By ED RUNYAN

Staff writer

YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County commissioners recently discussed with state Reps. Lauren McNally and Al Cutrona, Auditor Ralph Meacham and others the burden homeowners face over the increasing cost of property taxes following the recent county property revaluation.

With the average residential property value increasing 38% and taxes increasing by some percentage below that, residents have expressed rustrations, commissioners Anthony Traficanti, Carol Rimedio Righetti and David Ditzler said.

“It isn’t the county that pays insurance on the house, the lawn maintenance, the furnaces, the air conditioners, the roofs, the paint, the vinyl siding, the driveways,” Traficanti said. “These people have invested their whole life into that investment. And to have them scared that they might be taxed out? They should be getting a rebate for all of the investment they made.”

Rimedio Righetti said she knows people who retired when she retired more than 20 years ago from the Mahoning County Board of Elections, and now they are going back to work to pay for their health care.

“But your taxes keep going up, up, up. There has to be a cap on there somewhere,” she said. “We need to tell our state and federal legislators how our people actually feel, how they are just existing, and it’s not fair. It’s not fair you work 35, 40 years and you leave and you think you’re great and you wake up someday and your health care is $1,500 a month. How do you afford that and everything else?”

Ditzler said with Mahoning County’s declining and aging population, “We have people on fixed incomes. We’re one of the highest below-the-poverty-rate in Mahoning County. We have a huge number of children in the school system on school subsidies.

“We have a lot of issues that are not whether I am buying a new car or not. It’s whether or not I am buying a sandwich to feed the kids on weekends when they are not in school to get a free lunch,” he said. “We need to really focus on what we need to do to help people who need help.”

McNally, Cutrona and Meacham talked about legislation proposed in Columbus to address people’s rising property taxes. However, Meacham focused on what he called the “20-mill floor.” It is a part of Ohio law that allows school districts to still see increases in their property tax revenue despite other parts of Ohio law that limit how much rising property values increase property taxes.

The 20-mill floor was enacted by the Ohio Legislature in 1977, and it allowed school districts to continue to benefit from increased property values for levies such as a capital-improvement levy, bond issue or emergency levies, Meacham said.

Meacham used the Jackson-Milton school district as an example. It collects 20 mills of property taxes through its general fund, but it also collects an emergency levy and permanent-improvement levy that together resulted in “an extra $1.4 million this year and every year thereafter,” Meacham said.

“We have about eight school districts who are below the 20-mill floor that got more money this year,” Meacham said. “So it is an unvoted levy on the taxpayers. School treasurers know what they are doing, and they know if they have an emergency levy, it doesn’t count against the 20-mill floor.”

He noted the “school districts have been strangely quiet on the 20-mill floor and the bonus they are getting this time around.”

Kirk Baker, Jackson Milton’s superintendent, was asked about Meacham’s comments. He replied in an email that Jackson-Milton “does benefit from the current system in place. Any change or adjustment to the 20-mill floor would have to be at the state level. The school does not calculate changes to the floor.”

He noted that “No one has an issue when money is deducted from our budget, flatlined or even when non-funded mandates are passed. The additional money will be spent wisely on items that have needed attention, projects that need to be completed, personnel and what is best for the school district. Some projects have been on hold because of funding.”

Meacham said the County Auditors Association last year advocated to “put an inflationary adjustment on the 20-mill floor. I think the commissioners said 3%. I think the county auditors proposed something approximately like that, so instead of a 38% increase for everyone, if you put an inflationary adjustment for everyone, it would be 3%.”

McNally, a Democrat from Youngstown, meanwhile, said the Ohio General Assembly increased the amount of funding for private and for-profit schools by 16% in the last budget, and public schools “will only increase by 11% in the budget,” meaning “The state is not putting the money in the public schools, so it’s always going to end up on the backs of the local residents until we change that at the state.”

She said reliance on property taxes to fund schools leads to disparities in funding among the Ohio school districts. Meacham said property taxes pay 60% of school budgets.

Meacham reiterated his belief that Mahoning County has too many school districts, and reducing the number would be a reasonable way to save money.

“Some of these school districts are getting very small. Every one of them has a superintendent, a treasurer, they have an administration,” Meacham said.

He wishes the legislature would give incentives to “come together. We keep building all of these multiple million dollar schools all of the time, and then we don’t have the kids to put in them. We have a declining population in Mahoning County. We have a declining number of kids eligible for school.”

McNally said the calls to her office “are mostly from our elderly population. They mostly start at the beginning and they can’t even read their tax bill.”

Ditzler wanted to know whether Ohio could do something like what was done in California in 1978, called Proposition 13, that puts limits on how much property value increases can affect taxes.

“I know people who lived in Lake Milton and had a $15,000 house, and now their property is at a half a million dollars, and that’s ridiculous for somebody to lose their home or move or change areas,” he said.

Cutrona, a Republican from Canfield, said it’s important for residents to think about the property tax increases they approve at the polls.

“When you vote for it, it affects you on your property taxes, so if you want to vote for a countywide whatever, or this park or that park, whatever it is, you are paying for it, even if they say this is not a new tax, just a renewal, where you are renewing the property tax you are struggling with,” Cutrona said.

Cutrona urged the commissioners to come to Columbus to testify on the legislation related to property taxes.

Traficanti asked if the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Legislature “knew this was coming and they knew it was going to be this burdensome for this revaluation, could someone have headed this off?”

McNally also asked the commissioners to come testify at a hearing. She said she is hopeful that policy can be created “that will really move the needle. But it is something — I agree with Rep. Cutrona — you guys coming down and testifying in terms of exactly what you are talking about today — would go a long way,” saying “they can really get a good picture of how it is affecting everybody.”

McNally said she would provide the commissioners with a synopsis of the bills involving property taxes, and they can “look it over and decide which ones they want to come to Columbus to testify on.”

Traficanti said, “I think we could do that.”

It can be equally important to talk to the committee chairman and ask for a bill to get hearings, McNally said.

Meacham also urged the commissioners also to consider not approving so many tax abatements.

“We have to look at what we are abating and what we are exempting from our tax roll. I’m not against anything, but VFW, American Legions and schools and churches and hospitals and not-for-profits; they all get all of these exceptions.”

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