Buckeye Institute - Different idea than No Property Tax

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
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

(00:35):
great having you on the fifty five KRC Morning Show.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Thanks a lot for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
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

(01:00):
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,

(01:20):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
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.

(01:54):
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.

(02:15):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
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

(03:40):
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

(04:00):
getting a response from them on what they plan on doing.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
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

(04:25):
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.

(04:47):
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.

(05:08):
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.

(05:30):
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

(05:54):
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.

(06:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, that's the point that's not lost on my listeners.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
I hear that.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
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

(06:50):
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.

(07:12):
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

(07:33):
about this thing that there are four thousand local taxing authorities.
They're going to be scrapping over that money.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
And they're going to be arguing.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
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.

(08:16):
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

(08:37):
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

(08:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
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

(09:27):
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

(09:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:43):
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.

(11:04):
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

(11:24):
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,

(11:45):
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

(12:09):
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

(12:31):
issue of what's making it cost mole.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
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

(12:54):
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?

Speaker 2 (13:04):
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

(13:24):
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

(13:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Well, I think that's definitely per there's no question about it.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:10):
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

(15:32):
it's sold near you. O D O, R XIT no
E odor exit dot com fifty five KRC the talkstation