The house and senate’s proposed plans are different on some key issues….teacher merit pay is included in the house plan, absent in the senate. A financial reward for school districts that fare well on state standards is included in the senate plan but not the house version. Those debates are now going to end up before a conference committee made up of leaders from both chambers. Governor Kasich says he expects that will be productive.
"It’s historic. We will go to conference committee but I don’t anticipate any major problems in there. There will be some things that will have to be worked out."
Ohio House Speaker Bill Batchelder says he’s already met with Senate President Tom Niehaus about moving forward with the conference committee. Batchelder says he knows some people who will be on that important panel.
"Well it will be Chairman Amstutz, Vice Chairman Carey, and I’m not sure about who will be on the senate side. The president this morning, he’s just off the field, he wants to have a chance to look at things and see what’s going on in terms of his own caucus and his own folks situations. It will be six days a week I suspect."
Batchelder says it will be hard work to come up with agreements between both sides on some issues like merit pay for teachers. The house passed plan includes it. The senate plan doesn’t. And if it is passed as part of the state budget, a possible successful referendum of the controversial collective bargaining bill will not, on its own, be able to nullify it. Batchelder says members of the house are insistent merit pay for teachers be a part of the final plan that will be passed by lawmakers. But he says the fight over it….and the other sticking points in the budget, are likely to be more transparent with this conference committee.
"Frankly we want the Governor to be able to review it in total so that he may have some input as we go along. And I think it’s going to be a more open process than we’ve had in the past. And that’s the way Tom and I work anyway. I think we are going to have a complete conference, a lot of differences. This is the biggest budget that’s ever existed. Not in dollars but in terms of volume. We are looking at 48 hundred pages. It’s an effort by this Governor to reform a lot of things and that means to be responsive to his requests, it’s going to take a lot of time to get it done."
Governor Kasich says he and lawmakers will be making ambitious changes to Ohio’s way of operating government that no one thought could ever be accomplished.
"It sends a message to the rest of the country and I think it sends an important message to Washington. Face up to your challenges. Face up to them. Don’t play politics. And you know along the way I had to have some strong words with some of these special interest groups but that’s all part of it. So it’s a good day for us."
The entire membership of the conference committee is expected to be named Tuesday.
