May 20, 2026 · Finance Committee · 7,672 words · 25 speakers · 112 segments
The House Finance Committee will come to order. Will the clerk please call the roll?
Ritter's checked in. Robinson?
Present.
Romer?
I'm here.
Santucci?
Schmidt is checked in.
Sims is checked in.
Thomas?
Yes.
Troy?
White?
Checked in.
Williams?
Here.
Willis?
Young?
Here.
We have a quorum present, so we will proceed as a full committee. The first order of business is to approve the minutes from the previous committee meeting. Without objection, the minutes will be approved. Hearing no objection, the minutes are approved and are part of the record. I'm told we have a former member and one of our current Court of Appeals judges, John Willimowski, here in attendance. So thank you, sir. Appreciate you being here. Good to see you again. Housekeeping for today. We do anticipate a vote on House Bill 413. Some members, as you need to come and go, if you're not able to be here when we are voting, please make sure you sign our sheet afterwards. I'm now going to call up House Bill 645 for its third hearing, and I recognize Vice Chair Davila for a motion.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move to amend with Substitute Bill 2571-1.
Will the Vice Chair please describe the amendment, the substitute?
Yes, Mr. Chairman. First of all, the sub-bill delays from the start of the 137th General Assembly, which is next year, to the start of the 138th General Assembly, 2029, the bill's requirements for the OBM director and state agencies to implement zero-based budgeting. Not later than June 30th of every even-numbered year, the Finance Committee Chair, alternating between the House and the Senate, each General Assembly, must select at least one-third of state agencies to submit ZBB-based estimates each budget cycle. Each chair may add agencies at the chair's discretion. Following a selection of those agencies, the chair must notify in writing the president of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the director of the Legislative Service Commission, and the director of budget and management of the state agencies that are selected. The substitute bill exempts elected officials, the General Assembly, including any legislative agency, and the Supreme Court, including any judicial agency. The CompDoc is available on your iPads. remember to take a look at, and again, this is just a substitute bill for the member's own bill.
Are there any objections to the member substituting his own bill? Hearing no objections, the substitute bill is adopted. Seeing no submitted testimony, this will conclude the second hearing on substitute House Bill 645. I now call up House Concurrent Resolution 32 for its third hearing. Also seeing no submitted testimony, this will conclude the third hearing on House Concurrent Resolution 32. I now call up House Bill 413 for its second hearing in this committee. First to provide proponent testimony is Zach Prouty, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Ohio Treasurer's Office. Welcome to committee, sir. You may begin whenever you'd like.
Thank you very much. Good morning, Chairman Stewart, Vice Chair Davila, ranking member Sweeney, members of the House Finance Committee. My name is Zach Prouty. I serve as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague. I'm here today to give proponent testimony on House Bill 413 specifically and to talk about the Ohio Checkbook generally. As Representative Davila correctly pointed out last week, the current Ohio Checkbook is a partnership between the Treasurer's Office, OBM, and DAS. This was not always the case. Our partnership began in 2020 after about five years of our agencies delivering financial transparency in different and sometimes competing ways. As a brief background, the Ohio Checkbook was initially launched over a decade ago by the Ohio Treasurer's Office. The former platform ultimately included expenditure information, local and state government entities, along with information on our state's public pension systems. Shortly thereafter, OBM launched their own interactive website detailing how the state will hire budgets and spends tax dollars. OBM's online interactive budget provided a complete picture of state finances as it included daily data concerning state expenditures, revenues, etc. The Ohio checkbook was updated less frequently as information had to be requested from OBM and posted to the platform. Of note, the OBM platform did not include any local data whatsoever. In 2020, Treasurer Sprague and Governor DeWine's team, specifically Senator John Husted, led a joint effort between the three agencies to create one unified online transparency platform. This effort streamlined website administration, eliminated duplication, and drastically lowered overall costs to Ohioans. The arrangement was then codified in statute in the 2021 budget. Today's checkbook interfaces directly with OBM and the Ohio Administrative Knowledge System, OAKS, which is the accounting software behind all of state government, allowing state revenue and expenditure information to be uploaded daily. Local government data, which is still processed by us, works differently while the state operates through a single accounting system, local governments operate many, many different accounting systems. We did an assessment of over 30 different accounting systems that are in use by various local government entities around the state. So while all of Ohio's local governments are welcome