Seven oh six at fifty five kre CD talk station. By the time I was wishing ever to a happy Wednesday and welcoming back to the fifty five CARCE Morning Show from the Buckeye Institute, which you can find online at Buckeyeinstitute dot org. I found an eighty nine it to independent research and educational institution whose mission is to advance free market public policy in Ohio. Greg Lawston, it's always great having you on the fifty five KRC Morning Show.
Thanks a lot for having me.
I love the pleasure, I love the topic man, and I laugh every time the topic comes up because it's property taxes and everyone's fed up with how high they are twenty thirty percent increases destined to increase even more. We got seniors in their homes, fully paid off and living on a fixed income, can't afford they hit. There's problems and complications and anger and frustration. And now we have a citizen led constitutional amendment effort to completely abolish
property taxes. And that's always what makes me chuckle, because what the hell are they going to do about funding literally everything that's funded through property taxes? How can you rejigger the system to cover the costs the police, fire levies, parks, the whole litany of things that are funded through property taxes. I'm going to boil it down to calling it a Charlie Foxtrott situation. Greg, you've looked into this, what's your take on it?
Well, I think it's one of the biggest issues that the stay in Ohio has maybe ever faced in terms of how Ohio government's literally organized. I certainly understand the frustration. I've talked to quite a few of the folks actually that are involved in kicking off this whole ballot campaign to abolish property taxes, and they have a lot of very legitimate beefs out there with how things are operating.
You said it yourself. You know, at the seniors who are worried about losing their homes after paying off the mortgage maybe decades ago and now because of ever escalating costs there on the property tax that they can't afford it. So the anger is real, it's boiling over. This is sort of a tech No, we're not going to take it anymore, and we're going to do something about it.
But the problem with that solution is that it really doesn't solve all the problems because if you get rid of the property tax, you still have all these services.
You've still got you know, a ton of the education costs at the local level, and almost all of your public safety costs that leaves, fire and everything else it's paid through property taxes, not to mention all the other kind of things that folks like, from parks and stuff like that, to even just doing the small the local roads and fixing local roads and local potholes and doing
trash cans. So it's a massive issue. It's going to blow if that thing goes through, it goes to the ballot and ultimately where to pass maybe a twenty billion dollar hole across the whole state. Actually probably been a little bit more than that. So we've got to do it off water reform, I think, before any of this happens, so that taxpayers can get some relief, get released now, and get relief in the long term, so that we don't have to run this frankly, pretty radical experiment.
Well, and it is a radical experiment I'll acknowledge, and I think born of frustration, because I would argue our elected officials and Columbus haven't lifted a finger to try to address the problem, at least that's what it appears from the outside. How come our property taxes one I'm thirty percent? Are they doing anything to address this? Shouldn't there be a cap on the percentage they can increase
our taxes. Something needs to be done. It's almost as if this radical effort was done out of frustration in order to light a fire under the bottoms of our elected officials to get on the thing and get on it right away. Do you feel that way. I mean, you guys are located right across the street from the State House, and you've been interacting with our politicians and getting a response from them on what they plan on doing.
Oh. Absolutely, and you're right. This was born of frustration, completely legitimate frustration, understandable frustration. I think that it has lit a fire. There's a whole bunch of legislation out there, separate bills. In fact, I was actually at to stay down so after one o'clock in the morning today because they were putting the finishing touches on the state budget and the conference committee that was reconciling differences between the House,
no House Senate. So they're actually going to put the budget on the floor and both chambers, I think today to send it to the governor. And there are some things that they have put into that that I think are good property tax reforms that are going to be helpful. I don't think they are enough. I don't think they're going to solve this problem. And in some way some of the stuff they've done and stuff that's that's necessary,
but it's a little bit more long term. It will help in the long rund, but it isn't necessarily going to fix the spikes that have hit people so hard recently. So there's some more work that absolutely has to be done. I'm talking all the time. There's a State rep of Ashtribuba County former County Autogra actually up there, Dave Thomas, who's been doing an awful lot of work in this
space to try to fix a lot of problems. Represented to actually out of Matthews from down near Neck of the Woods and done some bills and things like that to try to help out. So we're constantly talking to them. I was testifying last week in the Ohio House a major committee on a big bill that had a lot of moving pieces, very complicated, but that would have done quite a bit unfortunately because of how complicated it is.
