For three years, Ohio’s legislature nibbled around the edges of property tax reform while many taxpayers were hit with big tax increases. House Speaker Matt Huffman said while they attempted reform through the joint legislative committee, the grassroots effort to eliminate property taxes altogether was a catalyst for enacting $3 billion-plus in meaningful tax relief.
“We spent a lot of time and a lot of process and you get lobbied hard by the folks who are in the local governments that want this money, but in the end it’s the state legislature that needs to make the decisions about good policy,” Huffman told this news outlet. “I think this harbinger in the form of a potential ballot initiative helped inform the discussion also.”
Since January 2025, lawmakers have introduced 52 bills and resolutions that touch property tax reform and enacted six measures that will give roughly $3.8 billion in relief over three to four years.
The reforms aim to eliminate some types of tax levies, curb unvoted tax increases, give taxpayers tax credits for overly high taxes they have already paid, beef up credits in the future and expand the powers of local budget commissions.
What to expect this year
House Republican leadership’s property tax reform architect is former Ashtabula County auditor Rep. David Thomas and he says homeowners won’t likely see any more bills with large price tags, but there will be valuable legislation.
“Our main priorities for 2026 will be helping to address a lot of the non-spike frustrations that people have with the system,” he said.
Thomas is co-chair of the House Ways and Means Committee where these types of bills are usually vetted and he said they’ll re-start hearings the first week of February when the legislature returns.
Bills and “concepts” dealing with property tax appeals, delinquent taxes and foreclosures and the CAUV agricultural valuation system — not the formula — and other aspects of the system will all be improved. Consolidating services to attack the spending side of the tax equation could also get some attention.
The legislature’s planned 2026 reform phase may not faze the group from Cuyahoga County, Citizens for Property Tax Reform, that is attempting to put a constitutional amendment to eliminate property taxes entirely on the statewide November 2026 ballot.
When the $3.8 billion reform package was approved in late 2025, Beth Blackmarr, spokesperson for Citizens for Property Tax Reform, told this media outlet it wasn’t enough to stop their campaign, so technical fixes seem unlikely to stop signature collection.
Blackmarr said of the 2025 reforms, “We need a lot more legislation because we’re still in trouble, [this legislation] doesn’t fix what’s happened, people are paying on valuations that are two and three times what they were 10 years ago,” she said.
She suggested the lawmakers could put more of the burden of paying for local services like schools and first responders on income taxes and less on property owners.
New concepts for reform?
Sen. Bill Blessing, a Republican from Colerain Twp., has been at the forefront of the reform issue as co-chair of the joint legislative property tax committee and chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. He said he isn’t expecting anything Earth-shattering to come out of the Senate.
“I honestly would be surprised if we did a whole heck of a lot outside of sort of procedural, simplifying stuff, in terms of big spends I think that’s done,” Blessing said.
He has voted against nearly every reform bill — except House Bill 186 which included boosting the owner-occupied tax credit — because he says he fears the measures will backfire when reduced revenue will force local entities to the ballot for new money more often.
Blessing said he will continue to push for some new concepts to offer tangible taxpayer relief. He has introduced Senate Joint Resolution 7 that would give local entities the ability to shift from property to land value taxation — a straight per-acre tax just on land and not improvements. The goal is “shifting the system away from levies and incentivizing productive use of land.”
“Moving to LVTs would spur housing development and spread the tax base amongst more people,” Blessing said. “A very likely outcome is that LVTs would bring in more money in the aggregate, while lowering tax bills for the individual, and reducing housing costs due to the added supply.”
He is also crafting a “revenue-neutral” way to pay for the fair school funding formula, using increased tobacco, sports betting and other taxes, “which would be a massive, massive property tax relief bill.”
Rep. Dan Troy, D-Willowick has also been a stalwart supporter of the property tax reform effort — as ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee and founding member of the joint legislative committee. He said the reforms will prevent future spikes that have caused everybody so much pain, but do nothing to reduce the huge bills that are the new normal.
“The real answer to this is that if the state would start putting more money into school funding and into things like Children Services, Developmental Disabilities and things like mental health programs, there would be less reliance on those entities going to the voters to ask for additional property taxes,” Troy said adding his colleagues in the statehouse can’t cry poor since they just reduced the state income tax again. “They did have the money.”
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