COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio legislature is putting $40 million in cash into a state fund that promises direct financial help for firefighters, police and EMS first responders who suffer from a post-traumatic stress injury.
The measure was included in a broad spending bill known as House Bill 184, which awaits a signature from Gov. Mike DeWine before it’s confirmed into law.
Section 12 of the bill mandates the state, on July 1, 2026, or as soon as possible thereafter, to “transfer $40,000,000 cash from the General Revenue Fund to the State Post-Traumatic Stress Fund,” which lawmakers said was created in 2020 but has sat idle and unfunded ever since.
The fund, which H.B 184 will move under the Ohio Department of Public Safety, is designed to help cover wages for responders who become “disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder” incurred on the job, and to help cover the medical expenses incurred over the course of treatment.
Still, despite passing the appropriation, legislators on both sides of the aisle say there’s plenty more work to do to actually get that assistance to afflicted first responders, given that there’s no formal instruction in either administrative code or Ohio law that dictates how first responders can apply for help, or for how the fund should determine claims.
“We are finally getting money into that fund, and this is important. But it’s also important that we don’t go out and send out press releases saying that we fixed this problem,” Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake, said on the House floor before the vote.
Volunteer firefighter and local state Rep. Thomas Hall, R-Madison Twp., told this outlet he agreed with Sweeney’s characterization on the floor. Still, he called the step “a huge deal.”
“First responders see a lot of trauma, almost on a daily basis in some communities,” Hall said in an interview. “A lot of the stress and a lot of the trauma goes untreated.”
He said the fund, once operational, will fill a gap present in Ohio’s Bureau of Workers Compensation program, which financially supplements employees physically injured on the job, but doesn’t offer relief for mental trauma.
“Ohio was one of the few states that didn’t recognize the post-traumatic stress injury part of it for first responders,” Hall said. “So, these $40 million will go towards that, towards these traumatic scenes and situations these first responders respond to and have to leave there and deal with what they’ve just seen.”
Hall, who is one of a bipartisan group of lawmakers to recently champion the cause, said the “next logical step” is to hold discussions with first responders and their advocacy groups to determine how to set up a framework for the fund.
“This was a huge step getting the funds, and after we got the funds it’s now, ‘How do we actually see this working?'” Hall said, adding that he hopes to start discussions in the next few weeks and have a framework up “within a year, year and a half, that’s my goal.”
Most pressingly, lawmakers will have to nullify a provision in the law that states “there shall be no payments made from the state post-traumatic stress fund” and that “no person is eligible for any claims.”
“It is disturbing that we’re going to let this issue continue to go on, and I want to commend this body for moving this forward,” Sweeney told her peers, “but I urge all of us to give that commitment that we’re not just funding this, it’s not just another (instance of) moving-the-goal-line.”
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