to share their information on the checkbook, the number of local governments that have at one point or another shared are about 1,000, a little over 1,000. Those that currently actively participate, about 500. In addition to local government expenditure data, our office is responsible for processing the expenditure and salary information for the public pension funds and salary data for public schools. The bill before you, so currently, current checkbook is one piece of legislation, one piece of statute, one revised code section. So the bill before you would break that into two. We would keep the state side as it is today, the status quo, where it would be a joint venture between the Treasurer's Office, OBM, DAS, kind of a window into the state accounting system. The local side, however, would be its own brand new statute under the guise of the Treasurer's Office. It would enable us to make the Ohio checkbook, the local side, more automated, informative, and ultimately more valuable to the Ohio taxpayers. we estimate that once the new checkbook is fully implemented about 4,000 local government entities would qualify and would have to share their expenditure and revenue information on the checkbook 500 now to 4,000 this would clearly be a substantial increase in the size and scope of the checkbook which is why we have crafted much of the language in House Bill 413 to give the Treasurer's Office all that we would need to implement that as efficiently as possible Chairman Stewart, Vice Chair Davila and Ranking Member Sweeney members of the Finance Committee, thank you for allowing me to testify I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you, sir, for your testimony. Are there questions from members of the committee? Representative Young.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for coming today. I really appreciate the work that we've done over the last four years on this. I believe it will make a tremendous headway for our citizens to actually see how much money governments are spending. as we know that more money in citizens' hands is a lot better than in the buckets of government. So thank you very much for being here.
Other questions? Recce member Sweeney first and then representative Troy.
Thank you, Chairman, and thank you for being with us today. Very supportive of the overall effort. The one concern that I've heard from local governments that has stuck with me and we haven't gotten a full answer to, and I know part of it is because it hasn't happened yet, we haven't gotten the vendor going to the RFP, but is whether or not that this is going to inadvertently force all of our different local entities to basically change their accounting system in order to be able to comply. Could you just speak to, I know that within the local governments that do it today, could you just speak to, or did they have to change their system to comply internally? And do you think that it is possible, or within the realm of possibilities, that the Treasurer's Office, as they did for the state side, is looking at some of these entities are already giving information to do. Can we streamline that and have the departments talk to each other? Do we have that capability? And the idea is we should have this information, but if it's going to force every local government to account all the same ways when there is such variety, I could see how that could be a concern. Thank you, Chairman, Representative.
Yeah, let me try to address your multiple questions a couple ways. So I think what you're talking about is a unified chart of accounts for every single local government would use the exact same accounting system and the exact same definitions for what is a revenue, expenditure, public safety, et cetera. we don't have a mechanism to force that and I don't think we would ever want to do that with over 4,000 different local governments. I think that would be a Herculean task that we are just not equipped to do. Our intention would be to make it as easy as possible for local governments to share whatever information they already have on hand that their own accounting system produces and exports to just share it with us. So for instance, the 500 or so that currently participate they have kind of self-selected because they're the ones who find value in participating in the transparency aspect. It's quite easy for them to participate. They can just export their information to an Excel. They can upload it themselves through a portal we've developed, or they can email it to us and we manually upload. Obviously, the other 3,500 entities, many of them would also have that capability. Many of them wouldn't. So that would be something that our office, as long as we're in office, would seek to kind of work hand in hand with those local governments to make sure that as the rules are being crafted, as the RFP is being written for the vendor to kind of figure out how exactly this will look and how this will work, that we make it as seamless as possible. I can also say that, yes, to your point, we would seek to get information from other state partners. So, for instance, all the K-12 school district information that we get, we get from DW. So DW already has all that information. We figured, why do we need to go to 610 different school districts when we can just go to one state agency? So that's an example of proving your point where, yes, we can get information from other existing state entities. Did that answer all your questions?
