Do you want to be in a Man County? All right, here we go at this Bengals Hangover Monday on seven hundred WLW. Awful, right, awful. There's the old adage about, hey, you get enough crumbs, you make a loaf, and that's true a lot of things, especially money, enough crumbs you make a loaf. So Hamlin County is considering a one mill increase in the real estate transfer text the hold on second, I have no idea what this means. So a millage basically is a dollar for every thousand dollars
that your purchase price is. So you know, you buy three hundred thousand dollars house every thousand dollars. Do the math, and that's paid by the subtle closing. So you already have a transfer tax in Warren County, Butler Count's about three dollars per thousand. In Clare Mountain, Hamlin County it's four dollars per thousand, and now Hamlin County wants to add another buck to that. Joining the show this morning on seven hundred WLW is Commissioner Elesa Reese Hope, trust
you ad a good weekend? Alicia? How are you?
I'm doing good but not good about this proposal. It's been a rough a rough month, a rough year. You know, I was young the last time I was on. We were talking about the affordability, the snap benefits, and I've been out there, you know, trying to help people. Of course, the government's opening back up, but they didn't cash at us the money. You know, we don't have it right now. We're still operating, you know, on a skeleton. And so we've got the five one to three relief bus out there.
I've been out there. We've we've we've had the bus and cleeves. We're getting ready. We've been in Mount Healthy, We're going to we're getting ready to go to a new Hope and Avendale this week in Bethel and Wanner Hills food deserts. But I've been seeing and talking to people, you know, just middle class family's, even veterans who've been there.
And while we're helping them with food, at the same time, they're still saying, hey, you know, there's still affordability because everything is going up and it's just making it harder and harder to afford anything. And so now we're getting ready to do the county budget and we get the proposed budget from the administrator. That's how it goes. He gives us his budget and then we've got to go
in and look at it. And the thing that stuck out to me, I'm looking at the budget because I'm trying to figure out how can we make it affordable for folks who are out here struggling in Hamilton County. You know, the homeowners and you know me, I'm trying to help grandma and grandpa hold onto their house too. When we talk about we say we want to have affordable housing. Affordable housing is not just new housing. It's helping people hold on to the house they already have.
And as you know on this show, I've been with you. We've been fighting on these property taxes. And while you know, the state has you know, the ultimate power, they've got to come up with a better formula, and how they fund public education can't be on the backs of property taxes. But at the same same time, the county has some things that they can do, and I wanted to look everything we've doing. One of those things was the thirty percent they promised. The voters went out voted for two stadiums.
Is the only time the voters got to vote on this, and they voted and they were told that they would get thirty percent property texts rollbacks for the county's portion. And since I've been there, this is my fifth year, my only my second term, I've been able to get it done, you know, a couple times, but every year we got a fight for it. And then this new
Bingle deal. Yeah, this new Bengal deal. You know, three hundred million dollars guarantee to the Bengals, but in there, there's no guarantee to the homeowners, as I was telling you, And in this budget, the administrator only recommends for about four point five percent rollback. Now we went from thirty to now he's recommending single digits for the peace people. And then on top of that, if you try to sell your house, then they want to add add another
tax to the clothing toss. So you know, this is just the craziest thing. And then we talk about taking a million that would be generated from this extra dollar per thousand, which is you know, that's a lot of money. That's not a small chunk, and we already had four. Now we're going to go to five. And that extra he said, put toward CDF. Who does affordable housing. We did sixty million dollars toward affordable housing when we had
the American Rescue money. That was a one time thing, and we've been doing a lot of good things with housing. We just broke your ground on one of my major
initiatives with also having housing for people with disabilities. We broke ground just last week at Coloring Township, which I'm happy about with lad who where we're gonna have smart homes, but we want to make sure that again affordability is also new homes, which we've supported, but now we've got to make sure also that the people who already have a home able to keep their home. And I saw the Inquire doing a series, and I know some of these faces of men who own their homes. One of
them is in Madisonville. Worked pages dues, he retired, and now he's going to lose his home because the property tax is about to make him lose his home. Being Yeah, it's horrible, isn't it. So we have to be mindful as we're going into this budget. We can't be robbing Peter to pay Paul, robing the homeowners.
Yeah, let me.
Shut this up.
