Members of the Ohio House face a pivotal decision. They can side with the people who sent them to Columbus by passing the payday loan reforms in House Bill 123.

Or they can side with relentless Statehouse lobbyists for payday lenders -- lenders who for more than nine years have defied voters by charging borrowers unconscionable rates of interest; who, until mid-April, successfully kept HB 123 from moving out of committee; and who can be counted on to lobby intensively now to get legislators to water it down on the House floor.

HB 123 was introduced in March 2017, nearly a decade after Ohio voters, by more than a 63 percent margin, capped the annual percentage rate on payday loans at 28 percent. Payday lenders promptly found loopholes that the Ohio legislature refused to close. Result: Ohio saw highest-in-the nation interest rates, averaging 591 percent, as calculated by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2016.

The reform plan Springfield Republican Kyle Koehler and Toledo Democrat Michael Ashford offered last year was a good compromise -- that languished for more than a year, until April 19, 2018, when the House Government Accountability and Oversight Committee finally approved it on a 9-1 vote.

Coincidentally or not, the House committee voted just seven days after then-House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, a Republican from southwest Ohio, resigned amid an FBI investigation. The Dayton Daily News reported that "investigators are looking at a four-day [Rosenberger] trip to London in August 2017 sponsored by GOPAC Education Fund. Along on the trip were at least two lobbyists for the payday lending industry."

HB 123 would cap interest payments on short-term loans based on a borrower's monthly income and limit fees to $20 per month.

The bill "contains a range of important consumer safeguards and closes a loophole that for a decade has allowed payday lenders to charge Ohio families the highest rates in the nation," said Nick Bourke, director of the Pew trusts' consumer finance project, in a statement last month. "Each day that passes without safeguards on payday loans drains more than $200,000 from Ohio families."

Bills don't reach the House floor to be defeated. That's why the payday loan lobbies will likely seek to delay a House vote on HB 123 - or to gut the bill by, say, limiting HB 123's borrower safeguards to "outlier" lenders - payday lenders who could be portrayed as less "moderate" or "reasonable" than payday lenders who consider themselves respectable, a cut above their competitors.

A two-tier bill would be a legislative fraud. HB 123 should continue to cover all payday lenders making these short-term loans in Ohio.

Ohioans have waited almost nine years for the General Assembly to carry out the will of the nearly 3.4 million Ohioans who voted in 2008 to cap the borrowing costs of payday loans.

Last year, it took the legislature less than five months to pass a 3,384-page, $65 billion state budget.

In contrast, House Bill 123, which is 17 pages long, has been sitting in the House for 14 months; it's been reviewed plenty.

If House members weaken or further delay HB 123, that will be all the proof voters need that, in the Ohio House of Representatives, the public interest takes a back seat to special interests.

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