Yes, it did, and I think hopefully it gave a lot of comfort to some of those concerns. I think it is.
Other follow-up? Representative Choi.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Prouty. So I don't know of a lot of citizens that access this open checkbook. I mean, do we have any record of how many people are actually, citizens out there, actually accessing this tool that's available to them in 26% of our local governmental entities? Yes.
So, Representative, now I can't necessarily confirm if there are Ohio citizens that are looking at this information, but I did ask our team to pull some website traffic In 2025 we had about 230 unique visitors and about 750 different page views So each visitor would check out two to three pages on average while they're perusing the checkbook.
Okay, Mr. Chairman, follow-up. So when we have this information available, and I served in local government for 29 years, and I always try to explain to people, this is the reason for this particular expenditure. Is this just going to list the expenditure, the amount, and then who it goes to? Because sometimes these things, especially at campaign time, can really be taken out of context. It would have my name down and maybe $5,000 next to it and no explanation, and someone could have fun with that.
Representative, I certainly understand. And I would say that the data that we would post would be as good as we are given. And that for the state side, so the state, like I said, is a window into the state accounting system. So it contains a lot of detail. I think in the new iteration of the local checkbook, what we would seek to do is include contact information for the local government on every single landing page. so that if there were questions about a specific expenditure, we would not be the ones who would answer the question that the local government essentially has posted their own information. We would redirect them back to the locals to answer that question for them so that we don't... I don't know if we could ever be in a position of truly eliminating all misrepresentation of the data just with the number of local governments that would be participating, but the local governments could also, when they participate, when they share information with us can include any kind of qualifiers they would like to say that, okay, this is for these particular contracts, these vendors, et cetera. Here's a link back to our website where we have the city council resolution that approved this. Or there's all kinds of other information that we could include in future iterations of the checkbook that aren't included today. Because I think the real reason why we're trying to break this into two statutes in two different code sections is so that we can really be creative and inventive with how we structure this brand, essentially brand new local side of the checkbook. So that will ultimately be up to our successor and the vendor that we select to figure out the nitty-gritty on that side. But it is something that we deal with today, and we try to clear up any misconceptions and confusions when they arise.
Follow-up. So, Mr. Chairman, yeah, thank you for the follow-up. So if you want to say, okay, the city or the county appropriated $29,000, and the reason for this was because we had a change order on a particular project. I mean, who's going to put all that information? Is that responsibility going to fall on the local government? And how burdensome can that become when you try and be really transparent in terms of exactly what these expenditures are for.
Well, Representative, I guess part of that I don't know. It would depend on how the system is set up. I would think that regardless of whether or not a constituent finds the information through the checkbook or through a public records request, the local government should be prepared to justify the reason for their expenditures. I think it would certainly be a helpful tool that if the local government would like to, when they upload information to our website, include some additional written information about the justification for these various contracts. I think that's something we could certainly build into the system as we're looking to recreate it, like I said. Today, that doesn't really exist, but we also don't get a ton of those questions.
Representative Piccoli-Antonio. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Proudy, for being here today. I know this is a big room, So thank you for realizing where the sound was coming from when I started speaking. It can be really confusing in this room. The questions that I have are really just a little bit further in detail, and I don't know if you have any thoughts yet about when the rulemaking process would begin, but specific to school districts, for example, you've already alluded to the fact that they are required to submit that information and more to Department of Education and Workforce. Do you anticipate through the rulemaking process that you would write the rules in such a way that the EMIS data would be able to come directly to the Treasurer's checkbook? Have you had those conversations?
Representative, we have not had those specific conversations. I think, speaking on behalf of the office and the treasurer, our goal, you know, there's going to be a new treasurer in about eight months. So our goal in our time remaining would be to set as strong a foundation as possible so that the next treasurer, as they're preparing their budget requests, knows exactly what kind of resources they need. I think working with the Department of Education and Workforce makes a ton of sense. our goal initially would be to get as many local governments on board as possible with broader buckets of information so I think it would be much easier on the locals and much more valuable to taxpayers to see just broad categories of revenues and expenditures and then if they have additional information or requests they can reach out to local government so that would kind of be the way we would attack it for our remaining time in office. For the school district specifically, the kind of data that DEW collects, if it's already in the spirit of the intent of the law where you can see all the revenues and expenditures and salaries, then I don't really know if we would need to have any kind of interaction or need any changes really with the EMIS data. It would just be maybe as simple as an MOU where whenever the data is received by DEW, it kicks over to our servers, and then it's automatically uploaded.
