Toadlick Games

A group in Ohio is circulating a petition to ban property taxes in the state with a (state) constitutional amendment that reads thus:

The proposed amendment would add Section 14 to Article XII of the Constitution of the State of Ohio. The proposed amendment
would abolish taxes on real property and prohibit any future taxes on real property. As used in this Section, “real property” includes land itself, all growing crops therein, and all buildings, structures, and improvements permanently attached to the land. This amendment shall take effect on the first day of the year after it is passed.

First let me note that I completely get the sentiment. I’m not a fan of, for example, the idea of me passing on and my wife losing the house simply because she can’t make the rent payments to the state (she’s not old enough now, but homestead exemptions for seniors only cut the property tax a tiny bit). The whole scheme creates a bit of unease with everyone as they never feel like they truly own their property. I should also note that I hear that all the time where I live despite the property taxes here being about half what they are in municipal areas. Having lived in a municipal area before I understand the feelings of abolishers even more as taxes are close to what a studio apartment would be while the services provided for them are…iffy.

All that being said there are a couple issues here.

Firstly I have some issues with the scope of the amendment. My reading is that commercial property is also exempt which seems unappealing as we’ll have to make that up with personal taxes of some sort because, for example, big downtown banks no longer have a property tax bill. Secondly it takes effect the “first day of the year after it is passed”, which calls into question whether the current year’s taxes can be collected since property taxes are collected in arears (my reading is “no”). Adding on to that, do people who are behind on their property taxes, who cheated their neighbors in not paying, then get a pass? (My reading is “yes”).

Lastly there’s the “bond” issue where some projects are tied to property tax collections. A frequent example is the township that builds a firehall and is able to take out a super low-interest 30-year loan to build it because the repayment of the bond is tied to a property tax levy the voters approved. It really seems like those taxes specifically should be collected until all such bonds are retired?

The fact that these obvious issues are unaddressed by the ballot language makes me question how much abolishers know about property taxes in general.

As an addendum to that last section since the amendment mentions “crops” I will note that Ohio has a property tax method for protecting farmland called CAUV. It’s not as effective as I’d like it to be but in essence land used for farming is taxed at a much lower rate, BUT, if the property is ever rezoned for non-agriculture purposes the gap between CAUV and actual property taxes has to be paid for the past three years immediately. Were property taxes to go away even the one weak barrier we get to keep developers from paving over the countryside would go away.

Secondly, well, I’ll use a narrative here:

In a world without property taxes my township would have very little money for roads, so I told the trustees that we’d basically have to go house-to-house with a tin cup begging for money to fix the roads. Of course, I continued, we could maybe set people up on a subscription basis or, OR, get this: as a community we decide what everyone should have to chip in to keep the roads repaired. Now collecting this “subscription” has a lot of overhead, and it’s regressive since even the poorest people will pay the same amount. So, maybe we should base the collections on some external factor. Income taxes have way too much overhead, so maybe if we based it off of, hmm, property values it would be close enough and the low overhead to collection would mean that we could keep most of the money for the tasks for which it was collected.

I should also note from that narrative that although the township gets some money from the gas tax and other related revenue for roads, that if there were no property taxes there would be nothing for Fire and EMS (as would be the case in almost all areas). This is not a slight issue as one of the places I had lived as a child the insurance priced the house as a write-off since the home would be a pile of smoldering rubble by the time the fire department arrived so the property taxes for fire service are literally less expensive than the insurance rates were the fire department not there.

I’ve also heard “sales taxes” pitched as replacement and maybe (maybe) some municipal areas could pull it off (but I doubt it) but there are a few big issues with that:

• Most townships only have a handful of consumer enterprises (i.e. Dollar General and a gas station) so their sales taxes would have to be something on the order of 20%, but probably more, to make up the gap.
• Even barring that, there would be difficulty in treating sales taxes the same way as property taxes with votes and money for specific purposes (ditto any income tax fix)*.
• And, even barring all that, sales taxes go to the state and it’s up to them to distribute it (property taxes never leave the county) and, if they so choose, as they’ve done in the past, the state can just…keep it.

