Returning with October are Circleville’s Pumpkin Show , the Halloween revels of Athens and, to Columbus, perhaps Ohio's grandest example of trick or treat (perhaps more aptly, treat or trick), the state's 132-member General Assembly.

In theory, the Ohio House and state Senate, both Republican-led, will gather on Capitol Square Wednesday mainly to complete business left unfinished when legislators went home for the summer on June 27. (The Senate and House may also meet on Oct. 16 and Oct. 30.)

Accordingly, both chambers will likely consider technical tweaks to the two-year state budget, adopted in June. The measure, Amended Substitute House Bill 59, totaled 3,747 pages when it landed on Gov. John Kasich’s desk. If the past is any guide, a budget that hefty requires legislators to make at least a few nonsubstantive corrections and to harmonize any conflicting provisions.

Also in play, though, may be bills that could induce ardent House and Senate debate. One of them is likely to be critically important to Ohio’s environment – and to ratepayers (homeowners and businesses alike) of Ohio’s electric utilities.

Last Wednesday, Sen. William G. Seitz, a Cincinnati Republican who chairs the Senate Public Utilities Committee, unveiled a rewrite of his Senate Bill 58, which he originally introduced Feb. 27.

The Seitz bill is said to aim at revising the renewable energy and energy efficiency standards that current Ohio law requires of electric utilities. But environmental lobbyists charge that Seitz’s bill would gut, not revise, those energy standards.

Yet encouraging renewable energy and energy efficiency is smart public policy. As the Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents the state’s residential utility ratepayers, puts it: “Energy efficiency makes sense because it is less expensive to avoid using a kilowatt hour than it is to generate a kilowatt hour.”

Still, there were Statehouse hints last week that legislative leaders may pass Seitz’s bill in October. Such an unseemly rush to curtail public debate and ram through major changes on a critical issue of state policy must be resisted.

Other proposals in next month’s mix may also fuel debate, though the issues they raise aren’t as fundamental as the financial and environmental costs of electricity generation.

For instance, legislators of both parties may try to strengthen the ban on so-called Internet cafes. The cafes offer forms of gambling even though they purport not to but then accuse Ohio’s four casinos of fearing the cafes as competitors. The stakes are big enough that the Internet cafe lobby is circulating petitions to place on Ohio’s ballot a referendum to kill earlier General Assembly restrictions on the cafes.

It's also possible that state legislators, with business lobbyists and lobbyists for Ohio cities and villages, may fashion a compromise municipal income-tax bill. Ohio municipalities vigorously oppose a business-backed measure, House Bill 5, as an infringement on city and village home rule and a bid to limit local fiscal flexibility.

According to the state Taxation Department, in 2011 (the latest year available) 240 cities and 352 villages levied an income tax. The rates ranged from 0.4 percent to 3 percent. (Cleveland’s is 2 percent.)

Meanwhile, one topic and one date will loom over the Statehouse in October like the hunter’s moon. The topic: The unwillingness or inability of the House (60-39 Republican) to expand Medicaid -- a key Kasich priority. House action or inaction is considered a key because the Senate (23-10 Republican) is considered likely to approve expansion if the House does.

The date is Feb. 6 – the filing deadline for candidates who wish to run in 2014’s May 7 primary election. House Republicans are nervous about potential primary election challenges from so-called Tea Party Republicans.

Those fears clearly figure in the House's stall over Medicaid expansion. On the right, one (illogical) test of a Statehouse conservative's bona fides is whether he or she supports or opposes Medicaid expansion. The illogic: John Kasich, Ohio's most conservative governor in eons, avidly wants to expand Medicaid, so much so that what's been tagged the "nuclear option" -- using the state Controlling Board instead of the legislature to authorize expansion -- is a real possibility.