New pro-SB 5 panel to swing into action today

By JIM PROVANCE

Toledo Blade

COLUMBUS

For nearly two months, opponents of Ohio’s new law restricting the negotiating power of 360,000 public employees have been aggressively gathering signatures for a likely ballot issue while the law’s defenders have been largely missing in action.

That will change today.

Papers are expected to be filed to establish a committee to raise money and strategize over how to sway voters who, according to early polls, say they’re inclined to kill the law before it’s had a chance to influence a single salary, pension, or sick day.

The new pro-Senate Bill 5 committee also is expected to go live today with a website. The committee will be chaired by Vaughn Flasher, a longtime Statehouse lobbyist and political consultant who in recent years has helped Senate Republicans build the strongest majority they’ve had in four decades.

Flasher, however, will not be the face of the campaign as it contemplates how to turn on its head opponents’ arguments that the law is a GOP attack on Ohio’s middle class, working families, and organized labor.

Meanwhile, the Ohio chapter of the Washington-based Americans for Prosperity is raising money to conduct its own door-to-door grass-roots campaign to sell the merits of Senate Bill 5 to voters before the Nov. 8 election.

“We’ll be working together, but not technically together. We’ll be sharing information and working toward the same goal,” said Rebecca Heimlich, state director of the tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation. “We’ve had our plans for a while and have started fund-raising. We talked to [supporters of Senate Bill 5] a couple of weeks ago, and we will continue to communicate.”

The official pro-Senate Bill 5 committee will have to report where it gets its money and how it spends it to the secretary of state. But, while the conservative Americans for Prosperity, founded by brothers David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, will have to report its spending, it will not have to divulge the sources of its money.

So far, Heimlich said the money is largely coming from Ohio donors, although she’d be happy to take a check from outside the state if offered.

In addition to selling Senate Bill 5 door to door and in town hall meetings, Americans for Prosperity plans to simultaneously promote a proposed constitutional amendment to exempt Ohioans from the mandatory coverage requirements under the federal health-care law. Petitions also are being circulated to put that question on the fall ballot.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said he believes national nonprofits will be major players in what is likely to be more than just an Ohio fight.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year equated corporate political spending with free speech, finding that it would be unconstitutional to limit such spending. The same would apply to unions.

“[The Ohio battle is] getting loads of attention,” Sabato said. “Both sides see this as a trial run for next year’s presidential election, a chance to really get the machine reoiled. It’s a chance to get the two party bases stirred up, to get their lists updated, [and] their volunteers energized, which is all for the good. This will cost millions and millions of dollars.”

A Quinnipiac Poll conducted in mid-May showed that registered voters, by a margin of 54 percent to 36 percent, are prepared to give the thumbs-down to the Ohio law limiting public employees’ bargaining rights. They particularly don’t like provisions that ban strikes by all public employees, prevent them from negotiating health benefits, and eliminate seniority as the sole factor determining the order of layoffs.

But the same poll offered what could prove to be a road map for the defense when it comes to targeting its ads.

Fifty-nine percent of voters said they like the idea of requiring employees to pay at least 15 percent of their heath insurance premiums. Gov. John Kasich frequently plays that up when praising the law, saying the average private sector worker pays 23 percent.

Fifty-eight percent said they support requiring employees to contribute at least 10 percent of their wages toward their pensions, an issue addressed in the law by prohibiting local governments from picking up any portion of an employee’s share.

Fifty-seven percent like the idea of getting rid of automatic step or longevity pay increases in favor of a merit-pay system. The proposed two-year, $55.5 billion budget now under consideration in the Senate incorporates similar language but only for public school teachers.

The minimum health insurance and pension contribution issues also appear to have more support than opposition among union households, indicating a possible divide among private-sector and public-sector union members.