Now I will admit that there is a hole in my argument: the dreaded Inside Mileage. Scooping this up from an Internet bot:

Inside millage in Ohio refers to the 10 mills (1% of a property’s true value) of unvoted property tax that local governments are constitutionally permitted to levy without direct voter approval.  This revenue is shared among overlapping political subdivisions, such as school districts, townships, and counties, based on historical allocations from 1929–1933. 

While outside millage is subject to voter approval and tax reduction factors that limit revenue growth despite rising property values, inside millage typically increases directly with property valuations.  However, recent legislative efforts, such as House Bill 335, propose restricting this growth by capping inside millage increases at the rate of inflation, with provisions potentially effective for tax years beginning in 2025 or 2026. 

As every auditor in the state noted, the big issue people had with property taxes weren’t the ones they were allowed to vote on, which “lock in” at a dollar amount and decrease over time due to inflation, but the “Inside Mills” that are mandated by the state that cannot be voted on and float freely based on property tax evaluations. If, as my case makes, property taxes are supposed to be collected based on the voting sentiment of a local community, why then doesn’t the community get to vote on the Inside Mills? For that, I don’t have a good answer and I’ve never heard one offered. While the statehouse has implemented a series of workarounds to limit the “noticeability” of the inside mills the only real fix is, I think, is to make the Inside Mills, just regular old mills.

So yes, I’m generally against the amendment, because I do think the state house, or more specifically, my state rep, is working hard to tame the inside mill issue. However, there is a meta argument to be made, and I’ve heard many abolishers make this argument so I know I’m not alone in thinking it. The best example of this is when I’ve seen anti-abolisher flyers to appeal to voters they will list things that would have to be eliminated or heavily curtailed if property taxes were eliminated and the list is like:

• Fire Departments
• EMS/Ambulance service
• Police services
• Park services

And…that’s it. Do you notice one missing from the list, one glaring exception they left off because they knew if they included it the mood of the voter might sour. Yes: Schools. Schools are an endemic example of everything wrong in the American Empire:

• The more money is spent, the worse the results seemingly are
• They gladly shut themselves down during COVID showing that they act as little more than glorified daycare centers.
• They’re increasingly filled with “strangers”
• What once was a limited community function is now some industrial operation that indoctrinates kids to the GAE religious faith

And so on. What’s the fix? What feedback mechanisms are we given to address this (and many other) outstanding issues that the system we live under refuses to address? Very, very few. In fact, a formal elimination of property taxes may be “it”; “Burn It Down” as it were. At least we won’t be paying rent to the government when it all goes to ash. And no, I’m not being snide since it’s the only pro-abolisher argument that works as all the other ones are lacking.

*Unbeknownst to all be the most inside of inside government workers, revenue designated for specific services has to be spent on those services. It’s not enough to say “here’s replacement revenue” as the voters said that (an example generalizing greatly) half the revenue is supposed to be spent on roads and half on fire and EMS. And how much revenue is needed? Who decides, and how? At least under the current system there is local feedback for local spending.

• I ended up winning with 62% of the vote. True to my word I didn’t cast a vote for the position and with the low vote totals and the margin of victory if I voted for myself it would have been 63%.
• I felt bad for Crank Lady as she put some serious time and effort into the campaign, including mailers (which I judged to be too expensive for something that was going to go right in the trash) and physically visiting a good number of residents in the township. She is a long time resident, did the job for decades (winning the office, unopposed of course, five times in a row) and her and her husband are, what I would call, “well off”, and yet, couldn’t pull off a win against a relative stranger who sat in his basement for most of the campaign.
• Probably related, my brother asked about the political leanings of the “Crank” and an “H.R. lady” type of person conjures of visions of one type of character. However, that’s actually not the case here, or not directly the case. For instance, even driving by their house this morning I saw that they had not one, but two Trump for president signs on their property. The issue is that they (and probably the husband specifically) is strongly libertarian which means holding a strong deference to a moral order, a moral order which has only existed in the minds of libertarians since, I don’t know, the end of the Civil War? This leads to an odd disconnect as they believe that being sticklers for rules is a service to the community, even though those writing the rules would smash their community in heartbeat if given the chance. However, their duty fulfilled, they’re never to be seen at any function in the area (“What? Showing up for ‘community’ events sounds like ‘communism’!”).
• So, even though I rarely leave the house I ended up being seen more, at the right events, than my competitor, just because I happened to be there, not through any intention of my own. And in fact through my limited experience it’s reinforced the maxim “80% of life is just showing up”. I see this in other local elected officials who just happen to be where other people are at because they just made a point to be there.
• Speaking of which, I ran into the clerk I mentioned of the neighboring township who wasn’t running at one such event and it turned out she just never turned anything in to be on the ballot and that she just needed one person to write her name in (she got 13). She went on to mention that, even then, someone else could do it if they wanted, but there wasn’t anyone else anyway (as she was essentially drafted into the spot, as I was). Not entirely related, but in the whole county only one other township had a contested clerk job.
• Completely unrelated:

