Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
Busybody Senate’s
budget busts home rule: editorial
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Tucked into the Senate-passed version of Ohio’s proposed budget is yet
another assault on municipal home rule in Cleveland and all Ohio cities
and villages. A Senate-House conference committee must delete that and
other nonbudget riders before conferees clear the budget for final
passage.
At issue is the city’s Healthy Cleveland plan. The Plain Dealer’s
Reginald Fields reported from Columbus that GOP senators -- at the last
minute and at the behest of the restaurant lobby -- wedged into the
budget a ban on the ability of local governments to regulate fast-food
ingredients.
Plainly put, state Senate Republicans want to veto City Council’s April
decision forbidding restaurants, beginning in 2013, to use trans fat
cooking oils.
Leaving aside for the moment the home-rule question, this is yet
another brazen example of Statehouse logrolling -- wrapping into a
must-pass bill (the budget) a measure (the Cleveland override) that
might never pass on its own.
The sponsor of the trans fat preemption, Sen. Scott Oelslager, a North
Canton Republican, offered the stock excuse floated every time Columbus
politicians weaken city and village self-government to placate campaign
donors: “There shouldn’t be a [local] patchwork . . . there should be
uniform regulation [statewide].”
But this no-regulation amendment is exactly the opposite of what the
elected representatives of the people of Cleveland voted for. That’s
not “uniformity.” That’s a Columbus veto of a Cleveland decision.
Obviously, powerful forces -- national fast-food chains, predatory
lenders, the handgun lobby -- don’t like local self-government in Ohio.
Statehouse Republicans, who have run both General Assembly chambers for
15 of the last 17 years, obviously don’t like local self-government,
either. But for 99 years, local self-government is what the Ohio
Constitution has decreed.
It is of course heartening (and rare) that Ohio’s suburban, rural and
increasingly downstate Republican senators are taking an interest in
Cleveland. But as to municipal management, that’s why Ohioans elect
mayors and councils -- so local people, who know local needs, make
decisions locally, not in a lobbyist-choked Statehouse.
The Senate and the House should instead plump up state aid to local
governments from the rock-bottom levels the draft budget sets. That’s
the legislature’s authentic constitutional duty: to empower, not
emasculate, local self-government in Ohio.
Read it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
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