Ohio isn't a hotbed for model legislation. But copycat bills abound.

COLUMBUS – Ohio isn’t among the most prolific states to introduce model legislation, according to an investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity.

But copycat bills do occasionally make their way to the Ohio Statehouse through business interests, think tanks and other organizations.

Read the investigation:You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.

Take, for example, a bill preempting local laws against taxes on plastic containers that quickly passed the Ohio House late last year. No community in Ohio has passed a plastic bag tax, and environmental groups wondered why legislators were rushing to pass such a law.

The legislation (House Bill 625) closely resembled a model policy by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, commonly known as ALEC.

Bill sponsor Rep. George Lang, R-West Chester, said Friday he didn't know it was an ALEC bill, and he just recently joined the organization. Lang said he got the idea from a bag manufacturer with Ohio operations.

Lang said he shared the idea with the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, a nonpartisan agency that writes and analyzes bills, which then wrote the bill.

"I’m not smart enough to put a draft together – I don’t think many legislators are," Lang said.

He plans to reintroduce the bill in the next month.

If a lawmaker submits a template bill from ALEC or another organization, it will still be reviewed by the Legislative Service Commission staffers and written to fit Ohio law.

A computer analysis of nearly one million bills introduced from 2010 through 2018 found about 150 in Ohio with language matching model legislation.

One of those bills: “right-to-try” legislation signed in 2016 by then-Gov. John Kasich.

The bill was designed by the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based libertarian think tank. The law allows patients with terminal illnesses to try drugs not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. The legislation was passed on the federal level last year.