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Home > Blogs > Ohio politics > Archives > 2011 > June > 23 > Entry
SB 5 referendum can’t be cut up, secy of state says
A spokesman for Gov. John Kasich today denied published reports that his office was considering asking the Ohio Ballot Board to divide into mulitple ballot issues a proposed referendum repealing the controversial Senate Bill 5 . Kasich concurs with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted that the law does not permit it, said Rob Nichols, spokesman for Kasich.
He said no one in senior staff or in a position to be “impactful” on such a decision had discussed asking the board to divide up the repeal referendum, which is on track to appear on the November ballot.
The Columbus Dispatch on Thursday reported that unnamed officials in Kasich’s administration and other Republican supporters of the bill “are talking to the Ohio Ballot Board about presenting the issue to voters so that they would cast votes on its many provisions, instead of a simple up or down vote on the law.”
The legislature this year approved, and Kasich signed, the law curtailing collective bargaining rights of public employees. SB5 is on hold pending the outcome of the proposed referendum repealing it. Opponents say they have gathered more than three times the needed signatures to put a referendum for repeal on the November ballot. The petitions would place a single up-or-down referendum on the ballot, not multiple issues addressing different parts of the law.
Any effort to split the referendum into multiple questions would be “an attempt to circumvent the will of the people,” said Melissa Fazekas, spokeswoman for the We Are Ohio Campaign, which is leading the repeal effort. She called for the ballot board to reject any effort to modify the referendum. June 30 is the deadline for petitions, which need 231,000 valid signatures to appear on the ballot.
Husted, a Republican, is chairman of the ballot board and his office was unaware of the proposal to divide the referendum on the November ballot, said his spokesman Matt McClellan. “We don’t believe the ballot board has the authority to divide up a referendum issue into multiple issues because we don’t feel that the law provides for it,” said McClellan.
The ballot board determines the exact wording of state-wide ballot issues. Ohio law does allow the ballot board to divide up citizen-proposed Constitutional amendments or citizen-proposed statutes, McClellan said.
The five-member ballot board is currently made up of three Republicans and two Democrats. It includes two local members, former state Sen. Fred Strahorn, a Dayton Democrat, and Sen. Keith Faber, R-Celina. Neither could be reached for comment.
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By Quentin0352
June 26, 2011 5:45 PM | Link to this
I will save others the trouble. I have seen several comments that are well thought out in support of SB5 and they were all deleted. No surprises there that union supporters want to silence anyone who disagrees since they can not debate them with facts.
By Bill
June 26, 2011 3:21 PM | Link to this
Yeah, your done with Unions? Ready for child labor? The repugs already want to change laws protecting that. They don’t want you working for minimum wage, they want you working for less. Unions are more important now that 80 years ago. Any one thinks otherwise just isn’t paying attention.
By freebird
June 26, 2011 11:01 AM | Link to this
People in Ohio are so stupid. Let a Policeman or a Fireman ask them to sign something,no matter how much it has hurt them, they just sign away. I was a member of one of these unions and I can tell you I made much more then any private business and now make a pension the private business, other then the CEO, gets. What other private Company will let you save all your vacation, sick, earned days off, any extra pay you make, save it until the day you retire and then collect all these wages in one last pay-check that goes onto your last 2 or 3 years that they figuer your pension on. Some of these Last Paychecks are for 10,s of thousands of dollars. It just happened in Clark County, 11 people retired that cost Clark County milluion of dollars in all these saved wages and it will cost their Pension Fund milluion of Dollars over the life of their retirement. On Top of that, all of the top Chiefs in all of these C ity and County positions are usually Double Dippers, they receive a State Pension from one of the State Pension Boards and they also are still employed at full pay from the job they retired from. People of Ohio, how many of you can do any of this in your job. None or not many and yet you still sign these anything they ask you to sign. I hope the Governor has no choice but to lay off half the work force when you Stupid People vote for this repeal.
By TeabaggersRCommies
June 25, 2011 10:26 AM | Link to this
To let us vote- the only ones who have decimated the state of Ohio are Republicans. They have controlled all branches of government in the state for 30 out of the last 40 years. You can’t run from your record as much as you would like to. You are going to get steamrolled in the elections. When Republicans declared war on the middle class, they shouldn’t be surprised when they fight back!
By Mark Roberts
June 24, 2011 5:50 PM | Link to this
@let us vote. Collective bargaining didn’t cause the 8 billion or now its only 5 billion gap. Politicians did. Not the union members or the union. Your probably somebody who lost their job because you were not protected by a union. Your probably the one stealing my wi fi as we speak. Lets just say your still working, Kaysuck is coming after your pension next. You think your safe, think again. He has got you snowed. Anyways November 8th we will be heard!
By JS
June 24, 2011 9:01 AM | Link to this
@let us vote: You speak for all Ohioans? I did not know we had voted on your representation. You want to be done with greed, though? Collective bargaining isn’t the issue and never was. The issue was about who votes for who and campaign financing, and campaign financing is at the root of ALL of government’s issues and what leaves us stuck with the false choices our representatives give us. Monied interests, unions, corporations, PACs, SuperPACs, and individuals, who donate the most get what THEY want out of elected officials. and, generally speaking, that doesn’t work out very well for the rest of us. You think something like TARP came around out of neccessity? Nope. The financial industry had lobbied for favorable laws and lax regulation, and they used it to blow themselves up. When that happened, they had interconnected the wealth of our nation so much that they had us hostage, and used that leverage, and the investments in elected officials they’d already made, to get themselves that juicy bailout. So their debt is now your debt. You want a free market for energy? Not while ethanol and oil get so many subsidies and use a small fraction of their profits to keep the Congress captive to their will. It’s never been about the ills of unions… it’s about stopping donations from going to the Democratic Party, since that is who they most often donate to. Get out of the fake battles the media keeps selling you.
By Let us vote!
June 24, 2011 6:54 AM | Link to this
No matter how you slice it, ohioans want to stop collective bargaining. Send the shunted back to their pacifiers. We are done with greed in Ohio, therefore we are done with unions.