Follow-up. Thank you, Chair. And I should have said this at the beginning, but the more transparency, the better. I think that everybody agrees with that sentiment. The questions are really just about making sure that whatever it is that we put in place, that it's efficient, that it's not adding additional layers of work for employees that are all public employees that are paid with public dollars. Just in real brief follow-up, again, this is really in the details. I don't know if you've had any conversation about what other capabilities the platform might have, but I know that there are some entities, for example, Franklin County provides the data on a daily basis. They do updates on a daily basis. Do you think that the platform would have the capability of including a link so that if a local entity has more detailed information, whoever it is that's looking can click to get to the more detailed information?
Representative, yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that's something that we can certainly talk to our vendor about. And over time, so the state's accounting software is over 20 years old. It's going to need to be updated. So maybe in the future, the state checkbook can be a lot more robust too. And then as local governments upgrade their own internal accounting systems, maybe we can work with them in the future to make more of a seamless interface between the checkbook and their local systems, where they can either have the capability to directly send us information, maybe on a monthly basis or on a daily basis, or if they do already put the resources into having more of a daily transparent dashboard like we do for the state, then I think a button, you know, when you search for City of Columbus and you pull up all of their stuff, I think it's certainly feasible to include a little link on the corner of the webpage that would then kick you back to the City of Columbus' website, and you could just peruse from there.
Thank you, sir, for your testimony. I think I'll be the last question for you. In 2014, around about that time, I was in my first term as a Pickway County Commissioner. The checkbook bill passed. I thought it was a great thing that Vice Chair Davila had done in his previous tenure here and some other members. And so we actually passed a resolution to become what we were told was either the first or one of the two or three first counties in the entire state to voluntarily put all of Pickway County's county-level financial information on the checkbook. At the time, we were a county of roughly 55,000 residents, fairly modest general fund budget. It cost us $0. Our county auditor was from the opposite party as me, worked very well together to get that information online, no muss, no fuss, and that was 12 years ago. So I'm very optimistic that our folks with 12 years of technological advancements and far healthier budget balances can probably make this work. What I picked up from your testimony, though, that I was not aware of is if a local government, a board of commissioners comes in and says, we want to be transparent, and we want to put this data online, under the current voluntary system, there's nothing that says that they continue to send it. You could have a local government fall off. A new board comes in and just kind of quietly says, eh, we're not going to put out a press release about it, but we're just going to quietly stop sending the data. Is that a correct understanding of how the current system allows folks to kind of quietly fall off of the transparency locomotive here?
That is correct. The current law does not mandate participation. So in your example, county commissioners could change their mind after a few years of participating and fall off, and we can request them to stay or keep participating, and we try to make it as easy as possible so that there is no incentive to leave, but that is correct. That is why there's the disparity between well over 1,000 who participate at some point versus those that continue to participate today. The rest have just decided not to.
Thank you again, sir, for your testimony.
We will call up our next witness now. I'm now calling Nicole Marshall, Treasurer CFO at Westerville City Schools, to provide proponent testimony. Welcome to committee. You may welcome to begin.
