AFP - We Need a Reset–Too Many Governments

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I have a twenty eight ffty five krc DE talk station.

(00:02):
Happy Wednesday, one hour from now. Judge Ennen of Poulitano
preceded by Adam Hardach. He's a former CIA ops officer,
is going to give us the latest on the January
sixth pipe bombing investigation. Spicy details emerging on that. We'll
hear from him at eight to five in the meantime.
Welcome back Americans from Prosperities, Donovan and Eil and the shutdown.

(00:22):
We've finally seen the light at the end of the
tunnel on that one. Donovan, welcome back. I understand you're
doing an empower you summinar tomorrow night. You're gonna get
seven pm. Ohio needs a reset too many governments. Donovan,
good to heav you back on the show.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Ryan, always a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for
having me well.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
The marketing signs are going all over the place. New
York obviously is going to lose a lot of businesses
they have been. The business climate there is awful. There's
some ad campaigns going on. Texas is throwing out the
big welcome banner and here, Donovan, why can't we have
this Texas just voted to amend their constitution. The voters
approved three pro business tax amendments, saying there will be

(00:59):
no capital gains tax ever in the state of Texas.
In the constitution, they also are going to have a
ban on security transaction taxes, as well as an outright
ban on a state and inheritance taxes. They don't have
any of those right now, but they've just enshrined in
the constitution they never will be. That is probably one
of the best marketing angles I've seen so far in

(01:20):
the effort to bring businesses in any given state. How
come we can't have that, Donovan, Well, I.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Think we have a lot of that, right, we're moving
in the right trajectory, but we're not. I think it's
right we're not marketing these things. And we also have
been doing a lot of this stuff in a very
incremental manner. You know. Just this past summer they moved
Ohio to a flat two point seventy five percent income tax.
That's huge, Brian. That's the lowest in the Midwest, second

(01:47):
lowest in the nation. But you're right, there's other states.
As we've been on your show talking about before, Ohio
doesn't exist in a vacuum. We're in a fifty state compact,
these United States of America, and each one of these
states is competing for our jobs and opportunity and brightest minds.
And we need that leadership in Columbus who's going to

(02:07):
fight hard to move Ohio in that bold direction, competing
with states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida that for years
have been eating our lunch.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Well, and you've talked about this on the Morning Show previously.
I know Americans for Prosperity is you know, along the
lines of your seminar tomorrow night. And you know we
have so far too many local governments, thousands of townships, cities, boards, commissions,
everybody's got their own offices. Everybody needs to be supported
and paid for. It is extremely complicated. What is the

(02:36):
vision that you see? How do we streamline this process
and bring about what Americans for Prosperity and you Donald
Andannil are advocating for here in Ohio.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, And I'm really excited Dan Regnold and the empower
You team and just getting to go back go back
down there tomorrow night and be a part of that
with their crew. Appreciate you plugging that with us. And
that's what we're going to talk about. There's this we
think about big government a lot of times, Brian Wright,
as this monolithic creature that exists in Columbus or DC
right our state or nation's capital. But we're wanting to

(03:08):
begin to shine a light on and this isn't new.
Every fifteen to twenty years or so, this comes back up,
and most recently it's occurred started to have come unsurfaced
itself through the property tax crisis. The problem here is
we have the fifth most political subdivisions in the country.

(03:29):
What's the political subdivision? That's your township, city, school, village, county.
All of them provide some services. Our argument is, though, Brian,
is there too dang much of them? And are we
actually experiencing because of how much local government we have?
Are we actually experiencing a big government crisis because of
the amount of government we have here in the state

(03:52):
of Ohio. And we're unique in that. Again, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois,
New York beat us into Ohio terms of the number
of political subdivisions. That's not a group of states you
want to be anytime you're with California, Illinois, New York,
sumpthing's wrong, Brian, and that's where we find ourselves today
here in Ohio.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Well, let us kind of generally contrast how those states
the you know, Ohio, what are the worst in your
list as you point out, with one of the fewest
government states. I mean, how does the how do those
states operate and provide the local attention? And I'm I'm
an advocate for you know, the closer a politician is

(04:30):
to me physically where they live and what they see,
the closer they are to understand how the local issues
impact people locally. Nobody in DC has any concept of
how Joe Strecker lives in his neighborhood, and they can't
you know, provide benefits and ensure that his neighborhood is
being taken care of. They don't even know it exists.
So that same kind of concept makes an argument for

(04:52):
no more local government is good. So how does the
fewer local governments address the needs of people locally and
will work out to everybody's benefit? Donovan?

