Ohio session laws — the appropriation acts themselves

ohio-session-laws · cited by 4 nodes

Source. Ohio General Assembly, via the Legislative Information Systems service that backs legislature.ohio.gov. Type. Primary source — the enrolled act, which is the text that was voted on and signed. Location. search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_{GA}/legislation/{bill}/{version}/pdf/.

What it contains. The whole act. For a main operating budget that is on the order of fifteen hundred pages, and the part this repository reads is one agency’s appropriation table — for Am. Sub. H.B. 215 of the 122nd, SECTION 50. EDU DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, four pages of it.

GRF 200-501 School Foundation Basic         $     2,202,851,688 $              0
            Allowance
GRF 200-901 Property Tax Allocation -       $      566,800,000 $     600,800,000

A fund code, the hyphenated line item, a title that wraps, and one money column per fiscal year of the biennium. The modern series writes the same item 200501.

Why this and not an analysis of it. Everything else in the appropriation series is the Legislative Service Commission describing what an act did — greenbooks, budget workbooks, the Catalog of Budget Line Items — and all three stop at FY2002 or later. The acts stop where the legislature’s own archive stops, and that is four fiscal years earlier.

The floor is the publisher’s, and it is stated rather than inferred Contents

GET https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/ returns the service’s own index of every General Assembly it holds. It has seventeen entries and the oldest is the 122nd, 1997-01-06 to 1998-12-31. There is nothing below it, in any version code or naming.

So the pre-FY2002 record reaches FY1998 and no further. DeRolph I was decided in March 1997 and falls inside the 122nd, so the first budget enacted after it is reachable. The Foundation Program era and the equal yield formula are not, and not because nobody has looked: the body that publishes them does not publish them.

The version code is not guessable Contents

It is the bill’s position in its own version sequence, so it differs per bill: H.B. 215 is 06_EN, H.B. 650 and H.B. 770 are 05_EN, and H.B. 282 is 08_EN because two interim postings sit ahead of it. Guessing 06_EN returns a hard 404 with a nine-byte body, which reads exactly like “not served”. The index is .../legislation/{bill}/, a JSON array with one object per version carrying formatted_version and version_id; the PDF path is those two joined by an underscore.

Four acts carry a Department of Education table Contents

act	biennium	what it is
Am. Sub. H.B. 215, 122nd	FY1998-99	the main operating budget
Am. Sub. H.B. 650, 122nd	FY1999	itemizes the year H.B. 215 left in one line
Am. Sub. H.B. 770, 122nd	FY1998-99	corrective; reprints Section 50 as amended
Am. Sub. H.B. 282, 123rd	FY2000-01	education appropriations, and not the budget bill

The 123rd took education out of the operating budget. Am. Sub. H.B. 283 is that biennium’s budget, 977 pages, and contains no Department of Education section and no 200-5xx line at all. Education was appropriated by H.B. 282, enacted a day earlier, as the response to DeRolph II. So “which act carries the education table” is not answered by “the operating budget” for every year.

What is wired, and how an amending act is read Contents

H.B. 215, H.B. 770 and H.B. 282. All three reconcile: every parsed row sums back to the act’s own fund-group totals and those to its grand total, in both columns.

H.B. 770 is the operative text for FY1998-99 and H.B. 215 is not. It reprints Section 50 as already amended by H.B. 650, so its columns carry the itemization H.B. 215 deferred, with 200-405 struck back to zero. H.B. 215 is kept because the shape of what it did is the finding.

The amendment is positional, not typographic. Strike-through does not survive into the text layer and does not need to: the row line carries the figures as they stood, and H.B. 770’s own replacements are printed beneath, right-aligned under the column each replaces.

GRF 200-100   Personal Services   $  10,744,925 $  10,756,210
                                                   11,256,210

So a replacement is a line of nothing but digits whose numbers end where the row’s amounts end. That last condition is what keeps page furniture out — the acts print a bare page number on its own line, and 247 under a row whose columns end at 59 and 74 amends nothing.

A replacement can sit two lines down, after the wrapped half of its own title. 200-545 Vocational Education Enhancements is amended from $184,298,314 to $201,991,432 that way, and a reader that only looks at the next line loses $17,693,118 — which is how this one was found.

H.B. 650 is deliberately not wired. Its own table is the strike-and-insert edit that H.B. 770 reprints in settled form, and it reprints H.B. 215’s fund-group totals unchanged — so a reader reconciling against printed totals would pass against the superseded number. Everything it establishes is legible in H.B. 770 without that hazard.

H.B. 650 also carries a second education table that was never law. Its SECTION 31 appropriates $15,000,000 from a School Trust Fund, conditional on the 5 May 1998 ballot measure amending Article XII Section 14. That measure failed. Its line items are printed as literal placeholders — XXX 200-YYY — so nothing here would parse them as amounts, but a text scraper will find the table.

Two defects in the acts’ own arithmetic Contents

H.B. 282’s printed GRF total for FY2001 is one dollar more than its own fifty-two rows, while its five group totals sum to its printed grand total exactly. The dollar sits between the rows and the GRF footing. It is carried as a named defect rather than absorbed by a tolerance.
H.B. 770’s FY1999 grand total omits the Education Improvement Fund’s $1,443,401, while its FY1998 grand total includes it. This one is resolvable in the rows’ favor and was resolved there: appropriation-lines.csv already carries 200689 Hazardous Waste Removal as a FY1999 actual of exactly $1,443,401, from the H.B. 94 greenbook, so the money was appropriated and spent and it is the act’s footing that is wrong.

One line renumbered twice in four years Contents

The lottery half of the formula is 017 200670 School Foundation - Basic Allowance in FY1998, 017 200610 Base Cost Funding in FY1999, and 017 200612 from FY2000 — the same money in the same fund under three numbers. The FY1999 identity is confirmed from outside the acts: the greenbook’s FY1999 actual for 200612 is $666,093,028, which is what H.B. 770 appropriates 017 200610, to the dollar.

And 200610 is not a key on its own: 454 200610 is Guidance and Testing in the same tables, half a million a year. Anything reading the formula’s share here must key on fund and number together.

One act read for one section, not a table Contents

Am. Sub. H.B. 45 of the 134th (07_EN, effective 7 April 2023) is fetched for the one section of R.C. 3317 it reprints: 3317.0212, where it inserted the 1.5 and 2.0 weights on miles driven. The bill was introduced as a five-page tax amnesty and became a 320-page spending act in the Senate substitute (04_RS), the first version carrying the change; the seven codes below 07_EN are the bill’s own versions, not interim postings. The committed fixture is the amending title and that section, cut by reprinted_section; the digest pins the whole 183-page act.

Cited by Contents

H.B. 643 (136th G.A., as introduced)FSFP Transportation Sub. H.B. 583 (2022) — corrective and technical changes to the Fair School Funding Plan DeRolph v. State (DeRolph I, 1997)

Ohio session laws — the appropriation acts themselves

The floor is the publisher’s, and it is stated rather than inferred # ↑ Contents

The version code is not guessable # ↑ Contents

Four acts carry a Department of Education table # ↑ Contents

What is wired, and how an amending act is read # ↑ Contents

Two defects in the acts’ own arithmetic # ↑ Contents

One line renumbered twice in four years # ↑ Contents

One act read for one section, not a table # ↑ Contents

Also read by # ↑ Contents

Cited by # ↑ Contents