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A historic week at the state House is a former speaker is kicked out of the House as the economy recovers from the pandemic.

Businesses say they're still struggling to find employees, but workers say there are reasons for that.

And there are two very different plans to fund schools in the budget from the Ohio House and Senate.

A school funding expert is here to answer questions about the financial data in each of them all this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler for the first time since the Civil War, the Ohio House has removed a representative who was reelected to a seat last fall.

The House voted 75 20 one to expel former speaker and now former representative Larry Householder, who's facing trial on charges that in pushing for a sweeping energy law, he was part of the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history, charges he has denied.

And the whole thing happened after months of discussion.

But just a few days after, two of householder's fellow Republicans in districts surrounding him introduced the bill to remove him.

All but one of those who voted against the expulsion were Republicans.

And many had supported Householder in his bitter fight to unseat former Speaker Ryan Smith in twenty nineteen.

That vote made Householder the third House speaker in a one year period.

Many who oppose the expulsion say Householder has not been convicted of a crime.

Householder became the first person in almost 60 years to serve as speaker.

Two separate times did not go down without a fight.

He testified against the bill in committee.

He spoke in his defense on the House floor and talked with reporters at length after he was expelled, an action he says was illegal because he did not commit disorderly conduct.

It's easy for me to tell the truth.

And, you know, there's been a lot of allegations made, those that have been around for a while now that I went through a similar situation when I was speaker in 2004 and it took 18 months to sort out.

At the end of the day, they found that the allegations were false.

And this is going to have the same result.

And, you know, some people some people take issue with me saying it's politics.

If you would have went through this process with me over the last several days, you would know it's politics.

This was all backroom discussions and backroom deals and Republicans getting the Democrats and and folks that are green energy Republicans that linked up with you people on the other side of the aisle.

And I have reason to believe that there's others involved at a higher level, but I'm not going to discuss that right now.

Householder came to the speakership for the first time in 2001 by working with Republicans in contested primaries to gain support as then speaker Jo Ann Davidson had planned to turn the gavel over to the late Bill.

Harris, who was later Senate president in twenty nineteen household, became speaker by building a coalition of Republicans and Democrats.

He was removed from leadership last summer after becoming the second speaker since twenty eighteen to be under FBI investigation, and it was the second time that he'd been under FBI scrutiny, though no charges were filed in that investigation into campaign contributions in 2004.

Householder's says he's going to travel the state and talk to voters, opening the door to another run for office.

And he says he'll be speaking out, saying those who didn't like Public Citizen householder well, really not like private citizen householder, but householder's also awaiting trial on those federal corruption charges to defendants.

And the five, once before he ran, have agreed to plea deals.

One of the defendants, lobbyist Neil Clark, died by suicide earlier this year.

The utility accused in the case, widely believed to be first energy, has made major changes to its operation and lawmakers to repeal the nuclear power plant subsidies that were at the heart of the energy law known as House Bill Six.

Householder and former Ohio Republican Party chair Matt Burgess have maintained their innocence.

Ohio's unemployment rate is lower than it was before the spike from the pandemic help wanted, and now hiring signs are common sites, especially restaurants and retailers, and some businesses are actively advertising.

They'll pay well over Ohio's minimum wage of eight dollars and 80 cents, along with signing bonuses.

So why aren't they finding workers?

State House correspondent Jo Ingles looked into that.

I worked there goes Brandon Joyce worked in a Cleveland area restaurant before he was laid off last spring.

So, yeah, I'm never going to go back to work in restaurants.

I'm never going to go back back to work in the restaurant industry here.

And I think it's disgusting and offensive that anyone would expect restaurant workers to after the way that they've been treated for the last year.

Also the rudeness from customers and aggressiveness and defensiveness about wearing masks that I've heard from people I worked with on top of being literally being exposed to a pandemic simply so people can get drunk or eat an expensive meal.

It's just it's deeply offensive.

Joyce had to wait weeks to get unemployment because the system to pay him and other people who didn't qualify for traditional jobless benefits had to be built from the ground up.

Then his checks were held for weeks before they were released to him because the state was investigating thousands of fraudulent claims.

Joyce is now attending a university to change his career.

Restaurants throughout Ohio report being short staffed, so are retail stores, some are paying well above minimum wage and even giving signing bonuses.

Cedar Point and Kings Island are paying up to 20 dollars an hour for some positions and cutting hours of operation because they cannot get enough workers.

And Republicans are blaming the three hundred dollars a week federal subsidy being paid to unemployed Ohioans for holding back economic growth.

And it's having an impact and slowing that recovery down.

The federal assistance, that extra three hundred dollars a week in federal pandemic unemployment compensation is in some cases certainly discouraging people from going back at this point in time.

