It's time to repeal all the remaining tainted provisions of HB 6: Editorial

Four years ago this month, the Ohio General Assembly passed House Bill 6, a pro-utility bill that spawned the biggest Statehouse scandal in 220 years of statehood.

Yet most of HB 6 remains the law of Ohio, which, plainly put, isn’t just a disgrace -- albeit in a state whose legislature seems incapable of embarrassment -- but also a burden to electricity consumers and a blot on Ohio’s environment.

As it is, ex-House Speaker Larry Householder, a Perry County Republican, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his role in pushing HB 6 to passage in July 2019.

The bill’s best-known feature: Authorizing a billion-dollar bailout of two money-losing nuclear power plants then owned by Akron’s FirstEnergy Corp., including Greater Cleveland’s Perry plant. With the help of some Democratic votes, Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives and Ohio Senate passed HB 6, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine immediately signed it into law, on July 23, 2019.

The bill’s prime sponsors were Rep. Jamie Callender, of Concord, and then-Rep. Shane Wilkin, of Hillsboro. (Voters have since promoted Wilkin to the state Senate.)

In July 2020, a year and a week later after DeWine signed HB 6, a federal grand jury indicted Householder, former Republican State Chair Matthew Borges, three other Statehouse figures and a 501(c)(4) entity known as Generation Now. Grand jurors accused the defendants of a $60 million scheme to pass HB 6 for FirstEnergy’s benefit.

Then in March 2021, the General Assembly passed, and DeWine quietly signed, a partial -- very partial -- repeal of HB 6. The repeal bill is known as HB 128, and it is highly selective in what it does.

True, 2021′s partial repeal did junk HB 6′s nuclear power plant subsidies -- something the plants’ new owners didn’t oppose. And the 2021 bill repealed a part of HB 6 that had let FirstEnergy boost how much it collected from ratepayers even if power usage was flat or down -- regulatory mumbo-jumbo called “decoupling.”

But as cleveland.com’s Jeremy Pelzer also reported, 2021′s partial repeal left untouched parts of HB 6 “gutting Ohio’s energy-efficiency programs and renewable-energy mandates, [and requiring] statewide subsidies for two coal plants -- one in Indiana, one in Ohio -- owned by a consortium of [Ohio electric] companies” (Ohio Valley Electric Corp., of which Columbus-based American Electric Power Co. owns the largest share ).

 
First, Ohio must again require energy efficiency- and renewable energy mandates: Anything less amounts to environmental suicide. Yet the parts of HB 6 that undercut energy efficiency and renewable energy are still the law of Ohio. That’s unacceptable.

Also utterly unjustifiable are the coal-plant subsidies HB 6 still imposes. According to the Ohio Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents residential ratepayers in front of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Ohioans are paying more than $130,000 a day -- since Jan. 1, 2020, a total of nearly $166.2 million -- to cover the plants’ losses. Moreover, a study sponsored by the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association found that Ohioans will have paid $850 million in coal plant subsides by 2030 if HB 6 remains as-is.

Now pending in the General Assembly is a measure (House Bill 120) sponsored by Democratic Reps, Casey Weinstein and Sean Brennan to repeal the coal plant subsidies and require the refund of the amounts already collected from customers.

But thanks to a parliamentary maneuver, the Weinstein-Brennan bill has been bottled up -- for now -- by House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Kitts Hill Republican whose district includes Gallia County.

 
The bill had been stuck in the House’s Public Utilities Committee. But the bill’s backers had been circulating a “discharge petition” to free the bill from the committee and send the measure directly to the House floor for an up-or-down vote.

 
But on June 20, when the petition had garnered 22 of the required 50 signatures, Stephens “recalled” the Weinstein-Brennan bill from the Public Utilities committee to the Rules and Reference Committee, which Stephens chairs. Recalling the bill to Rules and Reference had the effect of freezing the petition effort for 30 days because House rules say a bill can’t be discharged by petition till it has been lodged in a committee for at least 30 days.

As it happens, one of the coal-fueled power plants HB 6 forces Ohio ratepayers to bail out (Kyger Creek) is in Gallia County. OVEC reports the plant has 232 employees and an annual payroll of $24 million. The Census reports that Gallia’s poverty rate is 16.4%. (Statewide, Ohio’s poverty rate is 13.4%.)

Stephens’s likely concerns, as a practical politician and the district’s representative, are understandable.

But as a matter of fairness and legislative transparency, the question of subsidizing the Gallia County plant should be debated on its own, in separate legislation.

Meanwhile, it’s long past time to wipe HB 6 from Ohio’s slate, which was and remains bad for Ohio’s environment, and consumers, and whose passage was a textbook illustration of Statehouse scheming. It’s time to pass the Weinstein-Brennan bill.

Now.