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Happy new fiscal year.

The state has a new two year budget and as always, there's a lot in it.

We'll run down the details.

And so the process of drawing new maps for lawmakers and Congress and the Ohio State House gets underway under a new process and with little time to spare.

We'll have more on that all this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler nearly two hours past the midnight deadline on Wednesday, Governor Mike DeWine put out a statement saying he signed the two year seventy five billion dollar state budget while striking out 14 items.

State House correspondent Jo Ingles has details of the budget and of those vetoes.

The vast majority of things we agree with this legislature.

We have a common mission.

It's a bipartisan bill.

We're very, very happy with.

The budget signed by governor to wine includes one point seven billion dollars in tax breaks and changes, including a three percent income tax cut, a new school funding plan based largely on 60 percent property taxes and 40 percent income changes in the step up to quality program for child care providers who serve families getting state assistance and direct state funding of vouchers, rather than the money coming from school districts budgets.

As kids leave for charter schools, DeWine says the budget will put a record twenty point six billion dollars into K through 12 education, including five hundred sixty four million dollars in new funding.

But the more than a billion dollars for mental health counseling, food programs and other wellness initiatives wasn't separated in the budget, but was folded into the overall formula.

And the budget doesn't include language that phases in the fair school funding plan over six years, which means future lawmakers are not obligated to it and to step up to quality providers who were expecting to have to earn three stars by twenty twenty five, we'll only have to earn one and a committee will study the program.

The budget also puts half a billion dollars into cleaning up brownfields and demolition of blighted buildings.

Two hundred and fifty million dollars into grants for broadband and removes the ban on municipalities operating their own broadband programs.

170 million to the age to Ohio.

Lake Erie cleanup program.

More than a half a billion dollars for children's services, foster care and adoption program.

61 million for food banks, including 12 million in federal covid money, 15 million for law enforcement training and 10 million dollars for body cameras.

Most of Darwin's vetoes were technical.

But one big item of note, he vetoed the provision that would have raised covid-19 violations by bars and refunded them for their fines.

So it really is not fair or would not be fair for the 99 plus percent of retail people who did a phenomenal job, who played by the rules, did everything they could to keep their customers safe for us to turn around right now, and the few who had to be cited by our liquor control agents to say to them, there's no consequences for what you did, that would simply not be right, but it would send a horrible, horrible, horrible message to wine.

Also struck the proposal to allow the House speaker and Senate president to hire private attorneys and lawsuits over the new congressional and state House district maps.

He wrote that lawmakers intervening in lawsuits is virtually unheard of, and that's the duty of the governor and the attorney general.

Perhaps the veto with the widest ranging impact is the redo of the procurement process for Medicaid managed care organizations, which advocates said would have caused big delays.

We will provide.

Additional support under this plan, under this new building.

To children with complex behavioral health needs.

As well as adults with chronic conditions.

The item that we vetoed put at risk the overall put at risk the the really the overhaul of a carefully designed plan to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Ohioans.

That is why we took this action.

Families in the new Ohio Rise program for children with complex and costly behavioral and mental health issues has said that rebid could put their kids in danger.

But DeWine let stand nonmonetary provisions Democrats and other advocates had asked him to veto, such as preventing doctors who work with abortion providers who got certain state waivers to operate from working in hospitals that get state dollars.

He also didn't veto a ban on public private partnerships to do voter education and registration.

And he let stand a conscience clause allowing medical professionals to refuse to provide treatment if it violates their personal beliefs.

This simply puts in statute what the practice has been anyway.

And the practice has been if there is something that you, you know, let's say the doctor is against abortions.

No.

One, the doctor is not doing abortions.

If there's other things that maybe a doctor has a conscience problem with, it gets worked out.

Somebody else does those things.

So, you know, this is not a problem, has not been a problem in the state of Ohio.

And I do not expect it to be a problem.

The bill allowing college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness is part of the budget, though it takes effect immediately through an executive order DeWine signed this week.

The budget legalizes electronic instant bingo for fraternal and veterans organizations, which was part of the disputed sports betting bill in the Senate.

And a provision of the budget requires schools notify parents if sex education goes beyond abstinence only the financial items in the budget go into effect immediately.