The assistance was always, always intended to be temporary.

I talked with an employer who discussed this potential policy change of the three hundred dollar bonus, and they and he said that would help him justify expanding manufacturing in Ohio versus another state that they're considering.

These are very real decisions that employers are making.

You cannot create a job until you have somebody who's willing to take a job.

Next week.

Ohio and seven other states will stop sending those three hundred dollar checks to unemployed workers.

12 states have already ended those benefits.

And another five states will stop the checks in the next two weeks.

Nearly all are led by Republicans.

The federal program for the twenty five states that will continue to participate expires on Labor Day.

The new leader of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Republican former Congressman Steve Stivers, agrees with DeWine about ending those benefits.

And part of the problem is we're paying people to sit on the couch.

Three hundred dollars a week, plus the regular unemployment benefits.

That's the equivalent of a forty five thousand dollars a year job.

That's a problem.

But some workers say that's simply not the case.

Isabelle Albarado of Columbus says she couldn't go back to her job because she didn't have child care.

I was working remotely.

And then the the office requested me to return to work, but I couldn't find daycare within the time frame that they gave me.

So I basically lost my job.

When much of the state shut down last spring, Mr Howard's daughter lost her child care at a Montessori preschool.

In order to meet the requirements for covid precautions, they had to cut their early childhood program by 60 percent.

That was the exact number they told me.

And so they closed their toddler preschool and had fewer spaces open.

And at that point it was only going to be like academic year stuff anyway.

So I was already in a position of having to search for child care for the summer in order to be able to continue working.

Eleveld says she's been able to get some pandemic unemployment assistance throughout the year and she's just recently found child care.

But she's a self-employed social worker, so now she has to build a client base back up.

So it could be tough for a while.

And while the state says everyone who wants to get vaccinated can more than half of the state's population has not.

Some workers tell me they're afraid of going back to work in close spaces without a mask mandate because they have health conditions that could put them at greater risk if they should get covid Jo Ingles Statehouse News Bureau.

In a surprise to many Ohio lawmakers working on differences between the House and Senate, versions of the state budget will have more money to work with.

The Office of Budget and Management shows a surplus of more than one point one billion dollars, three billion dollars more than was estimated in a press conference where he also announced that the covid state of emergency that's been in place since March 20 20 will be lifted.

Governor Mike DeWine said it's a good problem to have.

And while he never advised lawmakers against a larger tax cut, he said this must be seen as one time money.

I believe in taking this, quote, extra money, which is one time money and must be looked at as one time money investing it either hold on to a.

Kind of bankert, so to speak, or and or putting into things that we know we're going to have to spend money on in the future, getting it maybe at a lower cost today and building our infrastructure back back up, it goes really to the quality of life.

It goes to be prudent about how we spend this money.

Speaking of money, the House and Senate budgets include very different ideas on what to do about school funding.

The House budget includes what's been called the Fair School Funding plan, a dramatic overhaul of the funding formula to be, and this is greatly simplified, 60 percent property tax values and 40 percent household income to determine state aid.

It will be phased in over six years at a cost of around two billion dollars on top of the ten billion dollars the state already spends on public education.

But most of that huge cost would be left to the next two budgets.

The Senate ripped apart that plan and went to a two year funding formula similar to the one the state uses now with some tweaks and more money toward education than in the House budget.

And there are real questions about the financial data in both of those plans because the money involved is a key factor in which plan will prevail.

Howard Fleder is a school funding expert with more than 20 years studying the way Ohio pays for public K through 12 education.

The point and it's something that we've lost the thread of in this state over the last 10 years or so is that the Durov decision, which was in nineteen ninety seven, I think, left a clear roadmap for what legislators in this state need to do with regard to school funding, and that they articulated the funding formula needs to be adequate and that the funding formula needs to be equitable.

And so we have lost the threat of the adequacy methodology that starts with this base cost per pupil.

And so the we have not used a methodology and objective methodology to figure out what it costs to educate a typical kid since 2011.

So that's 10 years ago.

It's time to get back to doing that.

And so the House has a methodology that gets them to about seventy two hundred dollars per pupil.

The Senate has a methodology that gets them to sixty one hundred and ten.

That's a big gap.

But they're both using methodologies, which is a big step forward.

Right.

We're returning to at least trying to address that issue.

And I think that's a really productive conversation for us to have.

It's not ultimately about what the dollar amount is.

It's about figuring out what does it take to educate the typical kid in the typical place.

And we are now having that conversation again.

And that is a big step forward.

But as the conversation is happening with these two very different plans, there are some real questions about where the financial data came from to develop these plans.

