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By Victoria Hansen, HansenV@Findlay.edu
Although the controversial Senate Bill 1 signed into law on March 28, a group of professors from Youngstown State University and elsewhere plan to reverse it.
Under Ohio state law, any bill passed by the General Assembly can go on the ballot as a referendum for voters to approve or reject during the next election. This referendum pauses the execution of the bill until the election.
To start the referendum process, an initial petition needs 1,000 signatures and must be sent to the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General by April 21. If the initial petition is accurate and accepted, an official referendum petition can be written and signed. If the initial petition is rejected, the group must collect another 1,000 signatures. The referendum petition needs at least 250,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 countries before June 25, according to Ohio Secretary of State.
According to Flo Lynn Myers, lead of the petition for the Hancock County Democratic Party, a petition like this has only worked once in recent memory.
“It was the anti-labor bill,” Myers said. “They wanted to keep us [public employees] from being able to unionize.”
Ohio Senate Bill 5, which banned collective bargaining for state employees, was put on the ballot as Issue 2 and repealed by Ohio voters in 2011.
As of writing, the initial petition has not yet reached the required 1,000 signatures.
“We went up to Bowling Green today, and we’re probably going to go to Columbus on Monday,” Myers said. “We need a different petition for every county that people are coming from. We lost about 25 signatures because of that.”
Very few petitions for a referendum are accepted after the first initial petitions.
“They say it never happens,” Myers said. “It is highly likely that AG Yost will reject the first round of 1000+ signatures,”
The Ohio SB1 State Referendum website says, “Even if we turned in everything exactly perfectly and there were no issues with any signatures, he is likely to be obstructionist.”
Eve Gray, chairperson of the Hancock County Democratic Party, emphasized the multifaceted benefits of higher education institutions.
“The benefits of our higher learning institutions are that people go to our colleges and universities. They learn not only about how to make a career for themselves and how to do good in the world as far as their chosen career path, but they’re also learning about people other than themselves,” said Gray. “It [SB1] breaks the partnership between the government and universities that emerged after World War II. This and the [National] Science Foundation that promoted basic research in science and engineering shows that the government institutions need the Universities as much as the Universities do.”
