September 12, 1973

Ohio Assembly Plays Special-Interest Game

As the 110th Ohio General Assembly winds up its affairs this month I can't help but feel we would be better off to have skipped the whole thing.

To be sure, it finally authorized a new medical school in Northeast Ohio - a facility badly needed to help alleviate the shortage of family physicians.  Yet, even this is a long way from reality inasmuch as Governor John Gilligan and his legislative lieutenants are still balking at the cost - a curious reaction in view of their readiness to spend a whopping surplus for pay raises and jet airplanes.

As usual, the legislature weaseled a lot of special-interest goodies into law under cover of a mountain of routine work.

In the 1973 session, the Assembly introduced 1,414 bills and passed 207 of them.  This was the out put of 108 days of sessions.

Statistically, therefore, the Assembly was rather restrained.  In an election year the number of bills introduced and pushed through is substantially larger.

I don't wish to belittle the legislature, but the cost of law-making seems much too high for the amount of regulation actually needed.

An attorney friend confessed to me recently that it has become a near impossible task to keep the law books updated and the information noted, so rapidly do new laws and amendments pour forth.

In truth, we are over-regulated.  We are burdened with more laws than we can learn about and obey.

This deluge of law too easily camouflages self-serving legislation.

The legislators, for example, gave themselves TWO pay raises during the last session.  The first raise breezed through the Assembly so quickly that our representatives bellied up to the trough a second time.

Legislators' pay for 108 days of sessions thus was hiked from $12,750 plus mileage to $17,500 plus mileage - a 37 percent increase out of sight of wage guidelines imposed by law on the folks back home.  Not bad for part time work!

Of a more insidious nature are those bills quietly steered through the Assembly that lay the ground work for state control of local schools.

Representative Edward Orlett (Dem, Dayton) sponsored the bill that now authorizes payroll deductions for political purposes for school employees.  Just imagine the howls of indignation if a similar law had been passed authorizing political check offs for management employees of private industry!

State Senator Oliver Ocasek (Dem. Akron) authored a new law prohibiting members of county boards of education from serving on, joint vocational school boards, though still allowing local school boards to do so.

On their face, these two laws seem innocuous enough - unless you are aware that the Ohio Education Association has declared itself a "militant union organization" whose aim is "state control of local schools."

Then the two or three "little changes" affecting local education pushed through each year by the OEA lobby are seen as drops of water wearing away the 200-year-old granite foundation of our school system.

Orlett's bill now places a powerful statewide economic tool in the hands of OEA leaders.  Does anyone doubt that this wad of money will be used any differently than the "voluntary" wage check-offs from other union members for liberal Democrat causes?

Ocasek's bill probably is the death blow of county school boards - a situation long sought by liberal educators.  The latter want giant, centralized "education centers" controlled from Columbus where the newly legalized OEA slush fund can best influence legislators.  The county school board was the last vestige of school administration larger than the local school board to stand between parents and state bureaucracy.

Most bills in the legislature are routine and passed by votes of something like 70 to 10.  Only about one bill out of ten is controversial enough to spark debate, and the vote on these is usually along party lines.

It seems to me, therefore, that our Assemblymen could find the time - and should have the courage - to consider a few more meaningful pieces of legislation.

Where, for example, is the tax reform promised by Governor Gilligan and other incumbents during the last election if we would save the state income tax?  We saved the tax and it continues to pile up surpluses - $118 million at last accounting.  Wouldn't a little property tax relief be in order?

Where is a genuine political ethics bill?  The statesmen were somewhere else when the Assembly voted to OMIT a proposal to prohibit political kickbacks.  The sugar-water bill finally adopted by the Assembly is nothing more than window dressing for "politics as usual."

Now, don't get me wrong.  I think most legislators are sincere and dedicated.  It just gravels me to see so many of them playing the special-interest game.

For this I blame the voters.  It is human nature, I suppose, to put our own desires ahead of the total good.  On the whole, we elect the kind of legislators who reflect our innermost wishes.  Yet, our elected representatives must have a larger view of law if this state and this nation are to endure.

The 110th General Assembly muffed this responsibility.  We can only HOPE the 111th will do better.

Author: Lindsey Williams