Thank you. Good morning. Chair Stewart, Vice Chair Davila, Ranking Member Sweeney, and members of the House Finance Committee, my name is Nicole Marshall, and I serve as a Treasurer and CFO for Westerville City Schools. Thank you for the opportunity to provide proponent testimony on House Bill 413, and thank you also to our local representatives, Pickle Antonio and Abdullahi. We enjoy representation from four House members that cover parts of our Westerville City Schools community, So we're very fortunate. As the treasurer and CFO of Westerville Schools, I am responsible for the fiscal stewardship of tax dollars that support education of our community's children. This is a task that I do not take lightly. I know how important that is. And in public education we are entrusted to ensure that every single tax dollar is used transparently effectively and with full and clear accountability to the public I like to extend my gratitude to House Bill 413 primary sponsors Representative Young and Peterson as well as the co for their leadership on this legislation Initiating a concrete framework around reporting local government revenues and expenditures and standardizing public access through the Ohio Treasurer's Office reflects a meaningful commitment to transparency for all of Ohio's taxpayers. There is no situation where it would be appropriate to not have complete transparency around how tax dollars are received and also spent. And House Bill 413 offers an opportunity for the state to establish a dedicated searchable database that provides a reliable mechanism to strengthen this public trust across Ohio consistently. It also offers the opportunity to have an apples-to-apples comparison for revenues and expenditures across our taxing jurisdiction. and as the treasurer and CFO of public schools and a taxpayer, I do fully support this legislation and everything behind it, but I do also want to provide an opportunity for the state to find an efficient way to do this for Ohio's public school systems. As you talked about with the previous testimony, we do already report to the Ohio Department of Education workforce through the Education Management Information System. This is a systemic way that we already report all of this data to the state. And so my hope would be that the treasurer's office and the department could work together to try to figure out a way that that information could just get on over to the treasurer's office and be searchable and all that. The department already has a very robust platform where anyone can go on and search all of the things that you want to compare across public schools in our state. So we are very fortunate and I think a leader in the nation in that regard for this. So I fully support this. I would be happy to be a resource to any legislature that is curious about school accounting system. I also spent seven years working for the state auditor's office in local government services. I am very knowledgeable with local government accounting systems as well, and I'm always happy to be a resource to the legislature if anybody has questions about any of the accounting stuff. So thank you for the opportunity to provide the testimony, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
Thank you, Treasurer Marshall. Any questions from the committee members?
Mr. Chairman.
Representative Young.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ms. Marshall. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate this. And I appreciate your interest in transparency, which in Ohio government is few and far between at all levels. and so this will give us a chance to get down into the weeds to find out truly what the citizens are paying for. Do you feel that, and we've talked about this, how much information do you feel like the citizens see right now? And you said you're willing to advise if we would like to do that. to what degree do you feel that the citizens should be able to ask and get their information and see it?
Sure. Through the chair to the representative, thank you for the question. So I am responsible for all of the public records requests in our school district. I do work with my comms team and normally my IT team, we have to pull a lot of emails and things like that. But so we, anything that anyone requests out of our accounting system, aside from if it has any, like, identifying parent or student information that we would need to redact, we do provide that. We continually receive public records requests from, I think, people making businesses off of our data for accounting purchase orders, checks that we've paid, and all of those things. So as a treasurer CFO, if anything, I think having this sort of database, especially at the state level, because I can post stuff on the district's website all night and all day, but when it comes time for us to be on the ballot for a tax levy, there's a, like, I'd say a certain percentage of our community that just doesn't trust anything that we put on our website. And so when I'm able to have the state's logo attached to the data that's provided, it gives it more meaning to, I think, our local community. It gives us sort of another check from our community that it's not just us reporting it, but it's at the state level as well. Follow-up?
Thank you. No, I'm good. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Representative Troy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Treasurer Marshall, for coming in today.
So is Westerville Schools, are you already a member of the Ohio Checkbook? Through the chair to the representative, thank you for the question. No, we are not, and I will say I have reviewed it. I've been in Westerville since 2018, and that was something that I looked at early on. Being such a large school district, we have lots of nuancy things that we do, and I was concerned about the clunkiness. If you look at a school district on Ohio Checkbook, it doesn't work really well. It's kind of clunky. It's not a great platform, so I appreciate that the state is looking at doing an RFP to look at potentially a new platform for that data. But no, I am not currently on the checkbook, but I also have worked really hard to try to find more efficient processes in the school district so that we don't have to continue to ask our local community for more and more tax dollars. And so I try not to add new things if I'm able to avoid that.