I can tell you there's a line of local government organizations out the door opposing all these reforms going and buying to the legislators because they don't want to change things. And some maybe you can't change, but a lot you can't, and a lot of folks don't want to change the status quo. So you've got this interesting vice really on legislative You've got this incredible anger in the grassroots that again, I get it, you're kicking people out of their homes.
People aren't going to sit down and just say that's okay. It's not there's a moral issue here. Uh. You know, people are wondering if they even own their own homes you can lose it over the taxis.
Yeah, that's the point that's not lost on my listeners.
I hear that.
All the time, nobody really truly owns something that they think they own because of this very issue. And it is really in a world that you know, we have private property ownership here in this country, and I think it's one of those rights that we dearly embrace and love and appreciate. But if the reality is that the state's going to force you to sell your home because you can't pay the tax bill, then you really don't own anything. And adding insult interest you meant to mention
the budget. I can't allow that comment to go without pointing out adding insults injury. Giving six hundred million dollars of the Ohio taxpayer money to the Cleveland Browns, I think is a slap in the face to the Ohio taxpayer who can barely afford to stay in their home. You know, I deal with this as a suggestion, some suggests, and even I said it out loud. Get rid of this whole property tax thing and just increase the state tax on purchases. That way, everyone is responsible for sharing
in the burden of any service. But that forces the money to go to Columbus and then be redistributed to the various jurisdiction. And you point out in your article about this thing that there are four thousand local taxing authorities. They're going to be scrapping over that money.
And they're going to be arguing.
I mean, some police departments they pay their officers more. They choose to do that. Others don't have the money, they don't play the police as much. How do you allocate the pile of money. If you went in a different direction, there's a multitude of problems with that.
Oh, it really would be. And I think actually this is one of a lot of downsides too to getting rid of property taxes. I mean, because again all the services is a big hole and everything else. But the other thing that I think some folks aren't necessarily thinking all the way through is if that were happened, there's something like what you just described but probably need to happen. There would probably be some sort of state tax and increases. They would have to do some sort of a redistribution
out of Columbus back to locals. There'll be the all and they'll brike them up with some formula and things like that. But the problem is that then the Columbus is going to be in more power than ever before because part of the reason they have property taxes because it's local, it is mostly voted on by local residents, although there are some exceptions, and that's actually been one of the big problems here is how property tax are
so complicated. There are some situations where school districts in particular are essentially getting increased taxes without votes of the people, and that's needs to absolutely be changed. But we'll happens if you get rid of the property tax. Is Columbus is going to take more power because it's going to have to, because it's the one who's going to be redistributing all the donors exactly.
And you know, we're better off having local control over that money and a local say over whether or not we choose to vote for any given levee. But the levees are in and of themselves a problem because a lot of times you have more people who do not own property voting for levees because oh I love the parks or I love my schools, and they're not sharing
in the burden. It's the property tax owner. I know that ignores the reality that rent does ultimately increase to cover the cost increased costs of taxes on any given rental property. But in the final analysis, it just it allows these levees to pass, I think, without more scrutiny, and and your property tax goes up as a consequence
of it. But I mean what I know you mentioned some solution like requiring county commissioners to prove local levees, but they're subject to the same political pressures you just mentioned in connection with what's going on in Columbus right now, Well.
They are, and that's why, you know, the nfortunate situation here is there aren't silver bullet solutions. This whole situation didn't happen overnight. This is decades of things that have happened,
and I kind of call it the layering effect. We've seen a proliferation of different sorts of local taxing authorities over the course of literally decades, and so this whole situation with the property tax spikes is kind of like a unique confluence of events, the perfect storm, because we have some real structural issues and how local government and local taxing authorities are structured at Ohio that has been
being built up again over the course of decades. Then you had sort of a unique inflation air environment coming out of COVID that it has been a massive impact. And we had housing shortage in the sense that we haven't been building as much housing to keep up in certain key places. So that keeps the supply of housing tighter, which creates higher values, which is part of how the reappraisals are all, which is why the rates are going up too. So you have all of this stuff working together.