Alicia Race Hamilin County can let this up because at the intro I said, you know you already have you already have property tax valuation in skyrocket. He mentioned the rollback got it this year. Who knows it's going happened next year? Probably not, we'll see. H but Warren County, Baller County about three dollars per thousand dollars worth of house. So three hundred dollars three in a thousand dollars house. Right, that's how millage work, called millage Claremont County and Hamlin County,
not four. Y'all want to add another buck, so it'd be five. Would be the highest tax around in the Tri state. And so that three hundred thousand dollars home will cost about fifteen hundred dollars at closing. Same house in Warner Butler County is nine hundred dollars on top of the property taxes as we've been talking about here. So what am I getting in Hamlin County that would cost me two thirds more in taxes?
Well? I think you raised a great question. I mean that is a great question. And when this came out, I've been getting calls from people saying, well, wait a minute, you know, how how is this affordable because some people will sell their homes trying to you know, some of them sell homes trying to make the ends meet. And now we're talking about it's going to be hier to sell. But we can't be the champion in Hamilton County that everything is higher. We can't be the county whereas it's
hard to live here. It's hard to sell a house, it's hard to you know, to be able to live. And again, we can't have you know, I was telling the administrator and and and open forum, we have to have the theme. We can't have the theme that we're broke when it's time for the homeowners and the taxpayers and let's just keep putting extra burden on them. And then in the same meeting, we'll have a big idea come in and we say, oh my god, we can
find the money. We can find this. And I told him, I said, let's think a lot more creative, but we can't keep taxing the homeowners. And then on the other hand, I said, well, let's give the home owner thirty percent break. Oh no, we can't afford that. Oh no, we can't give them a break. We can't give them a break at all.
And so let you have money to do the stadium. And I think the way this team is this year, that's just bad optics.
Well, yeah, we're giving them guaranteed, which you say, three hundred million guaranteed. And when you look at some of these other deals, I'm starting to see you see Denver, you see some of these other the trend is not the trend we have. The trend of these NFL stadiums. The owners are putting in a lot more money because they know that the taxpayers are not putting up with it.
You see it. You saw that in Kansas City. They put it they want to do, they put it on the ballot and the people said, we'll give you a parade, but we're not going to tax We're not going to
increase our taxes. We'll give you a parade, though, And so if you look at Denver, you look at all these other teams when they're doing these new deals, they're including the taxpayers that they're in terms of a break for the taxpayers, they're putting up their private You look at you know, some of these other teams, and you look at us, and we're still stuck in the old way where the taxpayers are on the hook bear the brunt, and we don't even have to guarantee. They don't even
have to guarantee a winning product. So three hundred million guaranteed in the budget, and the administrator will say we have to do that. And then when I said, well what about the homeowns, well no we can't. We're only gonna do four percent when we were we were supposed to get thirty percent. And then they say, well, that's not fiscally uh you know, responsible. But I said, well, why is it not fistically responsible for the homeowners to
get a break? I mean, we are in affordability fight right now, and Sloan, like you said, all these things come together. It's not like a one thing. Now you're talking about if a Selma house, I got to pay more more than like you said, other.
Counting countries, right, and it's people go around three hundred thousand dollars house. Not okay, it's a but again, enough crumbs you make a loaf. And I get we're Jeff Aluto County administrators. He's that's a difficult budget to balance. For sure. You got a budget that's going to be about three point three percent from this past year, just
north of four hundred million dollars is the number. And you know, when you have expenditures growing just the rate of inflation and the growth and revenue is not there. You got to look at getting other income sources in there too, because you have it's mandated you balance a budget. So in your world, Alisha Rees said, what do you do? How do you balance a budget and get the same time without sticking to the taxpayers?
Yeah? Well, I think number one, you look at all funds. You don't look at each deal as a separate deal. And that's what we've been doing. We should have been saying that when we had the Bengals deal, we need to look at everything and say, well wait a minute, if we do this, it's going to hurt over here. We need to be looking at all things. But we don't do that. We look at a big deal comes in and we find money, and then we come back and now say, oh we can't balance the budget. Now
we won't be able to. I think you start off with who you know, who are we supposed to be representing? Who are our shareholders? And you go and say, okay, our shareholders are taxpayers of Hamilton County. So we got the number one, keep that first and foremost in the forefront, and as you saw in that article, they'll be taken right If the person can't afford it, they're going to take that home, say maybe a port authority for example.
