Slots Agreement Seals Budget Deal

Slots Agreement Seals Budget Deal Over the past weekend, the House, Senate, Governor Strickland reached agreement on the final piece of the state budget, relating to video lottery terminals (VLTs). The agreement came nearly two weeks after the June 30 constitutional deadline. The state operated in the meantime under two interim budgets, and the legislature passed a third interim budget that is currently filling the gap while House Bill (H.B.) 1 is prepared for the Governor’s signature. On Monday, the House-Senate conference committee met for only the second time, and the meeting was very short. Instead of the normal, grueling process of going through hundreds of items of disagreement between the House and Senate budget bills and announcing the decision on each one, the conference committee simply adopted a massive omnibus amendment addressing all the items that became the conference re! port. There was little discussion and no real debate. The conference report was adopted by the House and Senate in short order, and by nightfall, the legislative work was finished. While the conference report was available Monday, the actual bill blending the conference report changes into the Senate-passed version of the bill did not appear until yesterday. The final bill is online at H.B. 1. The Governor’s agreement to issue an executive order permitting slot machines at Ohio’s seven horse race tracks, with the Senate’s agreement to include authorizing language in the budget bill, broke the stalemate. Although the budget “counts” $933 million in anticipated revenue from the VLTs, it also contains $2.4 billion in cuts and other money-saving financial maneuvers. It is widely expected that a correction bill will become necessary fairly soon because state tax revenues will continue to fall below the estimates used to craft the budg et. As of this writing, the Governor has not signed H.B. 1 or exercised his authority to “line item veto” language or appropriations in the measure.

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