We are told there is no recourse to return funds paid by local taxpayers who were accidentally billed and, in turn, improperly paid a cumulative $631,000 assessment for the Mahoning County Library system tax levy.

The error resulted in the library receiving no additional funds, despite some 3,300 property owners overpaying the $631,000. Apparently other taxpayers were assessed less than they should have been in the same total amount. The whole mess is very difficult to comprehend, and perhaps that’s why everyone involved has been so quick to dismiss it as impossible to correct.

We don’t buy that, however.

This is how it has been explained to us: Some Mahoning County property taxpayers paid more than $631,000, collectively, in library levy payments they shouldn’t have been charged between 2015 and 2018.

According to Mahoning County Auditor Ralph Meacham, about 3,300 parcels in nine taxing districts were erroneously billed under the 2014 renewal levy of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.

Certain property owners in Mahoning County, but within the school boundaries of Alliance City School District, Columbiana Exempted School District, Hubbard Exempted School District and Leetonia Exempted Village School District, should not have been billed for the levy — the parcels were billed an average of $44 to $50 erroneously each year.

Now we are told there is simply no method to recover the taxes from the property owners who were supposed to pay more taxes, nor to return the funds to the property owners who were erroneously billed.

Instead, we are told the problem will be fixed going forward.

Certainly, there can be no easy fix to this problem. It involves thousands of properties, and there is the likelihood that both overassessed or under-assessed property owners may have since relocated or even passed away.

Still, there is a distinct difference between “impossible” and “difficult.” We believe, albeit difficult and time-consuming, the errors can be calculated and corrected.

We believe that any taxpayer who requests these funds be returned, should have that right.

We call on our state legislators to begin exploring this complicated issue and to find a way to correct both this error and any other similar future errors.

To be clear, we do not blame the library, which saw no additional financial benefit from the error and had no involvement in the error.

We also don’t blame Meacham’s office, as the error first occurred before Meacham took office. In fact, it was his office that caught the error and corrected it going forward.

However, we place this issue squarely in the laps of our lawmakers who must determine a way to correct this error and ensure that it never happens again.