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Sure? Well, I put to a state like Florida when
it comes to school districts, right, they are the single
largest here in Ohio consumer of our property tax revenue. Right, example,
we have six hundred some school districts here in the
state of Ohio, each one of those run with by
a superintendent, a board of five school board members, assistant

(05:24):
superintendent's treasurer, assistant treasure a lot of administration, right that
doesn't even get to the front lines of education. State
like Florida, I think there's somewhere about ninety school districts.
They run them by county.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
If we were to do a similar model, which is
an unprecedented there are reports and studies that have shown
how this can be done. There's off and on conversations
about doing that. Here in Ohio, we'd have eighty eight
school districts, give or take. We have one per county. Right.
What we're talking about there is streamlining the delivery of services,
not moving it to Columbus or DC, but streamlining within

(05:58):
our counties to eliminate a lot of this overhead and
administrative burdens that exist that all costs tax dollars. By
the way, on the argument for your local elected officials
being accessible might push back to our friends who are
out there fighting the property tax fight right now alongside us,
who are also saying they want more local government. I

(06:19):
say to them, how many of your township trustees, county commissioners,
school board officials that you've gone to and complained about
your property taxes, how many of them have actually done
something to lower that burden for you. Just because these
folks are accessible, Brian, doesn't mean they're actually, you know,
conservative and delivering the kind of efficiencies we want out
of government. There's some things we can do by consolidating,

(06:41):
and that's what's at the heart of this conversation.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Well, and you know, for whatever reason, I'm thinking back
to Sheriff Neil, but he was really big into developing
the concept of shared services among the region's law enforcement
officers for the purposes of efficiency. If you have one
dive team that is accessible for all of the various
police departments, they know what to do, how to do it,
they're efficient at it, and they share that service with

(07:03):
the others. That relieves the other police departments from having
an obligation of having a well a dive unit. So
that makes perfect sense. So this would extreme streamline efficiencies
in school government. You have fewer school board members, you
have fewer schools. It could deal with some of the
perhaps overcrowding or undercrowding issues, more efficiently managed property. I
see a lot of pluses for this, and see what

(07:26):
you say to see how you react to this. Going
back to the whole property tax, if you end up
eliminating property tax in Ohio, and I know that's a
train wreck for a lot of people, but if you
had county wide school boards, allocating the resources to a
single school board would be a damn sight easier than
allocating the resources to what you said, six hundred different

(07:48):
ones in the state of Ohio. If it's going to
be centrally distributed in terms of the whatever revenue is
being used to fund the schools.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, well, and I think you know centralization. You want
to be careful with that, right, Yeah. You don't want
to move everything entirely to Columbus or everything entirely to Washington,
d C. But we have to find a balance, and
right now the imbalance exists with the amount that we have.
When I lived in Franklin County near Columbus, the community
I lived in, I paid taxes. I filed income taxes

(08:19):
brian to six different entities. Columbus City of Reynoldsburg, a
joint a JED, a district that we had a special
taxing district that we had there probably not a jed
a special taxing district, the school district, the state of Ohio,
and the federal income taxes. On top of that, I

(08:41):
had property taxes. And when you look at your property
tax bill, which more and more that's becoming transparent, you're paying,
you know, for a dozen more levies that go to
all these different political subdivisions, all in a lot of ways,
right Brian, services we want I like police showing up
when my when there's an emergency. I like fire if
there's an issue with my home. I want to I

(09:02):
want to have safe roads to drive on, and I
want to know that you know, if I choose to
send my kid to a public school, that it's going
to be a good education. But the challenge here is
we have so many of these entities taking a slice
out of our pocketbook. That's at the heart of why
we are experiencing the property tax crisis we're experiencing right now.
So many of these political subdivisions exist, and there are

(09:25):
some opportunities through consolidation, shared services, and other collaborative agreements
to bring that number down and ultimately that delivers relief
to Ohioans and creates a more economic prosperous future so
that states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida stop taking our
jobs and opportunity and they come here to the economic
engine of the Midwest.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
All right, assuming this concept is embraced and we are
convinced that it's the right way to go, doesn't this
require each of these individual political subdivisions to be willing
to give up their control. A lot of people view
these as their own independent fiefdoms, like police departments. I'm
not working with them, and this is mine. You can't
trot on my neighborhood, you know, berber Berber. There's a
lot of that going on, and politicians typically act like that.

