is how to fix it, because you do have schools that feel that they should be getting more money from the state, especially wealthier school districts that contribute a fair amount of money to the state coffers.

So, that was one of the reasons why the bill was pretty much dead on arrival when it got to the Senate side.

Now, there's been a lot of talk about trying to incorporate pieces of that Cupp/Patterson school funding proposal into the budget that's coming up.

But another part of that is that that particular formula, if you went ahead and enacted Cupp/Patterson, it would take about $2 billion more than the state already spends on public education to fully fund it, and that money is simply not there.

And so that's going to be the question that continues to dog state lawmakers, as they're trying to figure this out, is how do you fund school funding, which advocates have said has been underfunded for many years, when the cost is that great, and there are so many other priorities that you also have going on?

- Yeah, and that seemed to be the case I know when we talked, that the Senate was balking at, where is the money going to come from?

Which always seems to be the case with school funding, no matter what the formula, the plan, because none of them ever come back and say, "We need to spend less money."

There's always an increase, which as you said, a lot of the schools believe they should be getting more money.

Some schools are getting more than they thought they would get.

So, the formula is broken, once again, but finding the right mix, and being able to fund it seems to be the issue that is chronic with this, and it's going to be for them to deal with again.

- Well, and the struggle too is the cost of educating a student, and that number has still never been put into any sort of law, and there are different costs to educate different students.

I mean, students in poorer districts often show up to school who are further behind, they need more help to catch up to their wealthier counterparts.

How do you build that into the formula?

You have situations in rural areas where school districts, the transportation costs are huge.

And also some of the same issues apply there where these students come to school disadvantaged, they're economically disadvantaged.

And so trying to equalize those things as the Supreme Court decision said, it's gotta be fair and equitable.

How do you do that?

And that's been the struggle for, you know, coming up 30 years now.

- Yeah, and appears that it's going to at least take another year or so, or at least another legislative session to even see if they can kind of get their hands around it a little bit as well.

- Well, and there's also an interesting thing that's developing here, now that we have a new Senate President.

Larry Obhof of Medina, he was term-limited, he was the Senate President last time.

New Senate President, Matt Huffman of Lima, he is a strong advocate for vouchers, and so that's going to be an element that's gonna come into the whole discussion about school funding as well, because he proposed a bill that would expand the voucher program to anybody in Ohio.

And right now, vouchers are limited to people who are in school districts that are considered failing, though there was a whole increase in that number of school districts, right before the pandemic started.

There was an attempt to try to fix that and figure out how do you lower that number, or who really does get a voucher, but then schools closed because of the pandemic, so that whole discussion is coming up again as well.

- And that's a piece of that, as you said, that was fairly critical, and was upfront in that whole discussion, because there were a lot of schools that seemed to fall in that category that suddenly said, "Oh, you're underperforming," and the schools are saying, "Wait a minute, we're not," and yet they would fall in that category, and then that of course opened it up for the parents to elect to go somewhere else using that, voucher might not be the right term, but there was money made available for them to leave a district and go somewhere else.

But you're right, then the timing with the pandemic sort of rendered all of that sort of moot at that point in time anyway, but it's interesting though that the change in leadership could also now put another angle into this school funding debate that's, as you said, has been going on for like 30 years.

One of the other things that is in there too, House Bill Six, which has been now, the collection of the money has been held off by a court ruling, but House Bill Six, which again, was something that I think Bob Cupp thought he could get done in the last legislative setting, in terms of fixing the controversy around that, the way it was passed in the previous legislature.

Where does that stand right now?

I know that Mr. Cupp has proposed basically spelling one of the primary key figures in that whole discussion, but talk a little bit about where House Bill Six stands now in the legislature.

- Well House Bill Six was the sweeping energy law that included a bail-out of Ohio's two nuclear power plants, the Perry nuclear power plant, and the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, and this is something that legislators, Republican legislators especially, had been wanting for a while, because the nuclear power plants in Ohio, like in other States, were saying that they needed some sort of subsidy to keep going, and that nuclear energy should be a part of the state's overall energy portfolio.

