Ohio House and Senate lawmakers working out differences in the state's $45 billion budget voted Sunday on several changes, including saving an outdoor jobs program and proposing to study a change in the new car exemption under the E-check program.

        The joint House-Senate budget committee, which reconciles laws passed in both houses of the legislature, also agreed to increase legal protections for legislators, develop a contingency fund that could help the state's steel industry and to consider changing state drivers' licenses to more easily identify drivers under 21 years of age.

        The state's budget for the next two fiscal years won't include an income tax increase, yet will cost taxpayers more in other ways. The budget will eliminate a tax break that was in effect last year, causing Ohioans to pay more income tax without having their tax rates go up.

        In addition, changes to the state's financial structure will indirectly tax everyone who has children in a state-funded college, owns a car, borrows a book, stays in a nursing home or buys automobile tires.

        Legislative Republicans, who make up the majority in both houses, had to scrape together every spare dollar to achieve their goals of balancing the 2002-03 budget and providing record amounts to public schools.

        As a result, they left no money in the state's income tax reduction fund this year. That fund contained enough money in 2000 to allow for a 6.9 percent income tax cut for Ohioans.

        Individuals filing their income taxes also will no longer be able to take a credit for a political donation, as permitted in the campaign-finance reform law of 1995. Suspension of that credit will provide an additional $4.8 million to the state treasury.

        Republicans also have frozen the state reimbursement to libraries and local governments, taken the ceilings off state college and university tuition, increased service fees for motor vehicle registrations, and made a variety of other changes.

        “We were able to provide an additional $1.4 billion for Ohio's schools, and we were able to climb out of an $800 million hole created by a slowing economy, and we did it without raising taxes,” said Rep. John A. Carey Jr., a Wellston Republican who chairs the conference committee negotiating the final budget.

        Democrats say holes in the Republicans' school funding plan will force local school districts to continue to go to the ballot for additional property taxes to operate schools. Republicans insist the state will make up the difference for any district shortchanged by the state-aid distribution formula.

        Among the actions Sunday, the house-Senate committee:

        • Restored funding to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Department of Natural Resources jobs program for wayward youth. The proposal funds the program with $7.8 million in federal welfare dollars next year and $8 million in 2003.

        • Agreed with a House proposal to create a task force to study how to exempt new cars of up to 5 years old from the state's E-check program. The program now exempts cars up to 2 years old.

        • Agreed with a Senate proposal to shield lawmakers and their staffs from lawsuits over legislation, including immunity from giving depositions in such lawsuits, and to prohibit certain documents involved in the legislative process from being subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit.

        • Agreed with a Senate proposal to consider creating a driver's license that makes it immediately clear whether the license holder is between 18 and 21, including developing a vertical license instead of the current horizontal license.

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