So it’s one of those weird things where I ended up holding an elected accounting position in my township of about 1200 people. The job pays OK, but if I were to do the day job in the off-hours I would make two-four times as much, but I don’t do that because I don’t want to, so I wasn’t happy with the elected job as a job from the get-go. However I felt, and still feel, that it’s what I can do to help the community out. Do note it’s not that my efforts haven’t gone unappreciated, they have, perhaps too much, and I will point out that you’re not going to live an anonymous existence in a town of 1200 people.

No, the worst part is the time. At least one day a week, generally Sunday, must be taken out to do paperwork, and then three meetings a month. Additionally there’s lots of “one-off” tasks (training, going to the bank, etc) that sponge up precious vacation time. Around Christmas last year I looked down, and up, and realized an entire year of my life blasted by me without my even knowing, and at my age I’d prefer time move as slowly as possible. Thus, early into the half-term I was serving out, I resolved that I would not run for the office, that surely there would be someone else who would want to do this, and the fact that there was turned out to be part of the issue.

I’ll digress here for a moment to give an overview of the “industry”, such as it is. When I was hired-in it also turned out that the state is currently struggling to get anyone at all to do this job and to do it in a remotely competent manner. Every training session is met with a note of how many new attendees there are and I thought this would taper out but my impression is the churn is just as bad as new accounting clerks determine the job isn’t for them and quit out. I mean, it’s good to feel that I’m not alone in my displeasure for the job, but what does that mean for the future of the state, of the country, when the competent people would rather have nothing to do with the guts of governance.

Meta Point Number One: In my state I see what an effort it takes to have decent bookkeeping on all government levels. In lesser states/communities I will guarantee this is not happening. This will only get worse.

Anyway, in the township there was a woman who had held the clerk position for decades but had quit after….I’m not quite sure. This happened before we moved here and I tell people that, outside looking in at the paperwork from the time, it would appear she started to “lose it”. She baselessly accused other people in the local government of breaking the law and generally raising a stink over people not holding to procedures in a manner she deemed proper (this, coming from the woman who, as near as I can tell, never issued a 1099 the entire time she was in office). She ended up rage-quitting and leaving the township in a panic to find someone who could at least fill in temporarily.

Fast forward several years and her husband ends up getting elected as one of the trustees and the accounting clerk at the time ends up resigning (for a variety of reasons but for which I’ll summarize as: the job sucks). At the time all of this was unknown to me when the call went out to find someone to finish the last two years of the clerk’s term which I reluctantly took up after a month and a half of the township looking for someone. After I was appointed I came to find out that the former long-term, mentally unstable, clerk was vying for the position, but since she was married to one of the trustees (who couldn’t vote for her) and had needlessly made an enemy out of one of the other trustees (which is something she is good at), she would not have the votes to be appointed as I was.

