While you were sleeping, Ohio law changed again. Lawmakers jammed through a $2B property tax package, an election overhaul, hemp limits, school fixes, and inmate product rules, plus a pile of extras.
The following sixteen bills have been sent to Governor DeWine’s desk to become law in 30 days.
House Bill 186 – Regards school district property taxes, school funding formula
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb186
Am. H.B. 186 rewrites parts of Ohio’s property-tax system and shifts how tax relief is distributed. The bill changes how the state calculates and applies property-tax rollbacks, homestead benefits, and local reimbursement formulas. One of the largest changes reduces state reimbursement for non-owner-occupied properties and moves that same relief toward owner-occupied homes instead. This means the state gives less tax support to rental properties, commercial holdings, and other investment-type real estate, while increasing targeted relief for people who live in their own homes.
The bill also modifies how counties calculate taxable value, adjusts contribution rates for specific levies, and changes the way the state handles reimbursements owed to school districts and local governments. Multiple sections give state agencies new authority to set calculation rules, audit records, and enforce compliance.
Much of the bill focuses on rebalancing who pays what: shifting tax pressure off homeowners and placing more of the cost on other classes of property. It also creates new reporting and administrative requirements for counties and school districts to follow, adding another layer of state-driven guidance on property-tax administration.
House Bill 492 – Prohibit interfering with motor vehicle-related arrests
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb492
Sub. H.B. 492 takes a narrow rule about not interfering with police during certain traffic arrests and turns it into a rule that applies to every motor vehicle law in Title XLV. The bill keeps the rule against getting in the way of people who enforce highway laws.
The bill also adds a new requirement. Drivers and passengers must give their name, address, and date of birth whenever an officer says they are reasonably suspected of violating any motor vehicle law. This applies to cars, motorcycles, utility vehicles, boats, and even aircraft. People are not required to answer anything beyond those three details. People can refuse to give their age if age is part of the suspected offense.
The expanded interference rule becomes a minor misdemeanor of the second degree. Refusing to give identifying information becomes a fourth degree misdemeanor. The old version of section 4513.36 is repealed.
House Bill 324 – Enact the Patient Protection Act
https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb324
Sub. H.B. 324 creates new rules for certain prescription drugs that the state says have severe side effects in more than five percent of users. The bill requires an in-person exam, a warning to the patient, and a follow-up visit before a prescriber can issue one of these drugs.
The bill gives the Ohio Department of Health the power to decide which drugs meet this threshold. The director must consult several state agencies and then choose the highest reported rate from insurance claims, patient reports, or FDA data. The state must post a public list of these drugs and update it as needed.
This setup gives the state broad control over which drugs fall under these rules.
Senate Bill 56 – Revise medical and adult-use marijuana laws; levy marijuana taxes
https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/sb56
Sub. S.B. 56 is a major rewrite of Ohio’s hemp laws. The bill creates a tightly controlled system for “intoxicating hemp products,” defining them by THC content and banning their sale unless the seller becomes a state-licensed hemp dispensary. Retailers may not sell these products unless they meet strict testing, packaging, age-verification, and labeling rules set by the superintendent of cannabis control. The bill also prohibits selling hemp products that contain added drugs, contaminants, or substances that boost THC effects.
The state gains broad new regulatory power. The superintendent can set potency limits, restrict advertising, approve all ads, and investigate or penalize any person involved in the hemp supply chain. Municipalities are barred from banning these businesses unless their bans existed before June 30, 2025.
The bill requires licenses for sellers, criminal-background checks, record-keeping, reporting, and compliance with numerous rules on cultivation, production, storage, and transport. It also imposes new taxes on intoxicating hemp sales and authorizes inspectors to enter facilities and seize products they believe are untaxed or noncompliant. Seized products may be forfeited and sold by the state.
In short, the bill replaces Ohio’s loosely regulated hemp market with a system resembling the state’s marijuana regulatory model, with far greater state control.
Senate Bill 293 – Revise deadline to return absent voter ballots
https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/sb293
Sub. S.B. 293 makes wide-reaching changes to Ohio election law. The bill expands the state’s authority to collect, compare, and share voter data across multiple agencies every month, including the BMV, Medicaid, Corrections, and federal immigration systems. It orders aggressive cross-checks to flag voters whose records do not match and creates new procedures that force flagged voters into provisional ballots until they fix the mismatch. Boards must cancel registrations in several scenarios, including non-responses to mailed notices and data conflicts.