And one thing I'm telling legislators, and one thing I try to tell folks, and you know, whether it's an off eds that we're riding events that I go through to speak about, is that in a lot of ways,
these costs are downstream of structure. And that's kind of a nerdy way of saying it's because of how we organize ourselves at the local level to deliver the services that people do want, but it's the way it's organized and may built up over so many years with these different things, instead of figuring out how to make things more efficient, how to do more with less, be efficient, leverage technology, maybe care services across different political jurisdictions and stuff,
and consolidation some things that school districts, I mean, this is a third rail for a lot of folks. But most Southern states, a lot of Western states too, but states with really growing populations, a lot of them have union based for the most part, with big city exceptions. The county based school districts have way less than we do be able to six centered school districts. Do we
find efficiency that way? And I think those are the conversations that we're going to have to have because it's well, what we do and how the government structure that is leading to the costs, and then you got to figure out how to pay for those costs. So we need to be more efficient, more effective at figuring out better ways to deliver things. Or even if you did get rid of property tax, you're not really solving that underlying issue of what's making it cost mole.
Well, it would force an analysis of that if we ended property texas in Ohio and real quickly without before we part company. And it's interesting conversation Greg with real no no real answers or quick solutions, Greg Lawson, our school funding mechanism was rendered unconstitutional about two decades ago by the High Supreme Court, and yet it's still fund of the exact same way it was when that's when that case came out. Why hasn't that problem been addressed by our legislative branch in Ohio?
Because it's expensive and also because it's the local state sort of partnership. The problem with it is we want local control through school boards and everything else. So the property taxes again kind of like we've talked about before, Columbus taking everything over whoever pays pays it or gets the funds to redistribute. The funding oftentimes has a lot
of strings attached to those dollars. The more the state would spend, I mean, what a lot of local districts kind of want is the state to spend more money and they do all the control, and I don't know if that's exactly how it's going to work. So there's sort of this push and pull between who's got all the control, combined with the fact that if you had the state do all of this, you know, the state would probably be raising taxes. There're ably in set of
cutting taxes, which is happening in the budget here. There's an fighting come tax and things like that, and that's just how it would work, and so it would be a pastor not expensive from the state's perspective. That's definitely a lot of it.
I guess that just ignores the Supreme Court edict that it's unconstitutional. The way they're funded right now sounds to me like you might be running the teachers' union problems and pushback because the control would then rest in Columbus. Not that that's necessarily a good thing, but they would have control over how money is spent and how much money is spent, which would take away local union and control from the teachers.
Well, I think that's definitely per there's no question about it.
Yeah, I kind of thought so, Greg Laws and Buckeye Institute final online and learn more about what they do and what they're on top of each and every day. Buckeye Institute dot or Greg. It's always great having on the program. And if you come up with a quick fixed solution, come right back and let's talk about it. Thanks so much, my pleasure. Seven to twenty. Right now, if you have caresey de talk station, give yourself some
odor Exit. Yeah, it doesn't work on that problem, but it works on all the odors that you regularly encounter day in and day out. Human owners, pat oders, food oders, smoke, mold, mildew. Got an order you want to get rid of? It comes with the one hundred percent satisfaction guarantee US as directed, the odor will be gone. They've been around for more than twenty five years. This is a locally owned and operated and manufactured product or series of products. So get
to odor exit dot com. It's easy to figure out which one of the products you need. Again, follow the instructions you have any questions at all. There's a toll free number you can get in touch with the smart people at odor Exit. I'll help you walk through your odor elimination problem. You need it right now, can't stand at another moment. Get out and buy it locally search engine at odor exit dot com. We'll tay right where
it's sold near you. O D O, R XIT no E odor exit dot com fifty five KRC the talkstation