03/06/2015

Legislative wrap up: ONA taking strong stands on tax reform, charter school proposals

By Dennis Hetzel, Executive Director

When you’re a lobbyist for the Ohio Newspaper Association, you wear two hats. One hat involves business issues as we monitor legislation that affects the financial health of not only our businesses but also our communities. The other hat involves open government issues. Legislators continue to look to the ONA for leadership before they make changes to open records and open meetings laws.

I’m not saying we always get what we want – obviously we don’t. But at least we’re at the table, and we don’t get blindsided very often.

Those two hats may seem incompatible, but usually they’re not. For one thing, strong journalism needs financially strong organizations. Otherwise, you are at risk to those who would try to damage you financially for doing the work that journalism sometimes requires. Every publisher – including me in a former life – knows what it means to take the heat from an advertiser angry about a story.

At any rate, here’s a status report on the business and open government measures we are actively following.

Tax reform: We oppose tax reform measures contained in House Bill 64, as outlined in my previous Bulletin column in detail. I want to reiterate that ONA members must not take this bill for granted for two major reasons.

First, it will negatively impact, potentially severely, all but the few members that are “pass-through” business entities that can take advantage of new tax breaks for small businesses. Members tell me the proposed 23 percent increase in the CAT (commercial activity) tax and .5 percent increase in all sales taxes will add thousands of dollars in new expenses. Remember that the CAT tax is on gross receipts, not income, so this particularly hits low-margin businesses. This also means your key accounts may have fewer dollars available for advertising.

More seriously, the expansion of the sales tax to lobbying, public relations and management consulting sounds benign, but the definitions are overly broad by miles. It would not be a problem for bureaucrats to include advertising in these definitions without legislative action. This language simply should not be allowed to remain in the bill.

We are involved in a group called the Ohio Service Industry Coalition that includes other media groups, manufacturers, accountants, lawyers, auto dealers and many others. We also testified about our specific concerns last week. (To read my testimony, click here.)

If you have not done so, please take the time to complete our brief member survey on the tax reform proposal. It really helps our efforts when our members engage.

Charter schools: To be blunt, Ohio’s regulation of charter schools has become a national embarrassment. Even pro-school choice supporters agree with that. You’ve all run stories about ghost students, failed schools, conflicts of interest, etc. Thus, we now have House Bill 2, which takes some steps toward cleaning up the situation.

At ONA, we frequently get complaints from education reporters about the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting meaningful information about how nearly $1 billion in public money is being spent by community schools.

We think HB2 is OK, but it doesn’t go far enough. We are pushing two amendment ideas that would release more detail on how public dollars are being spent and also mandate Sunshine Law training for community school officials – the same training public officials are required to take.

If you want to read anecdotes that reinforce why this is needed, check out my testimony that is planned for next week with real examples provided by our editors in Dayton and Akron. This is a fight worth fighting.

OhioCheckbook.com: We testified last week in favor of HB 46, which would take the terrific OhioCheckbook.com website unveiled by Treasurer Josh Mandel last year and require that future treasurers continue it. Mandel is working to include local government spending on this site.

Attorney fees: We are hopeful to get our legislative “fix” introduced to deal with an Ohio Supreme Court decision in 2014 that has made it all-but impossible to collect attorney fees in public records cases, even if the government agency broke the law. The decision is based on existing language in the law that wasn’t the legislative intent.

As always, you can follow all the bills we are tracking along with other legislative priorities by examining our Legislative Watch List in the “members only” area of our OhioNews.org website.