The senator, Senate Finance Committee chair Matt Dolan, sat in that chair a couple of weeks ago saying that he was concerned about twenty eighteen salary data for teachers in the House version of the budget and also about property tax value data that was outdated.

But you say the Senate plan is also using outdated data, right.

So Senator Dolen is correct that the House plan uses twenty eighteen data.

The Senate plan uses twenty nineteen data.

If you ask me.

They should both be using the most current data, which is 20 20.

So score one for the Senate by being one year more current than the House, I guess.

But they both ought to be using twenty 20 data as far as the property value and income data, that data is used to figure out the state and local share.

So the funding formula, the the adequacy part is what it costs to educate the different types of kids in the state.

The equity part is how the state decides how much local money goes towards that in each district and how much state money goes.

So that's the state and local share part of this.

And the House plan is using the most current data.

They did update that from what they had passed back in, you know, in House bill three of five last December.

That was the pattern.

That was the cut Patterson Fair School funding plan.

What they put into their budget is using the most current data.

The Senate plan, however, is using the data from the FBI eighteen nineteen biennium, which was, you know, we're in the twenty twenty one biennium.

So that data is now it's 14, 15 and 16 property values, 13, 14 and 15 incomes.

And the House plan is using the most current data, which is four years forward and all of that.

What's the implication and the possible effect of that if you carry that forward, let's say the Senate plan does get passed, what happens in the next budget?

So I think, you know, the formulas that both the House and the Senate use are different and the Senate uses a formula where all the districts are compared to one another.

So if you don't update, if you don't keep on top of the data, you know, and then you update it after several years, you're really going to jumble up those comparisons.

Right.

And so some districts are having big increases in property values, some not so much income changes.

It goes up more or less in some places.

And you you will end up with significant disruptions and you end up in for a couple pieces of a formula.

That, you know, if you some of the pieces of the formula, if you don't update the data and the targeted assistance component will cost more money.

And so if you don't stay on top of that, you're setting yourself up for trouble in the twenty four twenty five biennium when some of this data is going to be 10 years old.

And so there will be big differences in what districts are going to be getting from the state.

And I think it's going to there's going to be a significant cost hit at that point.

And in the House plan, they have avoided that situation in two ways.

One, their formula works a little bit differently.

It's simpler, and each district is based on its own, how it's changed among itself.

So it's not as disruptive, but they are using the most current data now with all of this attention on these two plans.

One thing that there is agreement agreement upon is that the current formula doesn't work.

80 percent of districts either get more money than they're supposed to or less money than the formula says they're supposed to.

But your analysis says that in the Senate plan, which is closest, it's closer to the current formula than the House plan.

One hundred and sixty six or one hundred sixty seven districts would get their funds capped and then two hundred eighteen districts would get their funds guaranteed.

That means still more than half of school districts would not get the money that the formula says they should get.

Right.

And so is the glass half full or is the glass half empty, Kiran.

So, I mean, that's you know, we shouldn't have any districts on the cap at all.

We shouldn't have a cap that started in twenty fourteen.

I think it was done probably for budgetary reasons.

But the cap inhibits stops the state from giving a particular school district all the money that it needs.

Not every district is on the cap, but too many are on the cap.

And there isn't anybody in this state that thinks that that should exist anymore.

The guarantee is.

But the cap number is down in the Senate plan from where it was two years ago.

And the number of districts on the guarantee is down.

Right?

They're both down.

So they're better than they were, you know, three years ago.

But they're still not where they need to be.

The guarantee, I think everyone can agree that the cap was maybe think of it as an experiment.

It was a failed experiment.

We should just get rid of it.

The guarantee is a little bit different that, you know, if you think about school funding, it's kind of like a living thing that changes over time and districts, their property values change, their income levels of their residence change, their enrollment changes.

The formula itself changes.

All those things mean that a district state aid could go up or down.

And so the guarantee is there to smooth things out.

And so we're always going to have districts on the guarantee just because we live in a dynamic world.

But we shouldn't have three hundred districts on the guarantee.

We shouldn't have two hundred districts on the guarantee.

You know, I mean, the best years we've had, I think maybe 50 to seventy five districts at a time on the guarantee and we shouldn't have districts on the guarantee for five, 10, 15 years.

Right.

So it's a transitional aid guarantee meant to smooth over the effects of changes.

It is not supposed to be a long term plan, but we'll always need something to prop up a relatively small number of districts, but not two hundred.

What I asked Senate President Matt Coffman about your report and the data.

And again, your report says that it uses property tax value.

The Senate proposal uses property tax values from twenty, fourteen, twenty, fifteen and twenty sixteen income data from twenty thirteen and student enrollment counts in teacher salary data from twenty nineteen.