So, this bill not only bailed out the nuclear power plants, it also bailed out two coal-fired power plants, it changed the energy efficiency programs that utilities were running.

And the bailouts, it should be said, that money would come from every single Ohio electric rate payer.

Not just people who were with First Energy, which was the previous owner of the two nuclear power plants.

The ownership's now been transferred to a company that was a subsidiary of First Energy.

Now it's completely on its own.

It's called Energy Harbor.

So all of this together, was part of this scandal that broke last summer, a $61 million bribery scandal.

Federal prosecutors say that bill was passed because of basically a pay-to-play scheme that included Republican Speaker, Larry Householder, at the time, the former Chair of the Ohio Republican Party, Matt Borges, and a couple of lobbyists, and an aide to Householder, and also a utility that's widely believed to be First Energy, though it's never been said.

So at that point, Larry Householder was removed as Speaker, but he still retained a seat in the legislature, and he was actually reelected in November.

And then toward the end of the legislative session, lawmakers apparently ran out of time to do something about House Bill Six, even though speaker Bob Cupp, when he became Speaker, said it was a priority.

So, like you said, there was a court case that did actually pull back on those charges, so Ohio rate payers are not paying those subsidies right now, but that could change at any moment.

So lawmakers do have to figure out do they want House Bill Six to stay as it is, even though it's the centerpiece of this federal prosecution or do they want to change it in some way?

And Governor Mike DeWine has said that he wants it to be changed.

He likes the policy, but he says that the bill itself is tainted.

- Yeah, so it's almost as if they could put together the same bill with almost the same language, pass that, and then everybody would be happy, assuming that there were no, you know, alleged shenanigans, as has sort of really, as you said, tainted House bill Six all along.

That yes, the policy seems to be, there seems to be agreement on that to some degree, but it's now the mechanism that allegedly took place, to get it approved, so that that's hanging over it.

- It's also a lot of the elements that are in there.

Like I said, the elimination of energy efficiency programs.

I mean, that's something that Democrats were very concerned about.

And so there's a real struggle here over what to do with the bill.

Does it really lower people's overall costs?

Which some Republicans have said it does.

What does it actually do to energy in Ohio?

And I think that there, you know, you could argue that there wasn't time to really discuss this because lawmakers were actually campaigning for their own reelections at the end of 2020, but that's a discussion that I think that, at least I hope that we're going to see in the next couple of months as they decide to do something with House Bill Six, but that remains to be seen.

- Okay, well, we come back there's a couple of other pieces of legislation out there, and some other things that the Governor also had a little problem with that the legislature did last session as well.

So, we come back, we can talk about those with the Karen Kasler, the State House Bureau Chief, and also host of the program, "The State of Ohio."

Back in just a moment, here on, "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us here on, "The Journal."

Our guest is Karen Kasler, you know her as the host of the program, "The State of Ohio," which is seen every Sunday here on WBGU PBS.

One of the pieces of legislation, which the Governor and the legislature kind of went back and forth.

Governor DeWine put forth his ideas on gun management, whatever you want to call it.

I don't wanna say gun control, but gun management, firearm control, whatever, and the legislature came back with something the Governor wasn't really pleased with, but he went ahead and went along with their version, their legislation this time.

So, talk a little about Stand Your Ground in Ohio, and the unease that the Governor had, although he did sign it when it crossed his desk this time.

- Yeah, this is a bill that would remove the duty to retreat from a person who feels threatened, when they're in a public place, before using deadly force.

Because right now the duty to retreat has been removed, if you're in your home, or in your car.

That's the Castle Doctrine essentially.

So Stand Your Ground allows you to not have to have that duty to retreat before using deadly force when you're in a public place.

That was something that was very concerning, especially to Democrats, and especially to Democrats who represent people of color, because this has been a bill, I mean, you might recall the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

George Zimmerman used the Stand Your Ground law as his defense, and was acquitted.

