If you’ve been paying attention anywhere on social media or perhaps have seen people trying to collect signatures for petitions lately in Ohio, you likely are aware of a grassroots movement to create a state amendment to abolish property taxes.
Ohio’s property taxes generate about $24 billion each year. Property taxes fund Ohio schools, EMS, fire departments, senior services, services for people with developmental disabilities, public libraries, county health departments, social services, road and bridge maintenance and public parks.
So why would anyone want to abolish them?
Well, it’s a long story. I asked Ohio Senate President Rob McColley about Ohio’s property tax dilemma at the Wyandot County Lincoln Day Dinner in March. He explained that unlike other taxes, property taxes are tied to something that now is treated like an investment commodity.
Property values have consistently increased beyond the rate of inflation, so when properties were reappraised by state and county officials, the property values increased much more than people were prepared to pay. Property taxes are based on a specific percentage of the property value, so any major property valuation increase causes property taxes to spike drastically.
That sounds like a serious problem, but if you really look at the current issue, it’s only surface level.
How did we get here?
The real problem with property taxes in Ohio traces back to the state legislators and their insistence on cutting taxes for the wealthiest individuals and then passing the responsibility for paying for services on to regular folks at the local level.
Since 1934, Ohio has had something called the Local Government Fund. The LGF provides state-shared revenue to counties, municipalities, townships and park districts to aid with operating expenses.
For over generations, the LGF paid out enough to local governments that they didn’t need to ask for much more money. Then Ohio Gov. John Kasich came along, and he began slashing Ohio’s income tax, as well as its tax brackets.
Ohio used to have nine different income tax brackets, which meant people who made more money paid a little more into the system, but in 2005, under Gov. Bob Taft, Ohio passed HB 66, which reduced income taxes by 21% over a period of five years.
In 2013, under Kasich, another 10% income tax cut was enacted over a period of three years with HB 59. In 2015, another 6.3% income tax cut was introduced as part of the state’s budget bill. In 2017, the number of tax brackets was reduced from nine to eight. Then in 2019, another 4% income tax cut was implemented and tax brackets were reduced from eight to six.
In 2023 under current Gov. Mike DeWine, House Bill 33 reduced the percentage paid by the top income tax bracket from 3.99% to 3.75%, then to 3.5% a year later. They had previously paid as high as 7.5% into the system. The number of tax brackets was reduced to two in 2024, then the highest tax rate was reduced to 3.125% in 2025.
Ohio legislators finally killed the state income tax bracket system once and for all with its 2026-27 biennial budget this past year, making one tax bracket at a flat income tax of 2.75% for all, with almost all of the $1.1 billion in “savings” for taxpayers going to the wealthiest people in the state and shifting the tax burden to regular schmucks like you and me.
So why does this matter, and what does this have to do with property taxes?
Well, by reducing the amount of taxes brought in, the state paid out less and less through its Local Government Fund. Townships, counties and municipalities all had to either do more with less, or pass their own tax increases to maintain their standards of living. There also was less in the budget to assist all the other services at the local level.
Just in the past eight years that I’ve been writing for The Daily Chief-Union newspaper in Upper Sandusky, we’ve had to pass new property tax levies for libraries, for schools, for senior services, for developmental disabilities services, for fire and EMS and more.
When current U.S. Sen. Jon Husted was running for lieutenant governor in 2017, he visited our newspaper office. Doing my due diligence, I reached out to local mayors asking if there was anything they wanted me to ask him on their behalf.
The response was unanimous: “Would you pleas stop cutting the Local Government Fund?” The state was lauding its tax cuts and its “rainy day fund” while stripping its funding at the local level, then passing the buck on to local politicians so they had to take the hit when asking for tax increases to make up for what they had lost from the state.
With all those new levies at the local level to make up for lost state revenue, it was only a matter of time before Ohio hit a property tax crisis.
The solution to this crisis is so glaringly simple, but the politicians we have in place today will never implement it. We need to increase the income tax on the wealthiest of Ohioans. Return the tax brackets to what they used to be. Undo all the damage the state has done.
But what is the state attempting to do instead? They want to remove the income tax entirely, like in Florida or Texas, where sales and property taxes are exorbitant. McColley said so himself on the campaign trail and at that Lincoln Day Dinner in March.
The state also is throwing away over $1 billion every year to pay for private school vouchers, which go to families that by a rate of 94% were already attending private school before the voucher system was enacted, but that’s an argument for another day.
If Ohio was able to properly pay out its Local Government Fund, we wouldn’t be so reliant on property tax levies to pay for everything. Property taxes wouldn’t be in crisis because properties wouldn’t need to be taxed as much to make up for what the state doesn’t have the guts to do itself. More money would be available to properly fund our schools. Districts like Wynford wouldn’t need to pass a new income tax just to keep maintaining school services and Upper Sandusky schools sure as hell would have additional funds from the state available to pay for desperately-needed new school buildings.
We need to stop trying to put Band-Aids on our wounds at the local level and instead address the root cause of the infection that created this mess in the first place. Vote for politicians that can fix Ohio’s problems instead of claiming they’re solving them while secretly passing them on to be handled at the local level.
