SB54 makes various appropriations, reappropriations, transfers, and redirects of funds for FY 2025-26, while expanding eligibility for sport site selection grants.
The Senate passed SB54 on December 18, 2024, by a vote of 29 to 1. We have assigned minuses to the yeas because funding education, health care, or social welfare services, let alone sporting events, is not the role of government. The State of Ohio has absolutely no business coercing taxpayers into furnishing proliferate amounts of money to spend on “pork-barrel” projects that exist entirely outside the limited purpose and scope of government. Significantly, this bill relies on the use of immoral and anti-constitutional forms of taxation (e.g., income taxes) that take from citizens the wages they have rightfully earned, thereby violating the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. The General Assembly should instead act to end all reckless “tax-and-spend” bills.
