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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > January > 14 > Entry
Guest column: ‘Redesign’ gives money to state, work to the locals
This commentary was written by Luwanna A. Delaney, a Republican and auditor of Greene County.
The latest offering in a continuing series of proposals to “change the way we govern ourselves” comes from Ohio’s metropolitan chambers of commerce and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
This one carries the ambitious title, “Redesigning Ohio: Transforming Government into a 21st Century Institution.”
The common themes to these sorts of so-called studies are that the state is facing a fiscal crisis, and we should take this opportunity to transform our state and local governments.
This chamber report is no exception, complete with the usual buzzwords: “getting more for less,” “building a strong state economy that can compete in the 21st century,” and “our state government must become more flexible, adaptable and innovative.”
Once you get past the lofty rhetoric, you find little more than warmed-over — and previously rejected — wish lists and left-over big-government schemes.
Among the specifics: the chambers suggest eliminating the 10-percent and 2.5-percent property tax rollbacks. These state-funded rollbacks were a trade-off for passing the state income tax in the 1970s and then increasing it in the 1980s.
Now some people want to treat the tax breaks as a “gift.” They also propose cutting back the Local Government Fund, which will impact basic services (police, fire and roads) provided by cities, villages and townships.
The personal property reimbursement has entered a phase-down period. In this case, the state eliminated our local personal property income resource, replaced it with the commercial activity tax, and then pulled the revenue to the state level, with eventually nothing to replace it on the local end.
The chambers discuss reducing or eliminating the homestead property tax exemption for senior citizens. One of their suggestions is to “means test” it, meaning it would be available only to those below a certain income.
There is no provision for the resources necessary to collect that information and update it every year. Ironically, after a rocky transition period, the program has just settled into an easier-to-administer format. Now they want to change it.
The chambers actually want to create new agencies and pay them to be the master manipulators of how local governments are funded and operated.
They advocate strongly for pushing decision-making downstream and then, in a strange twist of logic, also advocate for centralizing power by basically starving local units out of business.
Such loss of local control would be devastating to voters’ ability to hold government accountable.
Some studies say that state taxes are not the problem, compared to the rest of the country, but that local taxes are too high. Perhaps that is because the state has not shouldered its share of the cost of delivering services, which forces local governments to ask local voters for the necessary funding.
The problem with this and other similar “studies” is that they distract us from seriously dealing with our fiscal problems, and they offer the false hope that fiddling with the time-tested structures of government will be a “silver bullet.”
In fact, consolidation and creating bigger entities seldom result in better service, improved efficiency or savings. What it does is move government further away from the people.
Our problems in Ohio today are the result of excessive spending by politicians who over-committed finite resources, as well as unresponsive bureaucracies that acted as if they were beyond reproach.
Weak political leadership that could not say “no” to the next big project, favored programs or idealistic editorial boards is largely responsible for our collective situation.
Let’s stop wasting time getting starry-eyed over glossy reports. Taxpayers want results, not thinly disguised efforts to diminish local control and consolidate authority in bigger government.
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