(10:07):
So this is going to require the relinquishment of control
by these various entities.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
What have you ever known a politician or an elected official,
no matter how small their political government is, to let
it go. No, it's near impossible. The last time. Well,
here's the thing this I mentioned earlier in the segment.
This isn't a new concept.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Right.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
If you you might remember some of your listeners might
remember back in two thousand and nine, we experienced an
economic crisis, Right, two thousand nine experience an economic crisis.
John Kasik came in as governor, fixed the state budget,
and one of the big conversations at that time was
what we were going to do about all these political
subdivisions in Ohio. Reports were put out. Buckeye Institute Greg

(10:50):
Laws and put out a great report talking about this.
The governor had an Office of Transformation on that Auditor
of State Devio's who I was working for at the time,
we went out and talked about skis the Ohio and
shared services. The problem, though, Brian, you hit on it.
The problem is the fiefdoms and the the these folks
who are out there who have their special district or

(11:12):
their governmental entity, and just like Congress, you love your congressman,
but you hate Congress. People love their local government, but
they hate the cost of it. We've got to come
to a reconciliation here because it's bleeding us dry. And
that's you know, the flag and banner we're raising out
there is that, if you you know, underlying this property

(11:32):
tax crisis is a big government problem and it's not
entirely in Columbus right now. It's in the villages, townships,
school districts, and counties that your your local government, and
we need folks to get engaged and start start asking
for more accountability there.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well for those desirous of political expedients. Again, if we
embrace this concept and the majority of people are all
in favor of it, this isn't as if Columbus could
pass some piece of legislation that would streamline all these
various years ditions. They would have to relinquish that control themselves,
or the local voters would have to say we here,
let's say I live in Simms Township, we agree to

(12:08):
merge with Loveland as a political entity or subvision or
something along those lines. It would require local consent.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Well, for instances of villages that local consent is already available.
You can go and get a small fraction of signatures,
put it on the ballot and let the voters vote
on that. Wouldn't that be novel Brian instead of and
that exists today. But we don't see that happening across
the state of Ohio because who wants to be that
parie in their community? Right going to you're going to

(12:37):
abolish the village. So there's a lot at play. I
think what we need to do is regionalize some of
this stuff. So it's hard to get it done in
Columbus because there are literally tens of thousands of paid lobbyists.
If the state would have passed alat to day abolishing
villages or consolidating schools, the outcry and pressure campaign from
that would be unbearable, I think. But I think you

(12:59):
regional that you allow folks local in their communities to
make some of these decisions. I think there's some opportunities reform.
We've seen though that the voluntary disarmament doesn't seem to
be working because those options are available today, but it's
not happening.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, not in my backyard. Oh Donovan, you've got a
tough road ho on this one. But that's what you're
going to be talking about. Tomorrow night. Seven PM's a
start time. You can show up live three hundred Great Oaks,
drive the Empower Youth se in our studio or log
in from the comfort of your own home. It's empower
Youamerica dot org. Check out what Donovan has to say,
and also here from Eric Conroy, who will be discussing

(13:34):
the time he spent in the CIA as well as
his run for Congress. They do this what they call
take twenty twenty minutes worth of information from him, along
with Donovan and the Americans for Prosperity. Donovan, hope you
have a well attended seminar, and I hope you flush
out some of these ideas and maybe we'll see some
direction or some positive movements in this direction. But it's

(13:55):
going to take some work at a grassroots level. Absolutely
always does. Thanks Brian, I appreciate it. Thank you, Donald n'neill.
Empower Youamerica dot org. And of course this conversation and
the details will be at fifty five kr SE dot
com right now, it's seven forty three and fifty five
krs the talk station, Peter Shabia, Keller Williams seven hit