Kettering schools announced that Moraine Meadow’s 151 students will transfer to Oakview or Orchard Park elementary schools, more than 4 miles away. Parents and city officials had hoped the students would be sent to nearby Southdale Elementary.
“It appears that only the Moraine students are the ones to be inconvenienced, and it was a district-wide failure to pass a levy,” the mayor said.
The bad news comes at a time when Moraine — the second smallest city in Montgomery County — is fighting its way through its largest ever decline in income tax collections.
The city saw 21 percent drops in income tax revenues in 2008 and 2009 — about $3 million — the greatest decline in 2009 collections among all cities in the county.
Dayton saw a 9.07 drop in 2009 and a 2.05 percent decline in 2008.
And Moraine’s decline this year is expected to be even greater than it was in 2009, said City Manager Dave Hicks.
For decades, Moraine relied on a fortified industrial base for its core income.
But the departure of former income heavyweights — General Motors, Delphi, Cooper Tires and Plastech Industries — has forced the city to close its Splash Moraine operations, implement unpaid furlough days and cut some services and 187 positions.
Not even significant reductions in costs in each department, combined with the monthly income taxes from more than 700 businesses in the city has been able to save Moraine from having to tap into its rainy day fund to avert a $5.5 million deficit.
To put things into perspective, in 2005, Moraine’s total income tax was $18.4 million, benefited from the nearly 5,000 GM employees. In 2008, its total income tax dipped to $15 million, just as the last 1,200 GM workers left the plant. By the end of 2009, the city’s income tax collections dropped to $11.9 million.
But city officials are starting to see a glimmer of positive indicators, Hicks said.
“I think we’ll see things start to rebound in the third or fourth quarter,” he said. “We’re already seeing things at DMAX improving. So, we are seeing some signs of recovery.”
DMAX has a 584,000-square-foot truck engine plant off Dryden Road, employs 547 people and is one of the city’s leading income tax generators.
Hicks said the city is monitoring things at a microscopic level because change is month-to-month.
“We’re drilling down to see where the improvements are happening,” he said. “We’re seeing things get better in the trucking industry. They’re seeing more hauling jobs, and while that’s not affecting us directly right now, it will have an impact on us in time.”
Rosencrans said he sees the income drain “decelerating. I’m not sure how long it will be before it stops to make the turnaround, but I’m optimistic.”
John Heitmann, a University of Dayton professor who specializes in the history of the automobile and its impact on American culture, said Moraine has good reason to stay positive.
While its loss of industrial jobs is not a solvable, cyclical problem, there is precedence of recovery in places where similar losses have occurred, such as Detroit, Pittsburgh and Great Britain, where the industrial revolution began.
“Those jobs are gone forever, because all the new plants are located in the nonunion south,” he said. “But you can also see a renewal of community, an uptick in those communities.”
Though, change won’t come overnight, he added.
“You won’t see it in five years — typically in a decade or more,” Heitmann said. “In Great Britain, it was 40 or 50 years before you saw some of those communities come back.”
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