The bill tightens rules on voter registration, ballot returns, and provisional voting. It ends the post-Election-Day grace period for mailed absentee ballots unless they meet narrow timing rules. It expands circumstances where voters must vote provisionally and increases the list of reasons a provisional ballot can be rejected. It increases ID-based challenges at the polls and requires proof of citizenship in more situations, with failure leading to a provisional ballot that will be discarded if documentation is not supplied within four days.
The bill also creates a new Ohio Election Integrity Commission, with appointed members who have significant restrictions on political activity, and gives it authority to oversee enforcement actions.
House Bill 114 – Regards age requirements for kindergarten admission
https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb114
Am. H.B. 114 changes Ohio’s kindergarten age rules by tightening and clarifying when a child can start school. Districts must admit students who turn five by the first day of instruction, and it keeps the alternative September 30 cutoff for districts that start school later. The bill creates stricter guardrails for early admittance, forcing children who miss the cutoff to go through district-controlled evaluations before being allowed into kindergarten or first grade. It also reinforces that once a child is admitted to kindergarten anywhere in Ohio, no other district can block them due to age.
The bill keeps a complicated structure for determining “successful completion” of kindergarten, including rules for Montessori, charter, child-care-based, and accelerated programs. It also preserves the ability of some districts to charge tuition for all-day kindergarten and requires statewide annual reporting of those fees.
A second part of the bill orders the Department of Education and Workforce to fix a scoring error on the 2024–2025 biology end-of-course exam. Any student whose score should have been higher must have it raised, and new diploma seals awarded when applicable. Scores cannot be lowered.
In short, the bill tightens age-based gatekeeping and mandates a one-time test score correction.
House Bill 29 – Regards inmates’ access to feminine hygiene products and showers
https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb29
H.B. 29 creates a statewide mandate for all county, municipal, and state correctional facilities that house female inmates. Facilities must provide free feminine hygiene products based on individual need in multiple sizes. The bill defines “female” in biological terms.
The bill requires each facility to adopt written policies for storage, distribution, disposal, sanitation, and anti-discrimination rules. The bill requires separate disposal containers and specific cleaning procedures. The bill requires at least one hot shower per day for menstruating inmates unless the facility declares an emergency. The bill defines emergency in a broad way that covers riots, escapes, staff shortages, disease outbreaks, and similar events.
Local jails and prisons receive no funding or enforcement guidance for these new mandates. Each facility is responsible for meeting the requirements during normal operations and during periods of high security or limited staffing.
House Bill 247 – Revise dog law, including dangerous and vicious dogs
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb247
Sub. H.B. 247 is a major rewrite of Ohio’s dog laws. The bill expands state and local authority over dog ownership, creates strict classifications for “nuisance,” “dangerous,” and “vicious” dogs, and increases penalties for owners based on those classifications. Owners face criminal charges ranging from minor misdemeanors to felonies if their dog harms a person, another dog, or livestock. Courts may order a dog destroyed in many situations, including attempted bites that result in injury. The bill also allows mandatory destruction when a dog kills or seriously injures a person.
The bill imposes new duties on owners of designated dogs. Owners must obtain a dangerous-dog registration, pay fees, microchip the dog, maintain liability insurance, post warning signs, disclose the dog’s status to trainers and veterinarians, and notify county authorities when the dog is loose, transferred, or bites someone.
The bill forces shelters to conduct detailed behavioral history checks before transferring a dog and exempts shelters only if they could not reasonably know the dog’s risk.
Local governments gain authority to pass dog-control ordinances, and violations can be charged daily.
In practical terms, the bill expands state power, increases penalties, and broadens conditions where dogs can be seized or euthanized.
Senate Bill 103 – Allow alternative rate plans for certain natural gas companies
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/sb103
Sub. S.B. 103 makes broad, technical changes to how Ohio regulates and values large utility companies. The bill rewrites long sections of state law to give utilities more flexibility in how they calculate property values, justify rate changes, and negotiate special deals with large industrial gas customers. Much of the bill expands the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio’s authority to accept “forecasted test periods,” which allow utilities to set rates based on future projections instead of actual costs. This approach gives companies more control in shaping rate cases.
The bill also creates a new mechanism letting natural gas companies negotiate customized “alternative rate plans” for very large customers who use over 1.2 million Mcf of gas per year. These agreements can bypass normal rate-case scrutiny and are automatically approved if regulators do not act within 90 days. The bill claims to protect regular customers from subsidizing these deals, but enforcement depends largely on the companies filing internal financial reports.
