Ohio legislature kills governor’s stadium slush fund, will he veto its Browns subsidy bill in return?

As expected, the Ohio state legislature has killed Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to use increased sports gambling, cigarette, and cannabis taxes to fund a $2 billion stadium slush fund, and will instead move ahead with its own plan to collect all sales and income and other state taxes from in and around a new Cleveland Browns stadium and use them to give Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million toward the stadium’s construction cost. (Cuyahoga County and the city of Brook Park would be on the hook for another $600 million.)

DeWine still would have to sign off on the legislature’s omni-TIF plan, though, and if the pro-stadium NEOtrans blog is to be believed, he may veto it instead:

[DeWine’s] opposition — including a possible veto — to HSG’s funding proposal could also cause removal of the funding before the legislature votes in a couple of months on the a proposed biennial budget that starts July 1, 2025 and ends June 30, 2027.

But if it remains in the final bill, there’s a strong possibility that DeWine could veto it. If he does, it requires a 3/5 majority vote in both the Ohio Senate and Ohio House of Representatives to override a governor’s veto — and that supermajority may not exist.

That’s an overwhelming number of coulds, but, sure, a three-fifths majority is harder to muster than 51%, so the threat of a DeWine veto would throw at least a medium-sized wrench into Haslam’s stadium plans. So is the governor really threatening a veto, or what?

At a forum at the Columbus Metropolitan Club led by the Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles, DeWine was asked if he would veto the amendment. It would add the $600 million bond package to the budget and would eliminate his proposed sports facilities fund, paid for by doubling the tax on sports gambling operators, who are mostly located out of state.

“If you look at the next 10 to 20 years, there’s going to be a lot of demand on the state budget for this. I don’t think we can afford to continue to go into the general fund of our budget and take this money,” DeWine said.

That is, as Statehouse News Bureau put it, “stopping short of threatening a veto” — though the site didn’t speculate about whether DeWine actually doesn’t intend to veto the legislature’s plan or just isn’t threatening a veto yet. Add in that DeWine was still trying to push for his own now-dead subsidy plan at the time he said all that, and it’s really impossible to say for sure what the governor’s game plan is until he responds to the legislature stripping his plan from the budget, which he hasn’t yet done.

But so long as we’re reading tea leaves, I’ll play: The Republican-led state legislature didn’t axe DeWine’s tax plan because they’re antsy about handing money over to sports billionaires, but because they’re antsy about anything that can be said to be “raising taxes”: “Anywhere where there was a program that was proposed to be added or expanded, we either said no or dialed back the increase,” finance chair Rep. Brian Stewart bragged. Taking the money from existing taxes and giving it to Haslam, though, doesn’t count as “spending” in their eyes — same as giving income tax deductions to Ohioans who donate to anti-abortion fake medical clinics isn’t considered spending, even if it’s exactly the same from a budget perspective.

What we have here, then, is a squabble not over whether to give gobs of money to the Browns and other Ohio sports teams to build stadiums for their own profit, but rather which money to use. This seems like the sort of thing that a bunch of fellow Republicans could hash out a compromise over — or that could lead legislative leaders to wait out a lame-duck governor and see if the next one is more on their wavelength. Sure would be nice if the main debate here were over whether the subsidies are worth it at all and not just where the money will come from, but we live in the worst of all possible timelines.