DeWine, who must leave office in January 2027, may doubt that a legislature with far more partisan Republicans than those he grew up with will hold down property taxes without damaging schools. But time is on Huffman’s side: He could be speaker through 2032, an eight-year span bested only by the 20-years served by Appalachian Democrat Vern Riffe, equaled only by the eight-year tenure of Republican Roger Cloud, of Logan County’s De Graff.
DeWine (a Miami of Ohio alumnus) and Huffman (a Notre Dame grad) are Roman Catholics. (Full disclosure: So is this columnist). DeWine and Huffman favor spending state money to, in effect, subsidize non-public schools, notably Catholic and other religious schools. Ohio’s 2025-27 budget allots about $2.4 billion for non-public-school “voucher programs,” $205 per Ohioan.
The legislature went home last month without enacting anything close to genuine reform of zooming property taxes. Huffman claimed otherwise – naturally – and decried DeWine item-vetoes that, if not vetoed, Huffman said, would’ve eased homeowners’ tax burdens.
Huffman also criticized DeWine’s creation of a Property Tax Reform Working Group to suggest pro-taxpayer changes. Huffman said legislators’ now-abolished Joint Committee on Property Tax Review and Reform made DeWine’s outfit redundant. “I’m not interested in participating in [DeWine’s group],” the speaker said.
Trouble is, the legislator best-versed on property taxes, Republican state Sen. Louis Blessing III, of suburban Cincinnati, the joint committee’s co-chair, said it offered “two mutually exclusive [plans] ... One would require school districts to cut or forego property tax receipts without make-up money from Columbus ... [with] property-tax-cuts ... across the board, whether a home is valued at, say, $200,000 or $2 million.” The other perspective, which Blessing shares, would “means-test [property-tax] relief. Here, local governments and school districts [would] be held harmless, and relief will be targeted to low- and middle income Ohioans.”
Bigger challenge: Income-tax cuts have crimped school-funding options. The irony is that in 1971, only thanks to “yes” votes from Republicans, including then-House Speaker Charles F. Kurfess, of Perrysburg, and future Senate President Stanley J. Aronoff, of Cincinnati, did legislators OK the state income tax.
But since the ‘80s, Republicans have chain-sawed Ohio’s income tax. And in a huge 2005 slash in public school funding, legislators began phased repeal of Ohio’s “tangible personal property tax” on business equipment and inventories. According to the Ohio Education Policy Institute, repealing the equipment and inventory tax erased “over $1.6 billion in local taxes, of which roughly $1.1 billion [had previously gone] to Ohio public schools.”
Among those cheering that business-property tax cut? Then-House Speaker Jon Husted, a Republican — then of Kettering, now of Upper Arlington — and a U.S. senator. Among (off-the-record) critics of the business-property-tax bonanza, because it squeezed public schools: The late GOP mega-lobbyist Neil S. Clark.
Despite Speaker Huffman’s stated goals, homeowners are still holding the bag, especially older Ohioans relying on savings and Social Security payments. Which somehow never seem to rise as fast as property taxes.
That’s not a plan. That’s the problem – an unaddressed problem.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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