Toledo Free Press is in the process of setting meetings with the organizers behind the seven levies that will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot.

Endorsements will follow those discussions, but for voters understandably weary (and wary) of media interpretation, an excellent guide comes from the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber diligently meets with representatives for each levy hopeful and goes through a two-step voting process to determine which levies it will endorse. Chamber President Mark V’Soske is clear that the Chamber does not come out against levies. It endorses its choices but does not actively oppose others.

The Chamber chose to support:

• Toledo Public Schools (TPS) is asking taxpayers to approve a new 6.9-mill continuing levy, which according to the Chamber of Commerce will cost the owner of a $100,000 home $211.28 per year. The money from the levy would fund the district’s current transformation program and balance the budget beyond the 2012-13 school year.
• The Mental Health and Recovery Services Board of Lucas County has placed a 10-year, 1-mill levy on the ballot. The board’s last levy renewal was passed in 2008, so this levy would generate new money for the agency. This levy would cost $30.62 per year for the owner of a $100,000 home, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
• Lucas County Children Services will be represented on November’s ballot with a 1.85-mill levy. This is a 0.85 increase from the current five-year levy, which will expire in December 2013. The 1.85-mill levy would cost the owner of a $100,000 home $56.66 per year, an increase of $26.04 on the current $30.62 per year paid to the 1-mill levy, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
• Imagination Station will ask voters to renew its 0.17-mill levy, which is set to expire at the end of 2013. The levy would generate about $1.3 million of the organization’s $3.2 million revenue by costing owners of a $100,000 home $5.21 a year.

The Chamber did not support (but again, that does not mean it opposes):

• Parks and Recreation is a new 1-mill levy, which would require renewal in 10 years. Owners of a $100,000 home would pay $30.62 per year if the levy passes, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
• Metroparks of Toledo Area will place a 0.9-mill levy before voters. The levy would replace the 0.3-mill levy that expires at the end of its 10-year term on Dec. 31. If passed, the 0.9-mill levy will require renewal in 10 years.
• The Toledo-Lucas County Public Library is placing a 2.9-mill levy on the ballot that if passed will replace and increase their 2-mill levy, which is due to expire at the end of this year. The levy will cost the owner of a $100,000 home $88.80 per year for five years, according to a newsletter on the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce’s website, toledochamber.com.

There is plenty of time for education and information; let’s hope voters look beyond media and do some investigating on their own.

Thomas F. Pounds is president and publisher of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Contact him at tpounds@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: EPIC Toledo, Imagination Station, League of Women Voters, levies, Lucas County Children Services, Mental Health and Recovery Services Board of Lucas County, Metroparks of Toledo Area, Parks and Recreation, Publisher's Statement, Toledo Public Schools, Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, Tom Pounds, Voter's Guide

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2012 at 10:59 am and is filed under Opinion, Publisher's Statement.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Having lived for years near the beautiful rivers and sloughs of central California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the only levees with which I was familiar before moving to Ohio were the long earthen embankments that contained the delta’s tranquil waterways and protected the islands between them from flooding.

It didn’t take long after my arrival in Ohio to be introduced to a different kind of levy, one measured not in lineal distance or cubic yards of fill, but in dollars taken from the taxpayer by force of law. Of course, I have no issue with paying taxes, so long as they are just, but having participated in the Proposition 13 taxpayer revolt of 1978 that shook California’s property tax assessment structure to its core, this was not an especially happy learning experience.

(Before we go any further: Prop 13 most emphatically did not cause or contribute to the financial crisis now wracking California’s government at all levels. The taxpayers put limits on how their property could be taxed; the politicians failed repeatedly to control spending commensurate with those limits.)

Several comments in recent issues of the Toledo Free Press about the seven-headed monster of levies on the November ballot provide perspective on why Ohio could stand to see a Prop 13-style revolt.

In the July 15 edition, Publisher Thomas Pounds laid out the statistics of how much homes of various values will be taxed if all the levies pass. He also referred to the levies as “investments.”

