COLUMBUS - To make his case against term limits for legislators, Senate President Richard H. Finan needed to look no further than his colleague State Sen. Robert R. Cupp.

It was 1997, and Ohio's school-funding formula was under legal attack.

Republican leaders had tapped the knowledgeable Cupp to explain the intricacies and the shortcomings of the old formula, then tell a gathering of educators and reporters how the GOP planned to change and improve it.

"Can you imagine what it will be like without people like that?" Finan, a suburban Cincinnati Republican, asked later.

While Finan and some other legislators fear term limits will imperil careful legislating, Ohio voters overwhelmingly agreed to impose term limits seven years ago in November - a policy that soon will usher out the Statehouse door almost 700 years of General Assembly experience.

Pending more resignations - so far, 10 legislators, elected to their last permissible terms, have quit - six of Ohio's 33 senators and 40 of the 99 state representatives must find new jobs between now and December 2000. Cupp, a Lima Republican, is among them. He may seek an Ohio Supreme Court seat.

Despite the looming loss of so much institutional knowledge at the Statehouse, David Zanotti, head of the conservative Solon-based Ohio Roundtable that helped quarterback the 1992 term-limits drive, still ardently supports them.

Officeholders should do a fixed term of public service, like a hitch in the armed forces, and then return to private life, he said.

"It was never about one party or the other," Zanotti said.

The idea that limiting legislators to eight consecutive years in a seat would end political careerism and infuse the Statehouse with new faces and new ideas proved only partly true, because perhaps a dozen incumbent Ohio legislators want to flip-flop between the Ohio Senate and the Ohio House.

"We think that is a great idea," Zanotti said.

At least 10 term-limited state representatives are likely to seek Ohio Senate seats next year. Meanwhile, several term-limited senators, including State Sen. Anthony Latell, a Warren Democrat who represents Geauga County, will seek House seats.

Zanotti said he fully expected that term-limited legislators would migrate from House to Senate, and vice-versa. But on another front - the additional power that term limits give Ohio's governors - Zanotti conceded that there was some concern.

"That is unquestionably a problem," Zanotti said.

So far, for example, seven House and Senate members who, because of term limits, had been elected to their last permissible terms have accepted executive-branch jobs from Republican governors George V. Voinovich and Bob Taft.

The seven legislators each won markedly higher salaries by leaving the House or the Senate, giving governors subtle but substantial new leverage over potential job seekers who must vote for or against a governor's legislative program while seeking jobs from him.

So far this session, there have been two formal calls to redo term limits - either to repeal them or to make them 12 years long, rather than eight. Neither proposal is expected to go anywhere.

And one term-limited House member who had vowed to lead a drive to repeal term limits subsequently accepted an executive-branch job from Taft. Former State Rep. Joy Padgett, a Coshocton Republican, became director of the Governor's Office of Appalachian Ohio in July.

To some bystanders, term limits have had some positive effects. As an example, the House, in 1998, was poised to pass a school-funding plan that critics said could have made Ohio public schools shoulder greater costs without offsetting state aid.

Unlike in the old days, when the longest-serving House members took the lead on tough issues, some less-senior colleagues successfully pushed a rival plan.

"We knew we would be around to clean up the mess," State Rep. Lynn E. Olman, a suburban Toledo Republican, said at the time.

Term limits would force the more senior-ranking members to leave before the new, higher costs caught up with schools, Olman said, leaving House freshmen to pay the bills.

But the independence bestowed by term limits may have a downside, too, as shown by the controversy that engulfed Sen. Roy L. Ray, chairman of the Senate's most important committee, Finance and Financial Institutions.

Critics already had hammered Ray, an Akron Republican, for accepting $161,500 in consulting fees from Akron-based Ohio Edison Co.

Ray nevertheless appeared ready to vote on a mammoth Ohio electric-utility deregulation bill that would directly affect Ohio Edison, despite pressure to abstain from the roll call.

As the vote neared, even some of Ray's allies fretted that he would vote because term limits would keep voters from cross-examining him. (In the end, Finan forced Ray to abstain.)

Other evident drawbacks of term limits show during budget-writing, when aides (and lobbyists) must walk inexperienced lawmakers through budget basics that veteran legislators learned by observation during years of waiting for seats on budget-writing panels.

"There's not as much willingness to sit on the bench and learn the process," said Republican House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, who took her House seat in January 1981 and didn't become speaker until 14 years later.

"I guess when I came in [in 1981-, people, to help me, said I should keep my head down and my mouth shut. Now, legislators just don't have the [time- to do that," Davidson said.