The policy items become law.

In October, Jo Ingles Statehouse News Bureau.

The fiscal year ended with a surprise surplus, a windfall that's over three billion dollars more than the deficit the state had predicted months ago.

It will be closed for fiscal year twenty one, with tax revenues one point five billion dollars above the yearly estimate.

That was led by both categories of our sales tax, but that unexpected money can also be attributed to federal covid both direct money to the state as well as stimulus payments to individual taxpayers.

The budget also directs four hundred and sixty million dollars for grants to help bars, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues and other businesses hurt by the covid-19 pandemic.

This week, Duane also signed a bill setting up how to spend two point two billion federal COVA dollars from the American rescue plan that includes one and a half billion dollars to pay the loan.

The feds extended to Ohio to pay unemployment benefits when the states fund went broke during the pandemic.

The political reaction to the budget and to WINZ vetoes in particular, was swift.

The Ohio Democratic Party issued a statement that says he caved to GOP politicians and adds, leadership is about doing the right thing for the people you serve, regardless of politics or outside pressure.

Mike DeWine sold out working Ohioans to placate extreme members of his own party and state House special interests.

House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, who voted for the budget but called on the wind to veto parts of it, said in a statement he caved to pressure within his party, leaving intact dozens of misguided partizan provisions that threaten access to quality health coverage and child care priorities.

Giveaways to the wealthy overinvesting in Ohio's future and undermine our elections.

The governor's inaction means this budget continues to fall short of the opportunity for our future.

Ohioans wanted to see as we head into the second half of the year.

Democrats are committed to working toward that vision.

It's noteworthy that this budget was crafted by majority Republicans and only one voted against it.

But thirty of the forty three Democratic state lawmakers voted for the budget, with twelve of thirty eight House Democrats voting against it.

And Democratic Senator Teresa Fedor providing the lone no vote in the Senate.

Most Democrats cited the school funding formula as the reason for their yes vote.

But those who voted no said they were concerned about the language on abortion access, the medical conscience clause and other provisions they viewed as overly partizan.

Ohio Republican Party chair Bob Podiatric issued a statement saying This is the most conservative budget in Ohio legislative history and added, While Washington Democrats are fighting to raise taxes, Ohioans are benefiting from the largest personal income tax cut in state history.

Not only does this pro-growth budget return billions of dollars to taxpayers, it ensures that our children have access to quality education, regardless of where they live.

This budget reaffirms what we already know.

Republican leadership works.

In other political news, venture capitalist and hillbilly L.G.

author J.D.

Vance has joined the crowded field of candidates vying for next year's Republican nomination for the US Senate seat now occupied by Rob Portman.

Vance made the announcement in his hometown of Middletown late Thursday.

The one time critic of former President Trump has taken a softer view of him in recent months and was at Trump's rally in Lorain last weekend.

Vance will bring a campaign war chest of more than 10 million dollars with him, including financial backing from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, a close Trump ally.

Bance joins Josh Mandel, Jane Timkin, Bernie Moreno, Mike Gibbons and some other lesser known candidates already in the race on August 16.

The states are all expected to get data from the US Census Bureau to start the process of redrawing maps for congressional districts.

Seven states will lose a congressional seat, including Ohio, going from 16 members to 15.

A few weeks ago, I moderated a discussion on how to redraw that map and the maps for Ohio State, House and Senate districts for the first time under a new constitutional process, first approved by voters in twenty fifteen and then a second approved in twenty eighteen.

And that will be dominated by one big uncertainty when it comes to the congressional map.

For a lot of people, the real question is going from 16 members of Congress down to 15 and what's going to happen with that?

So are we going to see Republicans and four Democrats in Ohio's congressional delegation now?

Who loses?

Who loses a seat?

Where do you draw that?

And so I want to throw this out to Jeff and David to jump in.

I'm going to go to a 12 three map.

We're going to go to an 11 four map.

Are we are we going to go even further down the road to more more partizanship here, these new maps?

Go ahead, Gen David.

Well, I'll start.

I mean, I certainly hope that we don't see a 12 three map, and the reason is because that's not proportional to the vote share for Ohio.

