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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > June > 02 > Entry
Editorial: Senate needs skepticism on consumer cut
The Ohio House and Senate have developed a little good-cop/bad-cop routine.
The House passes a bill that goes so far to the right as to cause jaws to drop. The Senate comes in and eliminates the most bizarre stuff, but leaves the provisions that the Republican leadership really wanted in the first place. Cooler heads seem to have prevailed, and the resulting product looks measured, by comparison.
This sequence happened in the bill on changing election rules. The House, among other things, reduced the period for in-person early-voting by a week. The idea had hardly even been proposed before.
Everybody had been celebrating how early voting made life easier for voters and elections officials.
The Senate took the period back up to two weeks and looked moderate, fostering a certain trust about the rest of the bill, which had provisions more complicated and debatable.
Now this same process is happening on the sweeping budget bill. The Senate is proposing reducing some House cuts because of an unexpected uptick in state revenue.
More to the good-cop/bad-cop point is a provision about the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. That’s the agency that represents consumers before state and federal regulators on energy prices and such matters. The Kasich administration proposed cutting the consumers’ counsel’s $8.5 million budget in half, even though doing so would do nothing to help balance the state’s budget. The agency is funded by a charge on utility bills of about $1 per-year.
The proposal seemed to reflect hostility toward the agency. That hostility is strange because if the consumers’ counsel succeeds at its job of keeping utility rates down, it presumably helps make Ohio a more attractive place to live and do business. The governor is always talking about the need to keep costs down in Ohio.
But the House passed the cut, and wasn’t content at that. It added a provision to keep the consumers’ counsel’s phone number off utility bills, and another to ban it from opposing deregulation of natural gas.
The latter provision — popular with energy industry lobbyists — had no known sponsor. It apparently materialized through spontaneous combustion.
The pending Senate version of the budget, the phone-number provision and the gag order about natural gas are gone. And the bill gives the consumers’ counsel $1.5 million more than the House did. The new money is said to be for managing the costs of downsizing.
The Senate changes are in the right direction, but are obvious. Now lawmakers need to get beyond the obvious.
The Kasich administration says the consumers’ counsel’s call center is redundant with that of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), a regulatory body. Janine L. Migden-Ostrander, who heads the consumers’ counsel, says it isn’t.
She also suggests that before the legislature makes such dramatic cuts, it should have the state auditor look into her operation and see what waste is there. She points out that her budget has already dropped while the office’s workload has increased.
The consumers’ counsel says it has saved Ohioans billions since its creation in the 1970s. Whether one buys that or not, having a consumer advocate involved in the regulatory game is obviously desirable.
Utility issues are complicated fights that take place in a courtroom-like setting, with PUCO as the judge. Utilities should have to worry about an expert, well-funded voice on the other side.
Given all the work the legislature confronts on balancing the budget, the consumers’ counsel fight is an unnecessary diversion.
But if there is to be a cut, the task of figuring out how big it should be falls to the Senate.
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