I should point out right now that had I known all that I wouldn’t have applied for the position. Even now after she has done her best to slander me I consider her more annoying than anything. And that was the view I took into this past summer, telling my wife that if…Crank Lady was running I wasn’t going to run as I wouldn’t have to worry about the township finding someone to do the job. But…then people who been made enemies of Crank Lady, which was not a short list, started asking me to run, and then followed by people who genuinely preferred the job I was doing to what had been done in the past. I will note that even at this late date, had Crank Lady approached me and made her case I would have deferred to her candidacy and I would have been able to tell people that I couldn’t run because I promised I wouldn’t, but…

Against this I was responsible for processing the bi-annual fiscal audit of the township. I will admit I had a lot more shortcomings in this regard than I cared for but when the draft audit report came in I noted that there was no reason to not just sign off on it despite it’s many flaws as trying to resolve the flaws would cost money and to no financial benefit of the township. The only thing it might do is assuage my accounting clerk ego, if I had one, and not addressing the issues would have the upside that I knew Crank Lady would step into flaws as hard as she could.

And of course, being more predictable than a dog around an unprotected bowl of cheese, step she did. I will note that the primary issue with the audit report in general is thus: nobody cares. If I have to open an Excel sheet to show why I’m a better candidate then I’ve already lost. However I left a big landmine in there and did not (sufficiently) contest the finding saying that I, and the former clerk, hadn’t done our training. In another age this was probably a Really Big Deal, but I knew that the state was struggling to find anyone with a pulse to do this job and that it would rank low. Of course what made it a landmine was that I had done the training, just that I had grown sick of the low-watt auditor giving me grief on my documentation. So when she sent out campaign literature saying I hadn’t done my training I sprung the trap.

I should point out though that this trap was laying out in plain site as I had gone over all of that and more at a meeting that her husband attended (but, being 80+ years old and hard of hearing he does kind of fade in and out), and it’s not as if she couldn’t contact me about it as she had repeatedly taken the time to harangue me about all kinds of meaningless (to me) matters in the past. But this brings me to:

Meta Point Number Two: The current, aging system relies heavily on deference to authority. In the military it’s referred to as “saluting the rank not the man”, but after a certain point, when there are more questions than answers from authorities this breaks down.

Crank Lady and her husband carry a great deal of deference to job titles, in this case “auditor”. In my day job though I deal with real auditors, auditors who can get me fired from my real job. Against this I just had a hard time taking a $50 an hour private contractor seriously as an “auditor” (and they were just as petty as one might imagine). Anyway, instead of questioning the audit results with an open mind they treated it like Moses had brought the audit report down from the mountain, and it clearly rattled them that they might be in the wrong. Enemies of Crank Lady said that I should work to open a criminal probe against her (as lying in such a way in a campaign is illegal in the state, which I have a hard time believing) but instead I just emailed her concerning her oversight and she ended up mailing an apology letter to people that she had spread the lie to.

I’ve only touched upon the high drama for what may be, literally, the least important elected position in the state. And I’m not just talking about in terms of the title for the position, I mean that this clerk position is the least important. In other words, the clerk position itself is the least important, and if all the clerks in the state were assembled as a body that specific elected position that I currently hold would be in the bottom ten percent easy. Insult on injury I recently learned that the clerk in the neighboring township that I got along with somewhat had decided not to run (for a variety of reasons but for which I’ll summarize as: the job sucks), making me wonder “why didn’t I think do to that?”. To which I will mention:

Meta Point Number Three: Direct, open voting sucks at finding competent bureaucrats, or even not-so-incompetent ones. In this case the voters, who know nothing about accounting, are tasked with choosing the best accountant for their township (who I should mention, is also not required to know anything about accounting).

So that’s where I’m left at now, I don’t want to lose, but I also don’t want the job. The idea of spending every weekend and several other days of the month locked into this job for the next four years fills me with…I don’t know, exhaustion I guess. It’d be nice as a part-time retirement job I guess (my opponent is in her 70s) but I will note: I won’t be able to vote for myself. This is not to say that I will be voting for Crank Lady. It’s like I tell people: all she had to do was not be a jerk for four months and she couldn’t even pull that off.

Meta Point Number Four: This one is more opaque but it has to do with a community in general. I regularly hear from the trustees of them getting yelled at by residents who make Crank Lady look like the patron saint of civility. What’s the “redemption arc” though? A community doesn’t want to be defined by it’s “cranks” but at the same time there’s no method to address their behavior. In a more enlightened age people who were poisonous to their community, to their people, would go in the pillory to have rotten fruit thrown at them for a weekend.