John Herrington is a chemical engineer and spent more than 30 years at Ohio State University in the environmental health and safety field.
I am partisan on many subjects, but when it comes to property taxes, I am an equal-opportunity debunker or myth buster.
Both Senator Bill DeMora and former Representative Gene Krebs, the architect of the failed House Bill 718, claim to have the solution(s) to the property tax problem.
In his recent Dispatch guest column, DeMora, a Democrat, said his party has “real” solutions that are “ready to go.”
On the surface, ideas such as “doubling tax relief for seniors, freezing taxes for people on fixed incomes and capping property taxes so nobody pays more than 5% of their income” sound fantastic.
Krebs, a Republican, has a very simple 25-year-old plan: just have the state pay for it.
He at least warned us.
“I will caution you that while it will be costly, it will be no more costly than if the effort to eliminate all property taxes succeeds,” Krebs wrote in his Aug. 7 Dispatch guest column.
What the plans have in common
The (insurmountable) problem with both plans is that neither address the spending side of the equation.
Roughly 70% of your property tax bill goes to your local school district and roughly 80% of your school district’s spending is for salaries and benefits.
If the teachers’ union contracts demand 6% to 8% salary increases every year and nothing is done to curb them, then the legislators (no matter which party) will have to come up with yet another tax to cover it.
Westerville, for example, now wants an income tax to cover their levy fatigue. Is that a solution to the spending problem? Just come up with a new tax?
The Dayton Daily News had an excellent editorial Sept. 10, 2006 (five years after Krebs’ House Bill 718) entitled “Ohio Flunking Test on Schools’ Cost.” Unfortunately, it is no longer on the web. But it addressed the very problems being discussed today. While the data is old, here is one of the telling excerpts:
“One major problem with Ohio’s funding system is its heavy reliance on the local property tax, which still divides districts between haves and have-nots. Some school advocates and incensed property owners would, if they could, shift all funding for schools to Columbus. But that’s a practical — and political — impossibility. Replacing all the money raised by property taxes would require doubling Ohio’s personal income tax rates or raising the state sales tax to an astounding 12% (from 5.5).”
They concluded their editorial with a warning of their own: “But what’s clear is that the growth in spending can’t be sustained under any funding scheme.”
It was obvious then and it is even more obvious today.
If only we could make it clear to those in charge.
John Herrington is a chemical engineer and spent more than 30 years at Ohio State University in the environmental health and safety field. He is also a founding member of the Mature Wisdom Council, a group dedicated to solving the world’s problems.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Westerville has it wrong. You can’t tax yourself out of a spending problem | Opinion
Reporting by John Herrington / The Columbus Dispatch
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