And so I spoke with Kyle Koehler, the Republican from Springfield, who was responsible for putting that provision into the bill that passed, and he said that this is something that brings up Ohio in line with 35 states, and that this just clarified some things, but DeWine, like you said, really had some reservations about this.

At first it seemed like he was going to veto it, because he wanted lawmakers to pick up his bill that he proposed after the Dayton shootings.

That would have, for one thing, expanded the reporting of people who were not allowed to have guns to state and national databases.

He ended up signing it.

He had said in 2018, when he was running for governor, that he did support Stand Your Ground, so that does explain why he did sign it, but I talked to Kyle Koehler right before this armed march that was supposed to happen this past weekend at the State House.

He said he was pretty concerned, in the environment that we live in right now, even though Stand Your Ground is not to take effect for 90 days till after the Governor's signature, he was pretty concerned with what was happening, and all that's going on, that this was not a good time for such a thing to happen.

I mean, there's heightened security at the State House, and nothing did happen, but when the sponsor says he's very concerned, I thought that was very interesting.

- Yeah, that is because if the, yeah, as you said, the sponsor of the bill says well, maybe the timing hasn't been what they would like, the fact is, as you said, it's going to become law.

His concern obviously was that people would believe it's law already, and that could create other issues around, you know, some of these demonstrations and marches and things like that.

You mentioned security at the State House.

How is it different than it was when we talked in December?

Is it radically different at this point?

- Radically different just in the last week.

And again, this relates to these planned armed marches that were supposed to happen on 50 state capitals over the last weekend before the inauguration.

They didn't happen for the most part.

I mean, there were events, there one was one at the State House, and it did feature people who were carrying weapons, but there were no incidents.

But the security, I've been doing this job now for 17 years coming up in March, and I've never seen security like this.

I've never seen security like this for inaugurations, or for anything else.

This was really, really surprising.

The number of State Troopers that were there, the number of Ohio National Guard that were there, the fencing that was surrounding the State House it was pretty intense.

- Now, for those of us who have not been to Columbus for awhile, are there metal detectors at the State House that people pass through on their way to entering the State House, or entering the the chambers there at the legislature?

- It's interesting.

The State House instituted metal detectors back in 2015.

And I pointed out on Twitter that Representative Steve Stivers of Columbus, Republican Congressman, had claimed that he thought that the metal detectors installed in the Capitol were unconstitutional.

And yet again, the State House has had metal detectors since 2015, there are metal detectors at airports, at courthouses, at schools, and so the constitutional question seems to be largely answered, I would think.

But yeah, the security of the State House has gradually changed over the last couple of years.

When I arrived 17 years ago, you could pretty much walk into the building at any time.

Now, there are only a few entrances open, and actually the State House was closed most of this week because of concerns about further protests that could turn violent.

But yeah, the security is much more stepped up.

And I think that's one thing in this whole discussion about armed marches, and protests, and the insurrection we saw at the Capitol is the access that people are losing to buildings where government is done.

I think that it's sad that you can't go in and see your government at work, your tax dollars at work as easily as you once could.

- And that is a sad situation, because transparency, openness is one of the hallmarks of a democracy, and a republic, and you're right.

We have somehow, in a very unfortunate way, the very people who I think are asking for transparency, openness, want access to their government, in some cases, a small, very small minority has taken that away from not only themselves, but everyone else in the process.

So, we'll have to keep following that as well.

- Karen that's gonna wrap it up for us today.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, and we'll check in with you over the course of the next few months, as things on kind of unroll in Columbus, down there, with regard to legislature and Governor DeWine.

So, appreciate your time with us today, and we'll talk to you again soon.

Thanks for being here.

- And I hope next time I won't be at home, and I apologize for my cat, Magnus, who's made a couple of appearances, but this is the time we live in.

- Yeah, this is the world we live in right now.

So, no harm, no harm at all.

You can check us out at wbgu.org, and of course you can watch us every week on, "The Journal," Thursday nights at eight o'clock on WBGU PBS.

We will see you again, next time.

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