The upshot, said Finan, is that Ohio's executive-branch agencies will become "much, much more powerful" and that the level of legislative experience, especially in the House, will rapidly decline.

Term limits first surfaced in Ohio during the General Assembly's 1991-92 session, when then-State Rep. Ronald M. Mottl Sr., a North Royalton Democrat, and then-State Rep. Larry Manahan, a Defiance Republican, introduced competing plans.

Legislators took no action on either proposal, leaving the field to Zanotti's voter-initiated proposal, ratified by voters in November 1992.

Among the Ohio legislators who admit to voting for term limits in 1992 is State Rep. Robert Netzley, a suburban Dayton Republican, who will be forced to retire next year.

First elected in November 1960 - the same day Democrat John F. Kennedy was winning the presidency - Netzley has 40 years of House experience, making him the longest-serving current member of the General Assembly.

At the other end are an unlucky 13 legislators elected on the 1992 day that maverick H. Ross Perot drew 21 percent of Ohio's presidential vote and irked voters imposed eight-consecutive-year limits on Ohio legislators.

"I voted for term limits [though] . . . it was a bad solution to a terrible situation," said Netzley, alluding to the 20-year speakership of the late Vernal G. Riffe, an Appalachian Democrat, who retired in 1994.

Ironically, Riffe and other Democrats who were the target of term limits generally eluded them, while Ohio Republicans, expected to be the beneficiaries of term limits, may instead be the real victims of the plan.

For example, of the 46 Ohio legislators who must swap chambers or find new jobs next year, 30 legislators - or 65 percent - are Republican, including Davidson, the House speaker, from suburban Columbus.

"There may be a little touch of irony in this," Davidson said, adding that she nonetheless expected the GOP to retain its Ohio House majority.

Davidson, who wrested control of the House from Democrats in November 1994, ending 22 years of Democratic rule, said that were it not for term limits, she would probably have run again in 2000. Also being forced into retirement is the House's senior Democrat, and senior black member, State Rep. Troy Lee James of Cleveland, first elected in November 1966.

The term-limits drive, endorsed by then-Gov. Voinovich and led by Zanotti and Westlake businessman John J. Jazwa, was bankrolled by the late Fred Lennon, the Chagrin Valley industrialist known nationally for backing conservative causes.

Voinovich, in calling for term limits in October 1991 at a Midwestern Governors' Conference in Sioux City, Iowa, blindsided his Republican allies in the Ohio General Assembly.

In a further twist, Ohio Citizen Action, the local wing of Ralph Nader's pro-consumer movement, gathered many of the petition signatures to put term limits on Ohio's 1992 ballot. Statewide, term limits drew yes votes from about 68 percent of the voters and carried all 88 counties.

Spokesman Paul Ryder said Citizen Action's members overwhelmingly supported term limits, which were aimed at opening up General Assembly seats for newcomers.

"It was a cold look at what power of incumbency was doing to the political system," Ryder said, citing the "iron grip" of Democrat Riffe's 1975-1994 speakership.

Ryder conceded, however, that because parties draw Ohio Senate and House districts to favor their nominees, longtime rule by one party or another may continue in Columbus, though individual legislators may come and go. "Redistricting reform is also needed," he said.

One of the few business lobbies to openly back the 1992 term-limits drive was the National Federation of Independent Business, whose Ohio members gathered about 80,000 voter signatures for term-limiting initiative petitions.

"I was one guy who said we should do it," said the federation's Roger Geiger. "I took a few arrows in my back."

Geiger said that while it might be too soon to know what term limits will do to the long-term structure of Ohio's government, foes' concerns were misplaced.

Additionally, he said, local government will benefit as more and more term-limited legislators take their Statehouse experience home to run for county and city offices.

For example, among legislators who had won their last permissible terms is former State Rep. Darrell Opfer. He is a widely respected Sandusky-area Democrat who left the Statehouse to become economic development director of the Ottawa County Community Improvement Corp.

Since term limits became law in 1993, roughly a dozen savvy ex-legislators already have abandoned the Statehouse to become top officials of local governments or judges.

Among them are Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jane L. Campbell, Ashtabula County Commissioner Robert J. Boggs, Lakewood Mayor Madeline Cain, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Ronald Suster and Judge William G. Batchelder of the Akron-based 9th District Ohio Court of Appeals.

As part of the 1992 term-limit package, Ohioans also attempted to limit the terms of Ohio's two U.S. senators and 19 U.S. House members. But federal courts later ruled that only the U.S. Constitution may regulate congressional tenure.