Ohio's House of Representatives adopted House Concurrent Resolution No. 35 (H.C.R. No. 35) on June 9 by a 63-32 vote, urging Congress to reform federal permitting and environmental review processes for energy infrastructure. The resolution was introduced in February 2026 by Representative Beth Lear and carried 32 co-sponsors, all Republican. It passed the House Energy Committee 13-7 on June 8 before the full chamber vote the following day.
Concurrent resolutions carry no binding legal force. This one is directed at Ohio's congressional delegation and asks federal legislators to move on permitting reform legislation, citing grid reliability, consumer costs, and domestic energy security as the grounds for urgency.
The Numbers the Resolution Cites on Permitting Delay
H.C.R. No. 35 points to several figures that have become standard reference points in the federal permitting debate. More than 2,000 gigawatts of energy production and storage are currently stuck in electricity interconnection queues, a figure that exceeds total current U.S. electricity capacity. Average interconnection wait times have nearly doubled from roughly two years to nearly four years. The average time to complete an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for major infrastructure projects has risen to four and a half years. The resolution also notes that the United States typically takes close to ten years to permit a new mine, compared to two to three years in Canada and Australia, a gap it frames as a critical minerals supply chain vulnerability.
What the Resolution Asks Congress to Do
The resolution calls for reforms covering several categories: limiting litigation that delays energy projects, preventing use of the Clean Water Act to block linear infrastructure such as pipelines and transmission lines, funding and planning regional transmission buildout, and creating accountability mechanisms for federal agencies conducting permitting reviews. It does not endorse any specific pending federal legislation by name. The Clerk of the Ohio House is directed to transmit the resolution to the President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the members of Ohio's congressional delegation.
What the Passage Actually Means for Federal Policy
Practically speaking, the resolution changes nothing on its own. Ohio's Senate still needs to concur before it is fully adopted, and a concurrent resolution carries no enforcement mechanism regardless. Its function is political rather than legal: it puts Ohio House members on record, by name and vote, pressuring the state's congressional delegation to prioritize permitting reform in federal legislation.
The timing matters. Federal permitting provisions are currently embedded in the One Big Beautiful Budget Act moving through Congress, and the debate over how aggressive those provisions should be remains active. Ohio is not alone here. Several other state legislatures have passed similar resolutions over the past two years, and federal permitting reform has cleared the House in various forms before stalling in the Senate. Whether this round produces a durable outcome depends on what survives budget reconciliation, not on what Ohio's House resolves. But the resolution adds to a documented record that state governments are treating the current permitting timeline as an operational problem, not a political abstraction.