Follow up. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chairman. So I do have a great outcry from the citizenry of your particular school district saying that. I'm sure you do. Because, again, you know, at 29 years in local government, I always was as open as possible. We would issue, in conjunction as a county commissioner with the auditor's office, a CAFR report, comprehensive annual financial report. In other words, you know, the inference I have here is that, you know, governments all over the state are just hiding things and all that. And I'm not going to paint everything with that broad brush. So I guess the question would be, should this not be up to the local entity and their citizenry, whether or not they want to participate, rather than Big Brother here saying you will all participate?
Yeah. Through the chair to the representative, thank you for the question. So I fully support local control for all things. I do. What I'm supporting, I think, with this is the opportunity, because especially just as a school treasurer and all of the data that's out there for schools, there's probably 12 different ways that you can see data with 12 different answers to a question that you have. So I think about the Department of Education and all of the ways that we report our expenditures per pupil. The report card has a number, the cup report has a number, the benchmark report has a number, and none of those things match. And so what I'm interested in, I think, what I appreciate about this legislation is that it gives the opportunity, because schools are criticized for administrative expenses, right? And I think because our data is so very public and is easily accessible, but we don't have a way to compare our administrative costs to other local government administrative costs also. So I think it's easy to make schools a target when we're talking about waste and all of those things in public tax dollars. But I do think I support local control, but I would like to have a consistent way that we can compare ourselves to the rest of the world. And again, schools have been dealing with reporting this data for as long as I have been doing this business. So, yes, I support local control, though.
Follow-up.
Other questions? Representative Sims.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your testimony today. Just an observation, or just from your experience, do you anticipate that there will be a significant reduction in requests? Let's see. Public records requests, in particular. Yeah.
We hear a lot from the districts about a lot of public records requests. Because all this information will be and you'll be able to cross-reference, do you anticipate there will be or a need for addressing public record requests? Yeah. So through the chair to the representative, thank you for the question. I would hope so, but I'm not really holding my breath for that. I will say I think, you know, we already have a lot of data. So we don't subscribe to the checkbook because that's another manual thing. And again, as we have turnover in staff, it might fall off not because we choose to, but because somebody misses it in turnover or whatever that looks like. So we already have a lot of data reporting on our district website. And I do provide links to, like, here's this report. It provides the information you're looking for or whatever that is. I don't know that that's going to slow down our records requests because that data is already accessible. Most of the, I think of like some of the vendors that like periodically request the same data over and over again to upload to whatever their system is, like they know what is on the state already. And so I think it's just easier to get it from me than to go out there and look.
Follow up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a point of clarification. I don't have issues with public records requests, but I was thinking about the information now being more readily available, and people can get it quicker with that result and reduction.
Sure.
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your testimony.
Thank you.
Our next witness will be Kyle Kiffer from the Treasurer CFO at Nardonia Hills CSD. Welcome to testimony, sir. You're welcome to proceed.
Thank you. It's the first time doing this, sorry. Chair Stewart, Vice Chair of the Fellow, Ranking Member Sweeney, and members of the House Finance Committee, my name is Kyle Kiffer. I serve as Treasurer CFO of the Nordonia Hill City School District. Thank you for the opportunity to provide proponent testimony in House Bill 413. The Nordonia Hill City School District, there's no city of Nordonia. It is nestled in the Summit County, perfectly between Cleveland and Akron. when we serve 3,400 great kids. We have outstanding teachers, staff, administrators, community partners, board of education that make every kid's educational experience positive. And tomorrow we will graduate about 250 to 300 of those kids, which is always foremost on our mind. And before that, I spent 10 years at the state auditor's office before coming to school. So internal controls, government accountability, fiscal stewardship, and the importance of public trust is very important to me, and I convey that the best that I can to my community. Transparency, in my opinion, is not just a buzzword that we all use. It should be a philosophy built on public trust and public entities for all the communities that we serve. And I do think 413 is definitely towards that, the intention of that. At Nordonia Hill City School District we already participate in the Ohio checkbook system since 2022 We are one of those districts that actively participate House Bill 413 seems to strengthen this type of reporting which would further strengthen that public confidence Locally in my three years of Nordonia schools I routinely update on a monthly or bimonthly basis to the Ohio checkbook. I provide financial updates, give everything to the website, long-term forecasting, expenditure reporting. I provide community presentations where taxpayer dollars are spent and not just why but I mean not just here are the dollars that are spent but the why behind those investments of why it matters for our students in our community so transparency also means being honest with the community even when difficult decisions have to be made over the past three years we have had strategic reductions and again that transparency word we have told the community we have talked to the board and all that comes down to the dollar, right? The dollar that we receive, state dollars and public dollars and some federal dollars as well. So I support 413. I do have some considerations regarding the platform and reporting structure. I'm not going to go into that in my testimony because of some of it's already been talked about. But it is important to note that Ohio school districts already do report that financial information to the state. We've talked about the CAFR. We've talked about EMIS data.
