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Voinovich changed funding formula
By Dennis J. Willard
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Sunday, Mar 23, 2008
COLUMBUS: ''We're going to have to raise more money in this country. Did you hear me? We're going to have to increase taxes in order to do the job.
''Anyone that tells you that's not the case isn't being truthful with you. They're not being intellectually honest with you.''
Those are the words of U.S. Sen. George Voinovich, quoted in Gongwer News Service, as he addressed a group in Columbus last week.
According to the reports, the former Ohio governor was providing the audience with a lot of doom and gloom about infrastructure, gas prices, the trade deficit, the weak dollar against the strong euro and the need to proceed seriously on the issues plaguing the state and the country.
''How can America survive when half the kids in the urban districts are dropping out of school?'' Voinovich asked.
He is still asking that question 29 years after running for Cleveland mayor promising to address the city's woeful public school system, and 18 years after his successful campaign for this state's top office with the declaration that he would be the ''education governor.''
Voinovich pledged to make Ohio the envy of other states when it came to education.
So let's accept your challenge to get serious Sen. Voinovich by taking a serious look at your contributions to the primary, secondary and higher education systems that haunt this state today.
After all, your administration started the skyrocketing tuition at public universities, policies that were carried on by Gov. Bob Taft until the legislature and Gov. Ted Strickland froze them last year.
In your budgets, you limited state treasury dollars going to the colleges and in return gave their boards permission to jack up prices year after year.
The bottom line: Let the students and their families pay more so you could focus on spending state dollars on your priorities while simultaneously bolstering your future by not raising taxes.
The effect of your policies on higher tuition cannot be precisely measured, but Ohio is among the worst states in the nation in the percentage of adults with four-year degrees.
And you would be hard-pressed to find any state envious of that statistic.
Your record on primary and secondary education, hard to believe, is even worse.
Let's move past your time as Cleveland mayor, where during your initial 1979 campaign you promised to play a significant role in addressing the woeful public schools, only to make one highly publicized march on the board of education before virtually disappearing on the issue for a decade.
Onto the governor's mansion, where in your first year in office a lawsuit was filed to challenge the constitutionality of the school funding formula.
You fought the coalition in court and lost for the first time in July 1994, months before winning your second term as governor.
When the 11-member all-elected State Board of Education had the nerve to defy you and vote 6-5 to accept the Perry County court ruling, you took steps to ensure the panel never crossed you again.
In 1995, when the next two-year budget was introduced, you pushed to turn the state board into a hybrid of members elected by the public and appointed by you.
Shifting burden
Speaking of budgets, you took the liberty of fundamentally changing the school funding formula in two budgets you passed, first in 1993 and then in 1995, in ways that continue to hamstring education and force voters to return again and again to the voting booth to decide levies.
In 1993, you decided to raise the charge-off or local tax that the state assumes is being collected by each school district from 20 to 21 mills over a two-year period.
This seemingly innocuous, but highly technical, step allowed you to claim the amount of funding per pupil was rising across Ohio.
Two years later, you grew bolder and bumped the charge-off or local tax share to 23 mills.
This move allowed you to claim the per-pupil funding in Ohio was rising by almost $500 million in just two years, but you left out the part where more than two-thirds of that increase was borne by local property taxes.
For local school districts, the charge-off increase created a huge phantom revenue problem because your formula assumed the money was being collected when in many cases it was not.
The move also accelerated the decline of effective millage in school districts, which ate away at the base of their funding faster and forced school boards and superintendents to go begging for more local money.
This was the gift that kept taking and taking.
For subsequent governors to undo your charge-off increase would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars without pumping a single penny more into schools, because the true ramification of the move was to dramatically shift the burden of paying for schools and the blame for raising taxes to local districts.
Losing in court
In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled against you and said the way the state funds education is unconstitutional because of the over-reliance on local property taxes to pay for schools.
The court ordered a new formula.
You were angry and went to the voters with a penny sales-tax increase that purported to spell property tax relief and fix the funding formula, but voters rejected the idea 4-1.
Luckily, you were able to take the massive funding war chest accumulated during eight years in office and run successfully for the U.S. Senate before the Supreme Court ruled a second time that the system was unconstitutional.
Now, nine years later, the funding system is still broken, voters are asked again and again to support local tax levies and the inflated charge-off or local assumed tax continues to eat away at the base of funding for Ohio's 1.8 million schoolchildren.
And anyone who tries to tell you this isn't the case is not being truthful. They're being intellectually dishonest.
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
COLUMBUS: ''We're going to have to raise more money in this country. Did you hear me? We're going to have to increase taxes in order to do the job.
Get the full article here.
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