The budget doesn’t hold down the skyrocketing property taxes that are crushing Ohio homeowners. Nor does it fairly earmark state aid to local public schools, a failure that in effect further boosts homeowners’ property taxes.
At least 60 cents per $1 of Ohioans’ property taxes fund public schools. Yet the new budget earmarks a record-setting amount of state tax money to help pay private school tuition for Ohio pupils who would otherwise attend public schools.
The Haslams own the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns. And the power couple has persuaded the General Assembly to help them pay for a new Browns stadium – not in Cleveland, but in suburban Brook Park.
Were there such a thing as truth in labeling at the Statehouse (heck, truth in anything done there), the team should be renamed the Brook Park Browns. The financial shell-game the legislature played to shovel $600 million the Browns’ way was to give the team a loan of unclaimed bank accounts, deposits and refunds that belong to thousands of Ohioans, not their state government. But that sure as heck didn’t deter the legislature’s GOP leaders, Speaker Matt Huffman, of Lima, and Senate President Rob McColley, of northwest Ohio’s Napoleon.
True, “unclaimed funds” the state holds for their owners have been mobilized before, most notably in 1985, when the General Assembly – Democratic House; Republican Senate – tapped unclaimed funds to insure deposits in 33-branch Cincinnati-based Home State Savings Bank after its spectacular collapse.
Ohio had allowed some savings-and-loan associations to privately insure, rather than obtain federal deposit insurance. But Home State’s losses drained its private insurer, the Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund. Home State had been controlled by Cincinnatian Marvin L. Warner, a political ally of Ohio’s then-governor, Cleveland Democrat Richard F. Celeste.
The proposed 2025-27 budget, besides ignoring exploding property-tax bills, shamefully cuts state aid to Ohio’s public libraries, the nation’s best. Maybe the problem for today’s Ohio legislators is the old saying, “Knowledge is power.” Libraries help Ohio taxpayers and voters gain politically dangerous information about the Capitol Square hayride.
True, the GOP clique that runs the legislature will ballyhoo transforming Ohio’s state income tax into a flat-rate tax of 2.75% on income at or greater than $26,051. Break out the hats and horns: Happy days are here again. Or will be. Or could be. Or might be. Republicans’ income-tax cuts have been springtime Statehouse rerun since the mid-1980s in Capitol Square’s rumpus room.
Politically speaking, the pending budget might as well be termed, “More of the same – only worse.” That’s not a legacy. It is, or should be, a shame.
Footnote: Thursday would have been legendary Ohio House Speaker Vernal G. Riffe Jr.’s 100th birthday. He died, age 72, in 1997.
Mr. Speaker’s birthday fund-raising parties, which coincided, depending on the year, with state budget debates, were red-letter days for almost anyone who was anybody in Ohio. Riffe was a Scioto County Democrat, more liberal than he let on, who considered Harry Truman a hero. No one in Ohio’s history has served longer (20 years) as speaker of the House.
After Speaker Riffe retired in January 1995, so – in some ways – did the state’s once-mighty Democratic Party. And that explains a great deal about Ohio politics today.
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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