Amid skyrocketing local property taxes, the GOP clique that runs Ohio’s House of Representatives
will return to Columbus tomorrow
to try overriding “item vetoes” by Gov. Mike DeWine, a fellow Republican, of parts of the state’s new 2025-27 budget (House Bill 96).
True, the House (65 Republicans, 34 Democrats) and state Senate (24 Republicans, nine Democrats)
could
have comprehensively addressed the property-tax mess before fleeing that Statehouse for their hometown hammocks. But that’d be asking too much of a well-paid legislature that, year by year, yaks more and works less, while taking potshots at fellow Republican DeWine — often the only adult in any room full of GOP insiders.
DeWine can veto not just entire bills but also parts of one (“items”), if any part of a bill lets Ohio spend public money (an “appropriation”). Governors’ vetoes of an entire bill, or of an item in a spending bill, survive unless three-fifths of the Ohio House’s members (60 of 99) and three-fifths of the Senate’s (20 of 33) vote to override a veto.
Ohioans gave the governor veto power by a constitutional amendment okayed in 1903, then tweaked in 1912, to rein in a legislature that had repeatedly passed bills that picked the pockets of taxpayers and consumers. (Sound familiar?)
Some term-limited newbies in today’s General Assembly shrieked that DeWine’s vetoes were an insult to the legislature. Those gripes provided more proof, were it needed, that a shocking number of today’s General Assembly members are clueless about checks-and-balances.
In theory, all 67 of DeWine’s line-item-vetoes are in House Republicans’ crosshairs, but these three, which would make it harder for school boards to fund Ohio’s public schools, are said to be House Republicans’ targets:
* One House brainstorm would have let County Budget Commissions overrule voters – Ohio’s sovereigns – by unilaterally rolling back property tax millage. That’d give county-seat publicity hounds endless openings to grandstand without taking any actual responsibility for school budgeting.
In 86 of Ohio’s 88 counties, the Budget Commissioners are the county auditor, the county treasurer and the prosecuting attorney. (In Cuyahoga and Summit, Ohio’s two so-called home-rule counties, the Budget Commissioners are the county executive, the county fiscal officer, and the prosecuting attorney.)
* Another DeWine-vetoed item, if Republican legislators save it, would hold down the total amount of tax money a school district might otherwise receive if it reaches Ohio’s so-called “millage floor.”
In plain English, here’s what that gobbledygook means: When a district lands on that 20-mill floor, the state Taxation Department reports, so-called tax reduction factors “no longer keep tax revenues from growing as property value increases.” That is, this vetoed item would, if repassed, likely (perversely) require Ohio school boards to further irk taxpayers by proposing even more levies than now. Yet, as respected Ohio school-finance scholar Howard Fleeter told legislators last year, “Ohio [already] relies on local levies more than any other state … more than 18,500 school levies since 1976.”
* A third contested DeWine veto would block a legislative bid to forbid school districts to seek so-called “emergency” levies. “These levies serve as important tools for school districts as they seek to maintain their long-term financial stability,” DeWine wrote.
Yes, and Ohio’s public schools would also have greater stability if legislators would obey Ohio Supreme Court orders, reaching back to 1997, to fairly fund public schools. That might have been accomplished by now, but for this fact: The legislature is unconstitutionally spending mountains of state tax money helping pay the tuition that nonpublic schools in Ohio charge their pupils.
Tomorrow’s debate will flood the Statehouse with dreck from anti-public-school legislators, who are gambling dangerously with Ohio’s future.
The Committee to Abolish Ohio’s Property Taxes is asking voters to sign petitions proposing to place, on next year’s statewide ballot, a ban on all Ohio property taxes, current and future.
Should that make 2026’s ballot, there’s a chance that voters – fed up with legislators’ failure to genuinely reform property taxes without hurting schools – might repeal and ban property taxes. If so, a new picture, a thumbnail map of Ohio, will appear in Mr. Webster’s dictionary, alongside the definition of “chaos.”
Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.
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