Ohio Senate

The Senate has made its own sweeping changes to Ohio energy policy through a substitute bill version of HB6 that continues to bailout nuclear power plants but avoids repealing renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.

Ohio’s two-year state budget is headed to a conference committee this week to work out significant differences between the House and Senate versions. There isn’t much time to deal, because the budget must be signed by Sunday night.

The Ohio Senate passed a budget last week that includes a set of high school graduation requirements, which could settle an issue that the state has been struggling with for years.

The final version of the Ohio Senate’s budget is expected Wednesday. While there will certainly be some proposals added in, some things are unlikely to change – such as the money going to the local government fund, which has been decimated over the last eight years.

Advocates are calling on the Ohio Senate to restore $36 million in funding for mental health and suicide prevention before they pass the state budget. That money was in the House budget but was cut in the Senate version.

Among the changes the Senate made to the House version of the Ohio budget was a $5 million boost to a program that funds centers that counsel pregnant women against abortion.

Republican Senate leaders say the budget they released yesterday is not the final product, but it does represent some of the changes they wanted to make to the House’s spending plan.

Republican Senate leaders have frozen the existing school funding formula in their version of the budget. So did the House, but it did add funding into services to help lower-income students. 

With the deadline to sign a new two-year budget a little over two weeks away, Ohio's state senators are releasing their proposal for that spending plan Tuesday. There are likely to be some changes from the $69 billion proposal that overwhelmingly passed the Ohio House last month.

A group of school districts that aren’t getting the money they say they are owed by the state’s school funding formula are threatening a federal lawsuit if the issue isn’t resolved.

Dozens of people lined up to voice their opposition to state takeovers of local school districts through the so-called Academic Distress Commission. The Ohio Senate is considering legislation that could repeal and replace the system that has been in place since 2015.