And how I utilize public checkbook is that I upload maybe 15, 20 minutes bimonthly. That's how I participate in the checkbook system. It is important to note that we offer, it's fund accounting, so a school district, we follow USAS. Being the public, for the state auditor system, that they are on the unified accounting network. Either way, whatever vendor or how the bill chooses would have to work through those uploads we've talked about before. So transparency is not just posting numbers online. It requires context, right? There's general fund. There's 200 funds. There's student activity funds, federal funds, state funds, and all that, the descriptions and the reason why, does matter if a public citizen is looking up those expenses. So that's important to note for a vendor. And again, I would be more than happy to be a resource as well. I also believe transparency should apply across entities receiving public dollars. We've talked about this. Every educational institution and entity receiving public dollars should report their financial information in a transparent and accessible manner. Taxpayers deserve that accountability regardless of the type of entity involved. Consistency in the reporting strengthens public trust and always allows the communities to better understand how those public resources are being utilized locally and throughout the state. So I fully support this transparency initiative, including Ohio Checkbook or whatever it may look like in the future. I do agree with my peer before me. The current Ohio Checkbook system is a little bit clunky and, in my opinion, can be maybe revamped. Again, it goes into that context and the descriptions of what we talked about before. So I would encourage legislatures to pass this, and I'll be a resource if needed. And so Representative Young and Peterson, thank you for sponsoring this important piece of information, and I would be happy to answer any questions that the committee may have.
Thank you, sir, for your testimony. You said it was your first time. Well done. We're not that scary, so good job. Are there questions from the committee members? Ranking Member, pardon me, Vice Chair DeVilla.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for coming in. I want to thank both the Treasurers for coming in and sharing your expertise with us. You mentioned in your testimony that bimonthly, every other month, you're taking about 15 to 20 minutes to upload the data. That seems like a pretty light administrative burden on your behalf as the Treasurer, which is great. Can you talk a little bit over the four or five years that you've been part of Ohio Checkbook, how has technology changed to make that easier now perhaps than it was even at the beginning? It sounds like a fairly short amount of time that you're putting into it, and the idea here is not to be burdensome or onerous in terms of getting the information out there, but to be helpful and transparent to the public.
Through the chair. Thank you. I appreciate that question. I don't want to speak for all of my friends, all my treasurer friends, or especially in villages or townships, and again, I used to audit. So it's really just a download and an upload. yes, I have to look at the data. It's my responsibility as the public treasurer of the school district. But it is through our accounting system. I download the data, make sure it ties, and then upload. Really, it's an email right now. So an upload system would be very, very helpful. But I think that's the intention behind it is to expand it. And again, remember, we do submit our fiscal year data to DEW. and we also report various accrual bases through the ACFER. So there is a variety of information that I do think we do a good job with, that we are submitting that data very regularly. And then this being us in five years, yeah, the process is now about 15, 20 minutes.
Representative Gerrals.
Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Kiffer, for coming in today. Chair Kyle and I went to school together back in the day, so it's good to see you up here doing your part. I guess my question is, as I was looking at your testimony, you said that there was a lot of operational adjustments in terms of related to fiscal stability. As you were thinking through and as you entered the information in the Ohio checkbook, I'm all thinking about public perception. You said that you kind of put the data in multiple places when you had to make these hard decisions and were confronted with sharing with constituents why those decisions had to be made. Can you talk a little bit about kind of how the Ohio checkbook helped maybe brought down concern, pressure, maybe even anxiety around what these decisions were made maybe from a political landscape or maybe it wasn't necessarily a decision that someone agreed with, but they can understand that because it's in this particular system, I can at least say this is valid and true. Can you talk a little bit about the perception, how you use that to really be honest with people about, you know, these cuts that you have to make?
Yeah. Through the chair, Rep. Gerald's, I do believe our undergrad degree now has a driver's license. It's a good question, Rep. Gerald's. And if I'm talking to a community member, which I do live in the community that I serve as well in Macedonia. So it's very important to my neighbors, to my wife, that I am transparent, meaning when we – it wasn't just Kyle Kipper Treasurer. It's working hand-in-hand with our superintendent, our directors, our board, our teachers, our teacher leaders, our staff, everybody to, hey, this is where we were. This is where we want to get. here are, and how I do the financial information is that, hey, this is all the information. If a community member has any questions, I always try to start off a presentation like, here you can find the financial information for Ohio Checkbook. Here's the link to our website and the Ohio Checkbook website. Here's the data submitted on a monthly basis. We're not, I think one of the reps said, we're not hiding anything from the community. So if I always start that presentation like that, especially Ohio Checkbook, And again, if it can be a little bit more advanced from technology, that will help be a better tool for the future. We always started with the data first, and then with the financial data, and then we had various student data, staffing data, enrollment data, and then that centered from there. But everything was a process that was discussed and put in place, and all stakeholders were involved and communicated with. I hope that answers your question.
Follow-up? We have some other committees starting, so I'm going to be the last question, and we're going to proceed to a vote before we start to lose members. I think Vice Chair Davila kind of sees on maybe the stat of the day for me, which you said 15 to 20 minutes every other month to get this done. Can I assume then, when we potentially hear questions about costs, you didn't have to pull assistant treasurers off of other duties? you didn't go to your board and say, I've got massive overtime. I mean, the increased costs for that 20 minutes every two months is essentially zero. Would that be a fair understanding?
Well, you are the chair. I would say I just want to preface that that's for me. I'm 15, 20 minutes. There are different accounting systems that may be a little bit longer. I don't know that process. And I don't want to also include our, since this is for Ohio in general, our peers and friends at our villages and townships, because that may be totally different. But for me, for the accounting system I use, I do it. I do it. And is it another thing? Yeah. But is it an important thing to ensure public trust and accountability and transparency? Of course. Yeah.
Thank you, sir, for your testimony.
Thank you.
There is additional written testimony on your iPads. A lot of folks have characterized that as interested party, not a lot of opponents. I'm going to now recognize Vice Chair Davila for a motion.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move to favorably report amended House Bill 413 and recommend its passage.
Will the clerk please call the roll?
Stewart.
Yes.
Davila.
Yes.
Sweeney? Yes.
Abdullahi? Yes.
Abrams? Yes.
Baker? Yes.
Bird?
Calendar?
Yes.
Glassburn? Yes.
Grimm? Yes.
Hall? Yes.
Gerralls? Yes.
John? Johnson? Yes.
Manning?
Pickle Antonio? Yes.
Plummer? Yes.
Ray? Yes.
Ritter? Yes.
Robinson? Yes.
Romer? Santucci? Yes.
Schmidt? Sims? Yes.
Thomas? Yes.
Troy?
White? Yep.
Williams? Yes.
Willis? Yes. Young? Yes.
with a unanimous affirmative vote.
This bill will be favorably reported to the Rules and Reference Committee. I grant LSC harmonizing authority for the committee report. The vote will be open following committee until 1 p.m. 1 p.m., members who could not be here, you can sign the roll in the clerk's office. Additionally, if you wish to add your name. We're still going, folks. We're still going. If you wish to add your name as a co-sponsor, please write your nasterisk next to your name. this concludes the second hearing on House Bill 413 seeing no further business for the committee the committee now stands adjourned