COLUMBUS, Ohio ( WCMH ) — A years-long effort to crown the walleye as Ohio’s state fish again drowned at the Statehouse.
While the Ohio House passed House Bill 599 last June to designate the state fish as sander vitreus , commonly known as the walleye, the proposal didn’t advance in the Ohio Senate. The walleye provision was then folded into Senate Bill 62, legislation to make a variety of designations like naming Oct. 4 “Rutherford B. Hayes Day,” but it too failed to swim across the legislative finish line. Watch a previous NBC4 report on H.B. 599 in the video player above.
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Ohio’s 135th General Assembly ended in December, meaning any proposal seeking to name the walleye as the state fish will need to be reintroduced and undergo the legislative approval process during the state’s 136th General Assembly, which kicked off on Monday and runs for two years.
Though Ohio has memorialized other symbols, like tomato juice as the official beverage and white trillium as the formal wildflower, the state is one of three — along with Indiana and Iowa — which remains symbolically fishless…