DeWine can veto not just entire bills but also parts of one (“items”) if any part of a bill lets Ohio spend public money (an “appropriation”). Governors’ vetoes of an entire bill, or of an item in a spending bill, survive unless three-fifths of House members (60 of 99) and three-fifths of the Senate (20 of 33 members) vote to override a veto.
Some term-limited newbies in today’s General Assembly shrieked that DeWine’s vetoes were an insult to the legislature. Those gripes provided more proof that a shocking number of today’s legislators are clueless about checks-and-balances.
These three budget items, vetoed by DeWine because they’d make it harder for school boards to fund schools, are in House Republicans’ crosshairs:
• One House brainstorm would let county budget commissions overrule voters — Ohio’s sovereigns — by unilaterally rolling back property tax millage. That’d give county seat publicity hounds endless openings to grandstand without taking any actual responsibility for school budgeting.
In 86 of Ohio’s 88 counties (exceptions: home-rule Cuyahoga and Summit), the budget commissioners are the county auditor, the county treasurer and the prosecuting attorney.
• Another DeWine-vetoed item, if Republican legislators save it, would hold down the total amount of tax money a school district might otherwise receive if it reaches Ohio’s so-called “millage floor.”
What that gobbledygook means: When a district lands on that 20-mill floor, the state Taxation Department reports, so-called tax reduction factors “no longer keep tax revenues from growing as property value(s) increases.” That is, this vetoed item would, if repassed, likely (perversely) require Ohio school boards to further irk taxpayers by proposing even more levies than now. Yet as respected Ohio school-finance scholar Howard Fleeter told legislators last year, “Ohio (already) relies on local levies more than any other state ... more than 18,500 school levies since 1976.”
• A third contested veto would block a legislative bid to forbid school districts to seek so-called “emergency” levies. “These levies serve as important tools for school districts as they seek to maintain their long-term financial stability,” DeWine wrote.
Yes, and Ohio’s public schools would also have greater stability if legislators would obey Ohio Supreme Court orders, reaching back to 1997, to fairly fund public schools. Instead, the legislature is unconstitutionally spending mountains of state tax money helping pay the tuition non-public schools charge their pupils.
Today’s debate will flood the Statehouse with dreck from anti-public-school legislators, who are gambling dangerously with Ohio’s future.
The Committee to Abolish Ohio’s Property Taxes is asking voters to sign petitions proposing to place, on next year’s statewide ballot, a ban on all Ohio property taxes, current and future.
Should that make 2026 ballot, there’s a chance voters — fed up with legislators’ failure to genuinely reform property taxes — might repeal and ban property taxes. If so, a new picture, a thumbnail map of Ohio, will appear in Mr. Webster’s dictionary, alongside the definition of “chaos.”
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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