So in general, I think we all know that Ohio leans slightly more Republican, maybe fifty four percent, but for the last decade has had seventy five percent of those congressional seats.

That's because of gerrymandering those mapmakers set out to cement in a firm partizan majority and that it performed perfectly.

It didn't matter whether it was year that Obama won Ohio or Trump won Ohio.

We saw this 12 four map.

We didn't see any change.

My hope would be that the new congressional map is closer to a 50 50 split.

Slightly more Republican than Democrat would not be surprising.

And I also hope is that as voter preferences and actions change across the decade, that we see some seats changing hands.

And then we know that we have a far more fair and responsive map than we've had.

I think that's right.

First, thank you for having me.

It's really a pleasure to be here with within the League and Common Cause and groups in Ohio that have worked so hard on this issue for so long have really made change on behalf of voters.

And the work Alora has done on litigating partizan gerrymanders is just magnificent.

So the hope here would certainly be that Ohio gets a fair and responsive map for this next decade.

As as Jim was talking about over the course of the last decade, you had a map that did not budge.

It produced the exact same 12 four partizan breakdown for five straight elections.

And as we know, Ohio is not a seventy five twenty five state.

Maybe it's a fifty four or forty six state.

Right.

And you have had similar issues in the state legislature where gerrymandering really become such a problem is when you eliminate competitive districts, you make it so that the only election that matters is in the party primary.

You force politics to the extremes at all ends and then policymaking really becomes separated from the the public will at the same time that lawmakers are really insulated from the ballot box.

And that is a recipe for a real crisis in a representative democracy.

What are you likely to see in Ohio?

I think Jen is right on this.

There is certainly the chance that Republicans could look to draw a 12 three map.

They could try and draw Democratic districts around Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland and try and manipulate the rest of of of the state to 12 other solid or relatively safe Republican seats.

I think a fair map probably looks something more like a nine six map.

I don't think you're going to get anywhere close to that.

In reality, what we have seen around the country over the course of the last decade and what we hear from politicians is this redistricting cycle heats up again is that they are going to go for essentially whatever they think they can get away with on both sides, Democrats in Illinois and New York or are talking this way, as are Republicans who control that the process in in many of the same states, that they've controlled the process for the last couple of cycles.

We're not going to have the US Supreme Court any longer where the federal courts, they slammed that the door on partizan gerrymandering cases as a nonjusticiable political issue back in the rucho versus common cost case in twenty nineteen.

So it's going to really be left up to politicians to sort of work within these new guardrails of the twenty fifteen and the twenty eighteen amendments.

And what we've seen again around the country is that politicians work those guardrails as aggressively as they can.

And so the league and the ACLU and all of us in the media are going to have to be super attune to this process and and very, very watchful as it goes on.

And it's important to mention, I think there's a lot of talk about Ohio going for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but John's right.

I mean, it is only fifty three forty five that split.

Now, Biden only won seven counties, but those that represent two point seven million voters in Ohio.

So, you know, they're this idea that Ohio is totally one way or the other is not really the case when you look at the numbers here.

And that brings me to a question for a lawyer on the ACLU, Ohio's website, outlining four things that you should know about the new maps.

Is this point to think that the new redistricting process will inherently lead error, more representative maps would be a mistake.

Now, that's kind of depressing.

There were one point two million of Iowans who voted for changes to the congressional map drawing process, two point one million people who voted for change to the map drawing process.

And this suggests that maybe we won't get we're not guaranteed any changes at all, really.

Well, I think the question of whether you're guaranteed to change or not is an open one and it's one that we're watching, I think, as David said, you can still manipulate the guard rails to such an extent that you get a partizan map.

And the process certainly envisions the possibility of of ending up with a partizan map because both at the General Assembly process and in the process for a US Congress, you can pass a four year map so you can pass a map that everyone agrees only one party supports.

And if only one party is supporting a map, you have to ask yourself why.

And what we found through our litigation was the reason why is because the map was seriously gerrymandered and they're still really sophisticated ways in which you can take election results and then use that information to draw a map where you can guarantee an outcome.

And to kind of go back to something that both Jan and David said.

