YDC residents, supporters kicked out of Ohio budget

The massive $71 billion blue- print for spending our tax dollars in Ohio over the next two years contains something for almost everyone to savor. The 2016-17 state budget signed by Gov. John Kasich last week, which took effect July 1, contains a grab bag of perks sure to please a diverse and significant portion of the state’s 11.6 million residents. Consider:

All Ohio state income-tax payers get a break by way of a 6.3 percent state income-tax cut beginning this year.

All students and parents at Youngs-town State University and all publicly funded colleges and universities in the Buckeye State get a break in tuition costs. The new state budget freezes tuition for the next two years and injects long-overdue additional funding into state support of higher education.

About 500,000 caught a break in the budget’s continuation of the governor’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility, thus avoiding a potentially catastrophic loss in health care coverage for many of the state’s most-distressed and vulnerable residents.

Sad to say, however, not all of the Buckeye State’s most-distressed and vulnerable residents caught a break in the new budget. The governor’s veto of a provision to establish a commission to study the state’s network of developmental centers – and possibly save some from extinction – became a cruel victim of the governor’s hyperactive veto pen. Among the 44 items that Kasich struck from the budget was a measure to create a commission with authority to review plans before Ohio could close any of its residential centers for Ohioans with developmental disabilities.

GIVE YDC RESIDENTS A VOICE

As we editorialized in April in support of such a commission, “the affected residents of the Youngstown Developmental Center had little or no direct say in the decision that will radically alter their lifestyles. That’s why a study commission with solid representation from residents’ families and caregivers makes eminently good sense.”

Over the past several months, those residents, their family members and other advocates for the developmentally disabled flooded Columbus with sincere and compassionate pleas to give the closings the due consideration it deserves.

The Ohio Legislature listened to those pleas. Our governor did not.

That leaves us scratching our head. The commission would not have automatically meant that YDC and another center in Montgomery County would be granted an immediate repreive from closing. It simply would mean that more time and more input would be placed in the decision-making process.

What’s more, such study commissions are nothing foreign to the new biennium budget. This budget creates more than a dozen of them, whose tasks range from determining the value of manure applications on farm fields to pinpointing the impact of Canada geese on Lake Erie.

Though the veto stands as a setback for advocates of the centers, the fight is far from over. State Sen. Joe Schiavoni of Boardman vows to introduce standalone legislation this year to form and implement the commission. We urge him to do so speedily and with maximum lobbying from YDC supporters to make its enactment virtually veto-proof.

In so doing, those residents, too, can be afforded the break they so richly deserve but have been cruelly denied by one poisonous stroke of our governor’s veto pen.