Ohio lawmakers may help Browns, Bengals sack taxpayers in 2025 |Opinion

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.

Just before the Ohio General Assembly went home earlier this month, two House members, one a Cleveland suburbanite, the other from Xenia, introduced a bill to ban future such post-election (“lame duck”) legislative sessions.

The legislators calling for an end to lame-duck (post-election) sessions are Reps. Sean Patrick Brennan, a Parma Democrat who’ll return to the Statehouse next month, when the 2025-26 session begins, and Bill Dean, a Xenia Republican who’s being term-limited home.

“Being thrown multiple bills with multiple amendments on multiple complicated subjects hours before you have to make a decision is not a way to govern,” Brennan said.

True enough.

And one of the legislature’s sweetheart moves in this year’s lame-duck session was to exempt the Cincinnati Bengals from having to pay about $9 million in sales tax on improvements made to the team’s Paycor Stadium.

Opinion: No more! Columbus, Cleveland can’t keep feeding Browns, Crew money when teams make millions

Lame duck, big kiss for Bengals

The same tax break, if sought, could also apply the Cleveland Browns and other big-league teams in Franklin, Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties.

The legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal analysts warned that if enough teams sought the tax break, it “could reduce state sales tax collections by hundreds of thousands of dollars or as much as tens of millions of dollars per stadium, [and] county sales and use taxes could be reduced by hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and local transit authority sales and use taxes could also be reduced by similar amounts.”

And that lame-duck amendment may just be the opening move in a looming Statehouse war over taxpayers’ payoffs to sports teams’ owners.

Christmas tree bill and other threats to your wallet

The General Assembly’s kiss for the Bengals was slipped into a 323-page bill that had started out, long before, as a humdrum, 122-page plan to update township government in Ohio.

The stadium amendment, and many other unrelated riders, were crowbarred into the township bill, which the Senate (27-1) and House (76-7), panting to go home, passed in the middle of the night. (It’s only fair to note that Brennan voted “yes” on the township Christmas tree bill. (Dean voted “no.”)

Good intentions aside, it’s hard to see how a proposed law (rather than a constitutional amendment) can really bar the Statehouse door to lame-duck sessions. Still, lame-duck sessions are a real threat to Ohioans’ wallets and, more importantly, to their liberties

Earlier this month, for example, Ohio’s Republican-run Supreme Court killed a $650 million damage award that Lake (Painesville) and Trumbull (Warren) counties had won against big drugstore chains for the chains’ alleged role in enabling the national epidemic of opioid addiction.

In a 5-2 opinion written by Justice Joseph T. Deters, a Cincinnati Republican, the Supreme Court ruled that the General Assembly had abolished the particular legal theory that Lake and Trumbull County had used to win their “public nuisance” lawsuit against the drugstore chains.

And just when did Republican members of the General Assembly killed that “common law” argument? Deters and his high court allies didn’t specifically say so, but those maneuvers happened in December 2004 and December 2006 – during lame-duck General Assembly sessions, when, just like this month, legislation sluiced through the Statehouse like water over Niagara Falls.

So much for the public interest — and for the Ohio Bill of Rights, which promises Ohioans that “every person, for an injury done him in his land, goods, person, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law, and shall have justice administered without denial or delay” – unless, that is, a lame-duck legislature stampedes toward adjournment.

The Browns vs. your pocketbook

The new year will almost certainly feature big stakes Statehouse lobbying by Ohio’s major sports team owners – and not just the Browns’ (and the Columbus Crew’s) Jimmy and Dee Haslam – for taxpayer handouts, even though one in eight Ohioans lives in poverty.

A rough count suggest that Ohio’s pro teams field at least 20 Statehouse lobbyists. And, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has to be well-versed on the sports business — he and his family own the Asheville (North Carolina) Tourists, a High-A affiliate of Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros.

In 2025, Major League Baseball’s traditional opening day will be March 27. For Ohio’s pro teams and their owners, it may come much sooner — at the Statehouse.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Browns, Bengals out to sack taxpayers with Ohio lawmakers help | Opinion

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