Ohio bill versions — what was proposed, not what was enacted

Source. Ohio General Assembly, via the Legislative Information Systems service that backs legislature.ohio.gov. Type. Primary source, of a bill version — the document as introduced or as it stood at a named stage. Not authority for what the law is. Location. search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_{GA}/legislation/{bill}/{version}/pdf/.

What it contains. The whole bill, in amending form: existing sections printed with their changes, new sections printed entire, and a title enumerating every section amended, enacted and repealed. Line numbers run down the right margin, which survive pdftotext -layout as bare integers inside sentences and have to be read around.

Why a bill that never became law is worth committing # ↑ Contents

Because it answers a question the enacted text cannot. An act carries its provisions without their history: R.C. 3317.0217(C)(1) in force today adjusts its denominator for one of the ten channels R.C. 3317.03(A)(2) lists, and nothing in the Revised Code says whether that was a drafting choice or a budget-process residue.

H.B. 1 of the 134th settles it, because it enacts R.C. 3317.0217 and amends R.C. 3317.03 in the same document. The denominator already reads exactly as it does now, and the channel list it cites already has its ten entries. Same author, same bill, same sitting.

What it must not be read as # ↑ Contents

A bill version is not law, and where a bill and the act that followed differ, the act governs. H.B. 1 of the 134th passed the House and died in the Senate; H.B. 110 enacted the formula four months later. Any figure, rate or threshold quoted from a bill version is a proposal, and this corpus has already been wrong once in exactly that shape — six claims cited LSC’s redbook, which analyses a bill as introduced, as though it were the appropriation. See “The four genres of a description” and ledger::budget_analysis::Edition, which exists so that a caller has to name which document it is reading.

So the safe use is structural — which provisions were written together, in what order, citing what — and the unsafe use is quantitative. Nothing in this repository takes a number from here.

What is retrievable # ↑ Contents

The version code is the path segment: 00_IN as introduced, and later stages count up. The legislature’s own document index for a bill is client-rendered, so scraping the HTML page returns a shell with no links; the API above is the route.

There is no LSC analysis of H.B. 1 of the 134th. LSC writes greenbooks for enacted budget acts and redbooks for executive proposals, and this bill is neither. The asset names that would hold one return 404 while known-good LSC URLs return 200 from the same host, so the absence is real rather than a naming guess. The bill text is the whole of what exists.