Another major piece affects how utility property is valued for rate-setting. It provides utilities more ways to count future projects and replacement work into their valuation reports, which can justify higher rates.
In practical terms, the bill tilts the regulatory process toward utilities and large industrial users and reduces the transparency and predictability faced by regular residential customers.
House Bill 184 – Prescribe limitations on intercollegiate athlete contracts
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb184/
Sub. H.B. 184 stuffs Ohio law with local earmarks, agency rule changes, tax tweaks, and new mandates. The bill started with one topic and got hijacked into a catch-all where lawmakers crammed in everything except the original idea, leaving almost no real oversight.
Sub. H.B. 184 is a large spending and policy package that mixes unrelated changes into one bill. The bill contains dozens of local earmarks for buildings, parks, fire stations, treatment centers, and similar projects. The bill moves significant state money to local governments and private organizations without clear statewide standards for why these projects are chosen.
The bill also changes administrative rules across several state agencies. The bill gives the Department of Development and Budget and Management new authority to track and project tax credit impacts. The bill expands control over unclaimed attorney funds and redirects them to the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation under specific timelines. These changes shift financial control toward state agencies with little transparency for the public.
Sub. H.B. 184 include the exemption allowing foreign citizens with a valid U.S. visa and foreign license can skip Ohio’s new driver-ed rules if they show a form proving a hospital or health-system affiliation, with a similar carve-out for agricultural guest workers.
The bill contains regulatory changes for schools, emergency management, and public safety. The bill imposes new reporting requirements and compliance expectations but does not address funding or staffing limits.
The bill functions as a catch-all mechanism to pass large amounts of spending and policy with limited debate. The structure lets lawmakers advance many unrelated provisions under one vote, which reduces public oversight and makes it difficult for citizens to track what the bill actually changes.
House Bill 88 – Regards drug trafficking, human trafficking, and fentanyl
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb88
Sub. H.B. 88 is a major expansion of Ohio’s drug-crime laws. The bill rewrites penalties for trafficking and possession across almost every drug category. The bill increases mandatory prison time, adds new felony levels, and expands “vicinity” enhancements that raise penalties whenever an offense occurs near a school, a juvenile, or a treatment provider. These penalty charts take up most of the bill and apply to cocaine, heroin, fentanyl compounds, methamphetamine, hashish, marijuana, and controlled-substance analogs.
The bill also adds new sentencing enhancements for repeat drug offenders and major drug offenders, requiring mandatory maximum prison terms in many cases.
The bill does not focus solely on punishment. The bill creates “Fentanyl Poisoning Awareness Month.” The bill requires K–12 schools, charter schools, STEM schools, and colleges to add fentanyl-awareness education and prevention policies.
The bill makes a small number of changes to definitions in the state’s criminal-code section on criminal enterprises.
The bill’s practical effect is to widen criminal penalties, expand mandatory sentencing, and increase the number of situations where drug offenders can be charged with higher-level felonies.
House Bill 102 – Restrict sex offender from residing, loitering near victim’s home
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb102
Sub. H.B. 102 creates new statewide residency and loitering restrictions for people listed on Ohio’s sex-offender or child-victim offender registry. The bill bans these individuals from living within 2,000 feet of their victim’s home and bans them from being within 1,000 feet of the victim’s residence. Courts and prosecutors can file civil actions to force an offender out of an area, and the bill does not require proof of irreparable harm before granting an injunction. Victims can object to the injunction, but the court has the final say.
The bill also rewrites multiple housing and eviction laws to let landlords remove tenants who are offenders or who allow offenders to live with them, if the property is within 1,000 or 2,000 feet of a school, child-care center, or the victim’s residence. These provisions allow fast-track evictions based on registry data alone.
The bill expands criminal penalties for violating offender-registration rules, including new felony levels for repeat violations. It also expands bans on offenders volunteering in roles that involve contact with minors.
The bill centralizes more authority in courts, prosecutors, and landlords while placing broad movement and housing restrictions on registered individuals.
House Bill 338 – Enact Andy’s Law
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb338
Sub. H.B. 338 heavily expands Ohio’s assault and felonious-assault laws by adding long lists of special protected classes, new penalty levels, and mandatory prison terms. The bill creates separate penalty tracks depending on who the victim is. Peace officers, firefighters, EMS workers, emergency-service responders, probation officers, correctional-facility staff, judges, magistrates, hospital workers, school teachers, school bus drivers, and employees of child-services agencies all receive enhanced penalty protections. Many of these categories trigger felony charges even when the underlying conduct would normally be a misdemeanor.
