WARREN — Changes in federal and state laws will potentially negatively affect the amount of funding received by and distributed to residents through the county, according to Trumbull County Commissioner Denny Malloy.

The federal government’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate and was signed by the president, will reduce the amount of money received by local governments for people receiving nutrition assistance, he noted.

“There will be a lot of changes in relation to supplemental nutrition funding,” Malloy said. “Right now, counties are going to lose money. We are going to have to pay a bigger portion of the mandated share we split with the state than we did before.”

Malloy said the increased share will cost Trumbull County approximately $500,000 a year more than what it is paying now.

“The federal cost share has been 50%, now it will be only 25%,” Malloy said. “We will have to pay 75% now and that’s the administrative costs of the people who deal with child support and job and family services.”

Malloy represented Trumbull County during the County Commissioners Association of Ohio annual summer symposium last month. There were approximately 75 commissioners from 50 counties across Ohio at the series of meetings.

Malloy said that people receiving Medicare previously have been reevaluated every 12 months.

“They now will be reevaluated every six months,” Malloy said. “It will dramatically increase the workload of case workers. There is also a work requirement for people wanting to get Medicaid.”

Malloy said they have not evaluated the total impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Trumbull County.

PROPERTY TAXES

He noted that members of the County Commissioners Association of Ohio also expressed concern about efforts to reduce or eliminate property taxes in Ohio.

“If they eliminate the inside millage of property taxes, it’ll affect every levy out there, including police and fire levies, MRDD, children’s services and school levies,” Malloy said. “Who will pay for all of those funds?”

Malloy said Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed most actions dealing with property tax reduction when he signed the budget.

“However, there is an effort to eliminate property taxes through a ballot initiative,” he said. “If that happens, we’re screwed. If we didn’t have our current property taxes in Trumbull County, we would have to have an 18 to 20% sales tax to make up the difference. We would lose about $22 million a year from our general fund.”

Malloy said other counties have increased their bottom lines by increasing the amount of bed taxes they collect.

“We do have a 5% bed tax. We split it with the Port Authority. Two percent goes to our tourism bureau and 3% goes to the port authority,” he said.

Malloy said Hocking County has a 6% bed tax.

“If we do tourism in the right way, the amount of money collected can grow in the right way,” Malloy said. “What they do in Hocking County is taxing Airbnbs. We haven’t done that yet. We are looking at doing something like this.”

Trumbull County must tally the number of Airbnbs.