So when I ask Senate President Matt Huffman about that, he said quote, I think that's false.

The data that was used by the Senate is actually newer data than was used by the fair school funding plan from the House and it said twenty eighteen data.

So we're still to that point.

I think if he's referring to the teacher salary data that's used to compute that based cost figure, I think he's right.

Right.

And I've tried to be careful to say yes.

Twenty eighteen is an improvement over the House's use of twenty eighteen.

I still think they're both behind.

They should be using twenty twenty.

But I think that, you know, I think I am right that they're using outdated property value and income data because essentially their plan goes back and reruns the fine nineteen funding formula.

And so they're still using that underlying data and they haven't updated it.

We did not have a funding formula in this biennium for twenty and twenty one because we froze it.

Right.

So we're the Senate plan for the next biennium is going back to the previous biennium.

Right.

So we're you know, we're we're using data that is at this point three biennials old four for next next time in their plan.

And like I said, I think that that sets you up for for trouble in twenty four.

Twenty five.

And I think, you know, that there's just in my mind there's there's not a good reason for either the House or the Senate plan or whatever they may work out in conference committee.

Whatever funding formula we have for the next biennium should use the most current available data that we have.

President have an all.

Have said that if the Senate plan is adopted, quote, they are not going to be surprises for local districts from the state government anymore, you're going to know you're going to be able to predict five or 10 years out what your likely funds are going to be from the state.

And he says that helps with local levies.

That's been Huffman.

And Dolan's point on this is that it's sustainable, it's transparent, it's reliable.

Is that how you see the Senate plan?

So I do disagree with that statement from the standpoint of the state and local share in index and that that the Senate plan uses.

I think that that we use that from 2014 through 2019.

I think it is much less predictable than the than the mechanism that the House plan is using, because like I said a couple minutes ago, the House plan is just taking you know, the way that that works is you're looking at the wealth of a school district in their income and their property value.

And you're just comparing it to how their wealth has changed over the last couple of years.

And the Senate plan ranks all the districts and they're intermingled.

And so if something happens that raises wealth in one part of the state, then it makes the other part of the state all of a sudden look poorer in comparison or vice versa.

We've we've got several examples that we saw over the previous six years of how unstable that can be.

I suspect that when President Huffman made that statement, he was referring to, I believe they think that their base cost approach is simpler and more predictable.

And so we could argue about whether it probably is simpler.

Is it more predictable?

I think that that's that's an that's an open question.

I think that the House's approach to that is more comprehensive.

So the school groups that you did this report for, they support the House plan.

And I want to ask you about the House plan and the overall cost of it.

I mean, it's been estimated that it could cost one point eight billion dollars more than the ten billion dollars the state is already spending on public education.

But that number is higher now, certainly because of the increase in the salary data from the newer salary data there.

Now, you've been following school funding for a very long time.

The House plan is a six year plan that would be phased in.

And very little of that money comes from this budget into that phase and most of that phase and would be left to the next two budgets to enact.

So how much do you trust future lawmakers to put a billion dollars in each of the next two budgets toward this House plan?

Well, that's a little bit of a loaded question.

So I, I my preference.

Right.

As I said, I've I've been an observer and a participant in school funding in this state for nearly 30 years.

I would like to I I think that the state has the money right now to put more forward in the upcoming biennium than honestly either one of these two plans does.

And so we just saw revenue estimates through through the month of May for this year that are nearly tax revenues or nearly one point two billion dollars ahead of where they were estimated before the pandemic.

You know, some some of that some of that may not be entirely sustainable, but we have that money right now to put towards the plan.

We don't know what the revenue situation will look like two years from now.

But a year ago, we were looking at a two point three billion dollar estimated reduction in revenues and we did not see that coming.

We are in Ohio and most of the rest of the states.

We are in much better economic position right now than anybody anticipated a year ago.

And I think that it's squandering an opportunity.

I'm not saying that they have to fund the entire plan up front, but I think that you can put we can afford to put more money into the formula of this biennium and then not risk running into some kind of a cliff a couple of years from now.

I think that there is a lot of latitude there to do that.

And as you said, you know, we don't we don't know what future legislators are going to do, but we do know that the funding formula has gotten behind, you know, in twenty, eighteen and nineteen, we increased that based cost by ten dollars per pupil each year and into twenty and twenty one.

We didn't increase it at all.

So that's four years where we've had hardly any increase.

We now have the revenue to kind of get caught up.

And if we use the right data, OK, I think we can get ourselves back on track in this biennium and then set ourselves up for what the next two will be, regardless of whether we have some kind of a downturn in the economy or not, I still think we'll be in a good position.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

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