In coming days and weeks, chances are strong you’ll be interrupted on your leisurely stroll down the street by a passionate petition peddler beseeching you for your John Hancock.

That petition circulator likely would be a supporter or hired hand of the Citizens for Property Tax Reform. And that petition on which your signature would be highly coveted would call for a popular vote among all Ohioans to abolish all real property taxes in the state.

Despite the gut-level and easily understandable urge to swiftly sign on the dotted line, we strongly call on all eligible voters to respond in iconic Nancy Reagan fashion: Just say no.

Yes, now that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has stamped his seal of approval on the summary language of the group’s proposed state constitutional amendment, the group has its marching orders to collect some 413,000 eligible voters’ signatures by July 2 to qualify this extremist initiative for the November ballot.

Just how extremist is it? If approved by a simple majority of voters, local governments and public schools in Ohio stand to lose an estimated $20 billion in annual revenue.

The tsunami of disastrous aftereffects would quickly crash down on cities, villages, townships, schools, libraries, child welfare agencies, mental health organizations and others that have relied on the property tax as a principal means of public funding.

Impacts most surely would be felt fast and furiously. School districts could be forced to put financial survival above academic integrity. Municipalities could have no choice but to scale back or scuttle community-enrichment projects. Residents facing dire emergencies could be forced to endure much longer response times from police and firefighters.

To compensate for the losses, you can bet publicly-funded entities would waste no time in finding alternative revenue streams, namely highly elevated income and sales taxes.

As Greg Lawson, a research fellow from the conservative-leaning Buckeye Institute, put it: “Even if you cut back on some local spending to make it more efficient, which is, in the long run, a good thing to do, it would still mean you’re going to have exorbitantly high sales or income taxes. Either that or you don’t get the service — It’s really that simple.”

In the end then, should the tax-abolition movement succeed, the resulting burden on taxpayers very well could be just a wash.

Yet despite our staunch opposition to the proposed initiative, the motivation behind Citizens for Property Tax Reform is perfectly understandable. It is a direct — albeit over-the-top — reaction to state legislators’ utter failure to take meaningful action to address both skyrocketing property tax rates throughout Ohio in recent years and systemic failures of the tax since it was first declared unconstitutional for funding schools by the Ohio Supreme Court in its landmark DeRolph v. Ohio case back in 1997.

Except for a handful of committed legislators, such as state Rep. Dave Thomas, R-Jefferson, who has introduced a slew of property-tax reform bills this year, inaction has been the watchword in the Legislature toward meaningful efforts to lower property owners’ increasingly heinous tax burden.

Attorney General Yost agrees. Though his office certified the ballot language for the issue as meeting state standards, clearly he is no fan of the petition drive or of so many of our lethargic state legislators. “Ohio’s broken, dysfunctional property tax is forcing people out of their homes with unvoted tax hikes. The people are going to blow it up at the ballot box — and the resulting chaos will be a failure of the Legislature, which knew better but would not act,” he wrote on X.

We would like to think, however, that there is still time to act. As state representatives and senators put the finishing touches on the state’s 2026-27 budget over the next few weeks, they also should carve out time to address — and approve — any of a number of worthy property tax reform bills in the hopper. If that requires extending the spring session into the summer, so be it.

As we have argued several times in this space, lessening property taxpayers’ turmoil and burden must remain Priority No. 1. After all, the Tax Foundation recently ranked Ohio as having the eighth-worst tax burden on its residents in the nation.

And who knows? Perhaps some tangible and substantial property tax relief enacted this summer could motivate leaders of CPTR to end their misguided initiative campaign altogether.

Failing that, responsible Ohioans who do not wish to throw out the baby with the bath water can take some encouragement from North Dakota. In that first-in-the-nation referendum last fall to abolish all property taxes in that state, Measure 4 failed miserably at the polls — with 65% of the electorate voting no. We’d count on an even wider margin of defeat in the Buckeye State in the hope that voters would wisely choose long-term reform over short-term destruction.