Ohio budget bill with Browns stadium funding, LGBTQ+ restrictions heads to Gov. Mike DeWine

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The two-year, $60 billion operating budget sent to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine calls for flattening Ohio’s income tax and setting aside $600 million in unclaimed funds for a new Cleveland Browns stadium, among hundreds of spending decisions. He has until Monday to sign it and issue any line-item vetoes.

State Sen. George Lang described the massive spending blueprint as “a budget of abundance,” as he and other members of the GOP supermajority touted its $1 billion in income tax relief, pathways to address Ohio’s property tax crisis and how — like the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative — it trims spending at administrative agencies and curtails regulations.

Democrats voted uniformly against the bill, alongside a handful of Republicans, casting it as a collection of misguided policy tradeoffs that prioritize the wealthy over the middle class.

Those opponents argued that joining what the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Tax Foundation has described as a “flat tax revolution” in the states would stand to mostly benefit higher income earners at the expense of local governments and libraries. Another key Democratic sticking point: Though it increases public education funding by about $3 billion over the biennium, the bill underfunds, by hundreds of millions of dollars or more, the final stage of a bipartisan, legislatively approved overhaul of Ohio’s unconstitutional school funding system.

Here’s a closer look:

Paying for an NFL stadium

It includes the $600 million Haslam Sports Group, owner of the Browns, requested from the state to help build a new domed stadium in suburban Brook Park south of Cleveland.

DeWine proposed doubling taxes on sports betting to help the Browns, as well as the Bengals and other teams who might seek facility upgrades. But the Legislature settled on using some of the $4.8 billion in unclaimed funds the state is holding on to — in small sums residents left behind from dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks and forgotten utility deposits. The budget earmarks $1.7 billion from that fund to create an Ohio Cultural and Sports Facility Performance Grant Fund and designates the Browns as the first grant recipient.

The budget doesn’t explicitly include money for the Bengals, who reached a tentative deal on stadium renovations with their home county Thursday, but the fund would assist such projects going forward.

Lawmakers who represent Cleveland and surrounding communities, mostly Democrats, blasted the proposal as a gift to the team’s billionaire owners. Democrats outside the Legislature threatened to sue if DeWine signs the plan, arguing it would be unconstitutionally raiding the unclaimed funds without due process. The Republican attorney general vowed their effort would fail.

Taking on taxes

The budget phases in a single flat-tax rate of 2.75% over two years, effective on anyone making over $26,050 a year. Those making less would continue to pay nothing. The plan eliminates the existing 3.5% rate on those making over $100,000 a year by the 2026 tax year. Ohio would be the 15th state with a flat tax rate if the plan is enacted.

Republicans tout that as a benefit to working Ohioans and the economy and another step in their continuing efforts to reduce the state’s tax burden, with the aim of some of them being to eventually eliminate the income tax entirely. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, found 98% of the benefit would go to the top 20% of income earners, or those making over $139,900.

To address skyrocketing property taxes largely collected by public school districts, the bill prohibits any new emergency or new replacement levies and requires wording changes on ballots when seeking any future levies.

It also caps districts’ operating budget carryovers, requiring them to spend down surpluses that exceed 40% or return the excess to taxpayers. Opponents argued that penalizes districts that have been good stewards of their money.

Trimming government programs and oversight

Echoing the approach of Trump’s DOGE as one of that program’s architects runs for governor with Trump’s support, lawmakers boasted of the legislation’s 3% to 4% cuts to administrative agency budgets.

Beyond that, it defunds, defangs, reassigns or abolishes bodies that punish election law violations, craft public school policy, monitor rare diseases, field complaints about Ohio’s state prisons and oversee state spending on Medicaid — the largest and most foundational portion of the state budget. Most of the affected boards, commissions and committees were bipartisan.

It also reduces funding for tobacco use prevention, food banks and several housing programs, while devoting $7 million to quantum computing research at Miami University and $5 million to child cancer research.

In anticipation of potential cuts to the federal budget, Republicans also included a trigger mechanism that would end coverage under Medicaid expansion if the federal government match falls below 90%. Democrats criticized the decision, which affects health insurance coverage for more than 800,000 Ohioans.

Targeting LGBTQ+ issues

The legislation declares as not only state policy but “incontrovertible reality” that there are “only two sexes, male and female.”

It prohibits, to the extent allowed under federal law, the distribution of Medicaid funds for mental health services that “promote or affirm social gender transition” and bans state funds from going to youth shelters that do the same. It also would require public libraries to move children’s books “related to sexual orientation or gender identity or expression” out of view of minors.

Republican Rep. Gary Click, a Baptist pastor, called it unfortunate that lawmakers have to assert such positions on sexuality but said it’s what constituents want. “What’s next?” he asked. “In the next budget, do we have to say water is wet and the Earth is round?”

Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio, the state’s first openly gay legislative leader, rebuked Republicans for sowing “the seeds of division, of suspicion and shame” and suggesting LGBTQ+ people are “too extreme to be seen in the light of day.”

“These actions aren’t going to erase us,” she said. “Just because you put the materials behind a curtain doesn’t mean the people suddenly — poof! — don’t exist. Because you know what? We do. We are the very fabric of every single one of your communities in every single one of your districts.”