We do know in Ohio there is the possibility of drawing farer maps.

What we were able to do during our litigation is, in fact, give the court several options.

Up here are maps that could be drawn.

And in fact, we use the twenty eighteen amendment process and all the kinds of restrictions on how you draw maps to say here we've done what you should be doing to draw a map in Ohio and we're able to get X number of competitive seats and that's what the voters want.

They want a contest where at least the possibility of a win on either side is not predetermined and it's not electors picking their voters, but voters really picking their electors.

And unfortunately, there's still room for abuse in the process.

And that's just something we'll all we all are going to have to be watching.

I think it's really instructive when you look at what happened.

I'm sorry.

I think it's really instructive here to look at what happened in Pennsylvania in twenty eighteen after the state Supreme Court there overturned the congressional map that had been a reliable 13 five Republican map.

They said that it violated the free and fair election clause in the state constitution.

They sent them out back to the legislature to redraw and the legislature came back with a map that split.

A few were counties, kept more towns together, lacked the crazy shapes and districts of the previous map.

And the governor didn't quite trust the legislature.

So he brought in a professor and a moon Duchin at Tufts University, who runs really sophisticated computer programs that draw simple maps that can test all of the different possibilities that a map might look like.

And she read millions of potential sample maps there and found that the previous map was the most biased one that you could almost possibly come up with.

The new map was the second most biased.

So even though it looked better, it held more things together.

It still had the same predictable partizan results.

So that's the kind of thing you have to be looking out for.

I think when people whenever I put this out on Twitter or start talking about this, there are people who have their particular representative that they would like to see drawn out.

And everybody's got a different one, I guess.

But there are certainly some controversial ones that suggest I mean, you think of somebody like Jim Jordan, but, you know, he beat his opponent last time by thirty eight and a half points.

So drawing his district and drawing him out of there seems unlikely.

But also on the other side of this, the representative Congress, who has the biggest margin of victory every time, has been Marcia Fudge, a solidly Democratic district.

I mean, she beat her Republican opponent by 60 points.

So as these new maps are drawn and all these different things are broken down to the right, are you concerned that people will be disappointed if they don't see a dramatic change, if they don't see that eight to seven map or something that is more dramatic and they might think would work better or who's got a long history of gerrymandering?

Both Republicans and Democrats have done it because it is a human instinct that if your team is in charge and has power to want to solidify that and use your advantage to continue advantage into the next decade.

But here's the other thing, is that the people of Ohio demanded these reforms and now it's time for the people of Ohio to demand that map makers follow the letter and spirit of those reforms that are about transparency and public engagement and compactness and respecting local jurisdictional lines as much as possible and proportionality.

This idea that the sheriff should more closely mirror what we see and the general voting population, the minority party does have a little more power.

There was some encouragement for bipartisanship.

And finally, if none of these things work and we get really bad marks, there's an option to take this to the Ohio Supreme Court.

The commission that will draw the House and Senate maps has to propose them and hold at least three public hearings by September 1st.

State lawmakers have to draw the congressional map and hold at least two public hearings by September 30th.

Republican Senate President Matt Hoffman has said he thinks the state House and Senate maps likely will be short term for year maps because he doesn't think they will get agreement for minority Democrats.

But Hoffman has said he thinks the longer time line to draw the congressional map, even with one less district, will result in a 10 year map.

By the way, the city club has announced they will go back to in-person forums just after this Independence Day holiday.

The Columbus Metropolitan Club has been doing sessions in person for several weeks now, and that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at statenews.org and you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

We leave you this Independence Day weekend with images of a special flag on display in the statehouse rotunda.

This thirty six star flag was given to the owner of an iron foundry in Portsmouth during the Civil War as a gesture of gratitude for his help in the production of cannonballs.

The flag flew over the Ohio State House in 1865 when President Abraham Lincoln was lying in state and was used for other special occasions, including the nineteen forty five memorial for President Franklin Roosevelt.

It was donated to the Ohio history connection in twenty sixteen.

It will be on display in the Rotunda through the summer.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medd Mutual dotcom slash Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at PorterWright Dotcom and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at O H E A dot org.