But when they take the home, they don't have to maybe pay the clothes and costs because they're gonna they don't have to pay the taxes. They're gonna put it in a land bank. So the homeowner, the gentleman that owns the house, he had to pay taxes, but now we're gonna take his same house and put it in a land bank for a couple of years and there's no tax getting collected on it. So that's another thing. The other thing, I have an idea. It's time for
us to look at everything creatively. I've asked jeff A Luto, because when we get the budget, you know, we just get these you know, buckets in high level. That's great, but where I come from, we gotta have line items. And I told him, I said, I need to know every account that the county has and what's inch because what happens is maybe we can think of something more creative. The last thing I'll tell you that I am proposing
that we look at is the liquor license. Now at the state, we can't come and just add a tax to the liquor license. But what we could possibly do, For example, that site where the Millennium was, and they're gonna make that ice skating of you know, free entertainment and all that, we don't get any money off of it.
I said, why don't we get the liquor license as a county, which we can do, and then we sub lease it and people do this all the time, and then that can bring in additional revenues, not just at that site, but look at other things that we own, and let's come in through that. We've got to instead of taxing the homeowner, we could come in with those kind of things. We spent fifty something million dollars to buy it before I got there, and we're not making
one dime off of it. It was just an open space. So that's one of the ideas. I said, we got to think creatively. Don't tell me what will you bring something. Don't bring it to me and say, oh, we've just never done it. First of all, let's see can we
do it. We've got to do We're in some desperate times, and we need to be thinking a lot more creatives and not just giving away the house on all these different deals, because if you look at it, some of the new housing that comes in there's a tax abatement, but the person that's been there twenty years, they get a tax increase and they're getting ready to do another reevaluation, and they said taxes, probably taxes are going to go through the roof. So I'm saying, all hands on it, oky good.
It's not good to get more people or people who would sell normally move and get new blood in there. That's not happening. But relative to this, and by increasing the millage to five dollars per thousand, Hamlin County making by far the most expensive in our region. You mentioned affordable housing, but only like a million dollars of the almost five million dollars generated goes to affordable housing. So is that just the way to sell us and go, hey,
we're trying to help. I mean, a million dollars is not all that much money when you consider how big this budget is.
No, it's not much money. And I think that maybe it sounds good, but we got to read through the fab front. You can't Rob Peter to pay Paul No, you know, make it unaffordable. Some people are forced to sell, or some people are selling because this is an asset. They got to sell it because they got to downsize. Some people say, hey, I got I got a downsize
so I can afford to live. And now you're going to make it even tougher for the person to even downsized and be able to sell the house because the market will say, well, I'll go somewhere else and buy. The bottom line is we just can't keep adding to the consumers. You know, we're talking buyer consumer. We're adding there. And again a million dollars is not going to not going to get us. We put sixty million dollars and it's a one time. I mean some stuff we did
was the one time, and we did sixty million. We did it with CDs. They were able to stretch as much as possible. But you can't make it affordable on one hand and then on the other hand make it unaffordable. And at the end of the day, a lot of people they negotiate closing costs when they get ready to sign the deals. They try to negotiate somewhere can I
can negotiate. What can I do? Uh, And so on one hand we're saying we want more affordable, but on the other hand, we're always adding and they always say, always just one dollar, always just two dollars, you know, and then when you add it up like a second, you know it's going up. You know. I tell people all the time, they say, oh, they're only going to get two hundred dollars. That's two hundred dollars. It's some medicine somebody can get, or two hundred dollars worth of grocery
somebody can get, right, and so all these things. Sloan, I'm fighting it, but keep your eyes open. So closing costs they want to go up. Uh, property tax rollback we're going from a thirty percent now down to only four point five percent roll back. And then MSD in the budget they're going with an increase of that for four percent.
It doesn't make it attractive to want to, you know, do business or of her work in Cincinnati, but in particular in Hamlin County. She's Commissioner Alisha Reese all over this one. I know it's kind of a minor point. It's kind of a little bit of real estate wonkiness going on here when you talk about these tax transfer taxes. But uh, you know, again, as we've been saying, enough crumbs make a loaf. All the basketball chat again soon be well.
Okay, all adds up, Sloan, And at the end of the day, the consumer, the taxpayer, is the one is getting all these bills and everything's going up. So thank you for having me on. And keep your eyes. We got to keep your eyes on this before the bull comes to people or before they try to close on a house.
You're a fiscal pit bull. Reese, You're a fiscal pit bull. All right, take care of there you go. We got news on the way, pitbull. We need a pit bull in there. Just I think the thing that rubs you to in Hamlin County is effect. And you look at the what we did for the Bengals and how bad that product is and refuse to change. And then the news is hey bye, by the way, uh, you're gonna have to pay more when you want to sell your house.
So we got that going on, which is terrible sloany here seven hundred w all the