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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 > March > 13 > Entry
Ellen Belcher: Kasich seizing budget as prod for change
One thing that Ohio’s budget woes are driving home to people is just how omnipresent state government is in their lives — even if they don’t know it.
This week, when Gov. John Kasich releases his budget — including multi-billions in cuts — there is no one who isn’t going to feel the impact. The state doesn’t run your local school district, but it does put up hefty amounts toward your children’s teachers’ pay. Ditto for your neighborhood firefighter, the township’s road crews and the county’s mental health clinics.
Hospitals and nursing homes will feel the pinch, and, in one form or fashion, so will their employees and patients.
This is not to say that the governor and state lawmakers shouldn’t cut the budget. While we can debate how much it should be cut, and whether cuts should be coupled with a tax increase, serious people are not saying that the answer is to simply raise taxes.
When the cuts come, many decisions about how to react will fall to local elected officials. More than 80 cents of every dollar in the state’s general fund is funneled back to local governments and schools or directly for human services.
Many of the recipients have already been cutting their spending because of drops in local property tax revenues and local income tax revenues.
Some would argue that this arrangement is as it should be. The funding stream ensures that elected officials who are closest to the people get to make the priorities about how public money will be spent.
Sometimes that works out; sometimes not. After all, it was locally elected officials who negotiated the union contracts that Kasich and the legislature want to rein in under the pending collective bargaining bill. That bill has precise limits on what could be allowed in future contracts in the way of vacation, sick days, staffing levels and more.
In one of the memorable points made during testimony about Senate Bill 5, one Democratic lawmaker who opposes it complained that local officials who favor the limits actually want the state to save them from themselves — to stop them from being lousy negotiators. The point was that no one forced them to agree to the contracts they’ve signed off on.
Historically, locally elected people — when they confront financial crises — are good at two things. They find ways to cut that aren’t too hateful, or, if the cuts are hateful, they go out and make the case for a tax increase.
What they’re much less good at is imagining new ways of doing business altogether. That’s why governments don’t merge or rarely contract out for services they’ve been providing, and why they “share” mainly at the margins.
This week Kasich talked about the need to “restructure” government in his State of the State speech. He didn’t put it this way, but he’s intent on forcing restructuring at the local level by using the budget deficit — and his cuts — as a cudgel.
He’s dead serious about passing dramatic changes to the collective bargaining law that would save local governments and schools money both immediately and in the long term. And Republicans also are promising that they’re going to put more responsibility on employees to fund their pensions.
Depending on how far they take that proposition, the savings could be money that goes straight to the bottom line for schools and governments that are complaining about their finances.
Then the Kasich administration will likely put out rules, legislation and funding formulas that make it hard for smallest government entities to stay in business. That will be politically dicey because the legislature is made up of ex-school board and city council members and township trustees, who were succeeded by people who can bad-mouth the lawmakers back home.
If the governor and his legislature successfully make this last move, then Democrats will have a tough time saying that the Republicans are just out to get public employees. The totality of the changes would add up to a real effort to remake government across the board in Ohio.
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