Ohio Statehouse sprints to pass legislation ahead of lengthy break
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — State lawmakers raced to finish up some important, last-minute business late into Wednesday night before leaving Columbus for the summer break.
The General Assembly passed a capital budget, new fraud prevention regulations for Medicaid and SNAP and a resolution calling for photo ID requirements to be added to the state constitution. A deal on regulations for data centers, however, remains elusive.
Capital budget passes easily
The House quickly passed a $3.7 billion capital budget early in Wednesday’s session, sending it to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) for his approval. The money will fund facility upgrades and public works projects in all 88 counties, including renovations and pools, parks and trails.
State Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) ushered the budget bill to unanimous passage in the Senate last week. After considering requests from representatives, senators and the DeWine administration, Cirino said, “I think we ended up in a really good place, supporting all parts of the state, both the urban and the rural districts.”
After Senate passage last week, House Minority Leader Rep. Dani Isaacsohn (D-Cincinnati) welcomed the projects being funded under the capital budget, but criticized the underfunding of public services in the state operating budget, which funds all the agencies and departments of the state government. The larger operating budget passed in June 2025 and will be renegotiated next summer.
“We have seen cuts to basic human services that people in Ohio rely on,” Isaacsohn said. “We support those efforts to fund things in the capital budget but it is not nearly making up for the gap that we saw in the main budget last year.”
House passes troubled Medicaid fraud bill
Medicaid fraud prevention has been a thorny topic at the Statehouse in the last couple of weeks, but the House easily passed a bill making a number of reforms on Wednesday. Reforms include requiring home health care providers to clock in and clock out when they’re at a beneficiary’s home, and requiring those providers to be tracked via GPS.
Family caregivers who live in the same residence as the relatives they care for are exempted from the GPS tracking requirement.
The changes largely mirror the changes ordered by DeWine in May amid media allegations of fraud among Ohio’s Medicaid-funded home health care providers.
On the House floor, House Medicaid Committee Chair Rep. Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester) said the bill helps the state “identify fraud more effectively, improves accountability for how Medicaid dollars are spent, reviews programs to make sure they are serving for their intended purposes and holds bad actors accountable when they abuse our systems.”
Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney (D-Westlake) highlighted the ultimate bipartisan compromise after tumultuous committee debates, but criticized what she described as a rushed process with high stakes.
“Most, if not all, of the biggest concerns that could have delayed care, that could have a real impact on the most vulnerable citizens have been addressed and there is real safeguards,” Sweeney said. “We got to a good place, but again, we had two hours to read this and vote on it.”
The Medicaid reform language was added to Senate Bill 315—already passed by the Senate—requiring the use of electronic chip-enabled SNAP cards, also as a means of preventing fraud. The Senate concurred with the House changes to S.B. 315 late Wednesday night.
Voters to decide on voter ID requirements
By a vote of 60 to 34, the House approved Senate Joint Resolution 10—already passed by the Senate—that would put a referendum on the November ballot asking Ohioans to enshrine the state’s existing requirement for voters to present a valid photo ID at the ballot box in the Ohio Constitution.
Before voting on that resolution, the House concurred on a modified bipartisan bill—House Bill 472—that sought to help provide people experiencing homelessness with necessary state IDs. The Senate amended that bill to include a provision requiring voters to provide a copy of their photo ID when mailing in their absentee ballots.
House Speaker Rep. Matt Huffman (R-Lima) said some Republicans were reluctant to approve Senate Joint Resolution 10 until the ID requirement for mail-in ballots was passed first.
“You got to have photo ID for mail-in balloting unless the general assembly puts together another scheme,” Huffman said of the resolution. “So for a lot of reasons it was important to put together a scheme and certainly members were more comfortable knowing, OK, this is what’s going to happen.”
Rep. Christine Cockley (D-Columbus)—the co-sponsor for H.B. 472—asked to remove her name from the bill and criticized Senate Republicans for making the ID requirement changes.
“Senate republicans hijacked this well-considered language through a last-minute sub-bill,” Cockley said. “Ohioans are being surprised with legislation that turns people experiencing homelessness into political pawns.”
No agreement on data centers
The House and Senate failed to come to an agreement on expected legislation regulating data centers.
The Senate was expected to vote on a bill rushed through the committee process in the last couple of days. The bill would require data centers to document and report their water usage, put data centers in their own rate class under the Public Utilities Commission to protect other ratepayers from higher costs, and limit the percentages of how much data centers can receive in tax breaks.
Now the bill is in limbo over where the limit on those tax breaks should be.
In March, the House passed House Bill 646 to create a data center study commission, but senators modified that bill this week with new regulations on data centers. On Wednesday, Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) reiterated that he feels H.B. 646 would address many of the concerns voiced by Ohioans regarding the proliferation of data centers in the state.
But for the moment, the tax breaks—how big they should be or whether they should remain at all—remain a sticking point for members of the House Republican caucus.
“There were a lot of things in this bill that had to do with ratepayer protections and protections of Ohio’s resources, whether it be electricity or water or otherwise,” McColley said. “The House has to go through their process too and see what they can come back with.”
Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said some of her members are also “on the fence” about the size of the data center tax breaks.
H.B. 646 has been referred back to the Senate Energy Committee. Sen. Kent Smith (D-Euclid)—ranking Democrat on that committee—blamed Republican governors John Kasich and Mike DeWine for allowing the data center tax breaks to take billions out state revenue over the last decade.
“Tonight, Statehouse Republicans could have ended this tax giveaway, but they chose not to do so,” Smith said in a statement. “This is the latest example of the GOP supermajority looking out for billion-dollar corporations and not everyday Ohioans.”
The Statehouse is not expected to return to session until after the Nov. 3 general election.