Examples include mandatory prison terms when the victim is a peace officer and suffers serious harm, automatic felony upgrades inside state prisons and youth facilities , and harsher charges for assaults on correctional-facility employees both on and off facility grounds.
The bill also adds mandatory jail or prison terms when certain sentencing “specifications” are attached to a case. Courts receive less sentencing flexibility because many penalties become automatic once the victim falls into a listed category.
The practical effect is a large expansion of state power in assault prosecutions, more mandatory incarceration, and a growing list of occupations that convert otherwise lower-level assaults into higher-level felonies.
House Bill 476 – Authorize online raffles under the Charitable Gaming Law
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb476
Sub. H.B. 476 authorizes charities, fraternal organizations, and school districts to run online raffles. The bill removes the existing ban on electronic raffle systems and replaces it with a tightly controlled structure overseen by the Ohio Attorney General. Organizations may use an online platform only if it is approved by the state and only if the raffle qualifies as a “small raffle,” which caps prize values and ticket revenue. The bill requires every platform provider to obtain a license, follow record-keeping rules, and allow state auditors access to their data. Online raffles must also follow Ohio gambling laws, which already impose restrictions on who may conduct gaming and for what purpose.
The bill adds new enforcement powers for the Attorney General, including the ability to revoke raffle privileges, issue civil penalties, and shut down online platforms that fail compliance. The bill places all regulatory discretion in the AG’s office, including approval of software, audits, financial reporting, and investigation procedures.
The practical effect is that nonprofits gain a new fundraising tool, but only under a regulatory system that increases state oversight, expands AG authority, and restricts which organizations can participate. The bill opens digital raffles while tightening state control over the process.
House Bill 485 – Enact the Baby Olivia Act
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb485
Sub. H.B. 485 creates a new statewide mandate that requires every public school, including charter and STEM schools, to teach “human growth and development” to students in grades 5 through 12. The bill defines that instruction very narrowly. Schools must show a high-definition fetal-development video and must show the “Meet Baby Olivia” video produced by Live Action or a “substantially similar” replacement chosen by the same organization. Schools cannot pick their own core materials and must follow the state-approved list. Parents may opt their children out, but only by written request.
The bill also prohibits the Department of Education and Workforce from adopting any curriculum or standards in this subject area unless the General Assembly votes to approve them. This gives lawmakers direct control over what health-related material schools may teach.
Each year the department must audit every school to ensure compliance and must publicly post the results. Districts must make all teaching materials available to parents on request.
The practical effect is a top-down, politically driven curriculum mandate that forces schools to use a specific advocacy-produced video and subjects them to annual compliance audits.
H.B. 486 – Enact the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act
https://legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb486
Am. H.B. 486 creates a new statewide policy that invites public-school teachers and state-college instructors to teach a long, fixed list of “positive impacts of religion” on American history. The bill specifically names Judeo-Christian values and provides nearly two dozen predefined topics that schools may teach, many of which come directly from religious advocacy narratives. Examples include the “authentic history of the pilgrims,” religious interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, claims about the Ten Commandments shaping American law, and a list of religious figures credited with influencing public policy and civil rights.
The bill asserts that these teachings are “accurate” and “not proselytization,” despite the fact that they present a selective, religiously framed version of history. The General Assembly uses these declarations to justify the curriculum’s legitimacy.
The bill does not require schools to teach these topics but creates a protected legal space for teachers to do so without district interference. The bill also amends multiple sections governing community schools, STEM schools, and college-preparatory boarding schools so that all these institutions are legally permitted to include this material.
The practical effect is the introduction of a state-endorsed religious framing of American history into public education.
Ohioans are likely to see higher costs, tighter controls, and less personal freedom from this wave of bills. The property-tax changes shift burdens without fixing spending. Police-stop rules expand criminal exposure. Drug and hemp laws tighten state control. Election rules get more restrictive. Schools face new mandates and politicized content. Benefits are limited mostly to agencies gaining power, not to citizens.
Elections matter because lawmakers keep proving they can make everything worse. Ohio just got a pile of new rules, crackdowns, taxes, and mandates nobody asked for. Change requires people who show up. Volunteer, donate, run for office, or the same crew keeps writing your laws.