Inside Ohio Politics: 10 local lawmakers dealt powerful positions in Ohio legislature

Here are the committees that will be controlled by local lawmakers over the next two years:

In total, there are 27 standing committees in the House and 21 in the Senate, which oversee every single standalone bill the legislature considers. These committees are tasked with taking proposals and shaping them into well-vetted pieces of legislation ready to be voted on by the full chamber.

To do this, they consider testimony from bill sponsors making a case for their proposal; from citizens or advocacy groups outlining benefits in proponent testimony or pitfalls in opposition testimony (often heard on different dates); and from stakeholders filing interested party testimony to make sure some other angle is being considered.

Committees then tweak bills as they see fit, either through partial amendments or, in instances where a heap of changes are necessary, through substitute bills. Any changes to legislation in the committee process needs a simple majority vote of the committee.

Ohio’s committees are of varying sizes. While membership is bipartisan, Republicans have a supermajority in both the House and the Senate, so the party controls every committee by a substantial margin.

The placement of members is decided by leadership. Every member has various committee assignments. Some committee members enter that committee as a subject matter expert, others develop a proficiency on the topic by nature of partaking in hearings.

Montgomery County’s newest lawmaker, Rep. Desiree Tims, D-Dayton, told this outlet that every member has the chance to request the committees they’d like to be assigned to, but they don’t necessarily get what they want.

“You share your background and why you’re passionate about it and the potential impact it could have on your community. You sort of make your case,” said Tims.

Committee leaders

Each committee in Ohio is led by a Republican chair, picked by the House speaker or Senate president, who has considerable power in the system. Chairs have the unilateral authority to decide when to give a bill a hearing, when to stop holding hearings (effectively killing the bill), and when to hold a vote to pass the bill out of committee.

“Chairs are like the quarterback of the committee,” explained Montgomery County Rep. Phil Plummer, R-Butler Twp. “They keep the peace, they limit testimony, they set the standards.”

Plummer holds no chairman posts this General Assembly because of his leadership position as assistant pro tempore, third in the line of succession in the Ohio House.

Chairs are given authority to run their committees the way they see fit, to a point. For example, some chairs put a timer on public testimony to limit rambling. Some chairs, too, wield their authority over the rest of the committee if they see a bill differently than their fellow committee members.

“Chairs do it differently. Some chairs could overstep their boundaries and try to control policy, which I don’t like. Some chairs, if they don’t like it they won’t move it,” Plummer said.

This will be the first time chairing a committee for Montgomery County Rep. Andrea White, R-Kettering, who is tasked with the House Children and Human Services Committee.

“Being a committee chair is an opportunity to help members advance legislation, navigate differences of opinion, and give Ohioans the opportunity to be able to speak and have a voice in a public forum,” said White, who noted her belief that her committee members bring a breadth of experience “that will help us effectively address child development, human services and behavioral health issues to help keep our children, our families and our adults moving forward.”

For White, the goal is “to move bills as quickly as possible, while enabling all voices to be heard and conflicts to be aired and interested parties to be able to weigh in.”

Committee chairs have to balance a plethora of different factors, not the least of which being time. As a rule-of-thumb, the less controversial the bill, the quicker it can move through a committee.

There are some committees, however, that are magnets for controversial bills. Montgomery County Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., is set to return as chair of the Workforce and Higher Education Committee, which is already tasked with overseeing a piece of legislation that last year sparked a seven-and-a-half hour opponent testimony hearing in the Senate.

Young is the House’s main backer of that legislation, which he reintroduced earlier this month. The bill, House Bill 6, is a wide-ranging university campus reform bill that would, among many other things, block public university staff from striking; ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and mandate universities to affirm a freedom of political thought. It will be vetted through his own committee.

Young, a chair that sticks to a strict time limit, said there won’t be any such marathon hearings in his committee but conceded that controversial bills do take “a tremendous amount of time.”

“The way I try to look at it is: Everyone should be heard, but if it’s the same testimony, the same content, each and every time, you have to weigh that with your (Democratic) ranking member or your other members and say, ‘Look, we’ve heard the same commentary with seven or eight straight speakers,’” Young said.

Chairs that deal with controversial legislation, like Young, often note that just because a bill’s oppositional testimony outweighs its proponent testimony, “it doesn’t mean that there’s no one supporting the bill.”

Young said he weighs what he hears in committee with what he hears from his district and the communication his office receives from the public. He believes people are often afraid to publicly support controversial legislation.

In general, Young said he views it as his duty to take the necessary steps to help a lawmaker get their bill into law.

Once a bill is passed by a committee, it is up to the Senate president or House speaker to actually bring that bill to their respective chamber for a vote, which is another factor committee chairs need to consider when investing time and resources into legislation.

“For me,” said Sen. Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, who chairs Senate Health Committee, “it’s my thoughts on the bill, my committee’s thoughts, and also the (Senate) president, and taking all that into consideration with full knowledge that, if it’s something that the president doesn’t really care for, then it won’t get a vote on the floor. Ultimately, that’s the goal of any bill that you pass out of committee.”

Overall, the expectation is that there will be considerably more legislation passing through committees over the next two years than the previous two, given an apparent harmony between the Republican House and Senate leadership that was previously disjointed.

Other leadership

In terms of committee leadership, each has a Republican vice-chair just below the chair. The top Democrat on any committee is called a ranking member. All three get an annual stipend of $6,750 for their work on the committee — except in the House and Senate Finance committees, which have higher stipends.

Lawmakers cannot receive more than one committee stipend, however. So, Sen. Willis Blackshear, Jr., D-Dayton, will receive only $6,750 despite being ranking member in both the Senate General Government Committee and the Addiction and Community Revitalization Committee.

Tims, who will take on the role of ranking member in the House Insurance Committee, said her role is largely to become a subject matter expert to help inform her Democratic colleagues about the bills that pass through her committee. She said this type of delegation is necessary to ensure people know what they’re voting on.

“Everyone can’t be a subject matter expert on every single bill that moves through the legislature,” Tims said. “We’d like to be a jack of all trades, but the reality is you’re not going to know everything about every issue.”

Budget process

Committees will also play a critical role in the state’s biannual budget process, which will be the legislature’s biggest project over the next two months. In both the House and the Senate, leadership is expected to delegate certain matters to various chairs.

In the Senate, for example, Sen. Steve Huffman expects his Health Committee to hear testimony on any healthcare-related policies that make their way into the state’s budgets, as well as hearing from over a dozen state medical boards to talk about their budgetary asks.

In the House, that same task will be given to House Transportation chair Rep. Bernie Willis, R-Springfield, who will oversee the House’s side of the state’s biannual transportation budget; and for House Medicaid chair Rep. Jennifer Gross, R-West Chester, who will oversee the House’s side of Medicaid operations, which is a substantial portion of the state’s budget spending, and others.

The House and Senate Finance committees will get final say on all things budget, however. In fact, finance committees get the final say on every single piece of legislation that contains an appropriation, giving the committee an outsized power and its members a sought after level of influence.

The Miami Valley will have four lawmakers on the House Finance Committee and one member on Senate Finance.

“Miami Valley has got a serious seat at the table, so we have more of an opportunity to push our local agenda across the finish line and get our needs funded, so that’s a huge advantage,” Plummer said.

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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.