I beg to differ. An investment is made voluntarily after the investor determines that a profit is likely to be made on the deal. It is not confiscated from the investor at gunpoint, as are taxes. If it were, it would be the same as a protection racket: “Invest in our services, and nothing will happen to you.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) notwithstanding, taxes are not voluntary.

In that same column, Mr. Pounds worried that “ . . . fewer voters [will be] willing to reach deeper into their pockets” to fund these levies. And there is the heart of the problem. It is not a matter of voters choosing to reach deeper into their own pockets; it is one of voters authorizing the government to reach deeper into the pockets of others.

Unseemly as that is, I suspect this problem may be exacerbated by the mortgage crisis. The more voters who lose their homes, the more voters there are who will not be directly affected by the levies, and who can vote for them with abandon because someone else will have to pay the tab. Voters who do not own homes can happily vote for all seven levies; and if the levies pass, the homeowners get the bill regardless of whether they approve.

There’s also the matter of local income taxes. If the voters in a given jurisdiction vote to raise their local income tax rate, those who work in that jurisdiction but live elsewhere are forced to pay the higher tax, even though they have no right to vote on it. “No taxation without representation” is a stirring slogan; even though it’s not in the Constitution, I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of how this highway robbery is just.

Mr. Pounds thinks it logical that higher voter turnout will help pass the levies, but expects the economy to put a damper on that outcome. I expect very strong opposition to the levies, because so many moderates and conservatives who will turn out to hand President Obama his pink slip will vote down the levies at the same time.

The July 29 edition had a lengthy article on WSPD host Fred LeFebvre’s “What About Don?” perspective on the levies. To review, “Don” is homeowner and taxpayer Don Zellers, who is portrayed in the discussion as an everyman suffering “levy fatigue” from the barrage of government requests for more and more of his already scarce money.

What about Don? The voters who can vote for levies without paying them see Don’s wallet as low-hanging fruit, in the language of one Toledo councilman, ripe for the picking. Despite the grossly illogical mathematical concepts such a classist perception requires, they see Don, a middle-class homeowner, as a member of the mythical 1 percent whose money must be confiscated and “invested” for the good of the masses.

As easy as it is for those who see the government as the means to get what they want at the expense of others to impose levies on others without paying them themselves, it’s little wonder Toledo is dying. The tree of Toledo taxpayers is going to stop bearing that precious low-hanging fruit.

Thomas Berry is a member of the Children of Liberty.

Tags: "What About Don?", Children of Liberty, Fred LeFebvre, levies, Proposition 13, Thomas Berry, Thomas F. Pounds

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2012 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Children of Liberty, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Fall is fast approaching, and with the change of color will come the November ballot. The City of Toledo and its often parasitic sycophants are salivating as they line up at the taxpayer trough in another attempt to continue lining their pockets through the levy process. You all know the villains:

• The Division of Recreation is looking for money to pay for pools and basketball courts designed to keep groups of an apparently hoodlum children population from accosting people in shopping malls or on street corners. This effort personifies the truly misguided attempts of City Council to lower the city’s crime rate by lowering the bar for those who are “not bad, but merely misunderstood” (so far).

• Metroparks of Toledo would like more money to spend as well. After all, they used the last they got to buy land, so they require still more money to maintain it (and buy even more). Then next time there will be even more for maintaining recent acquisitions and a little more to buy with as well …. but most of you have to get the recurring picture in this tired tale by now.

• Toledo Public Schools would like more, but there’s nothing new there. One can only paraphrase Winston Churchill by saying, “Never have so few asked for much from so many, while achieving so little.” But let’s not let the last half century of failure in public education serve as a legitimate guide to predict its future, additional funding or not. Likewise, let’s not let recently surfaced accusations that the district may have been cheating on their tests keep us from granting these historic testing underachievers a temporary financial security that will last until their next Oliver Twist moment occurs.

• As for Imagination Station complaining that donations and attendance cannot fully fund their own often misguided efforts, perhaps they should be blaming TPS for helping to create an environment where learning is far less interesting and exciting than “American Idol.” While they’re at it, they may want to blame a City Council that picked up their light bill for years without requiring a business plan or a shred of fiscal responsibility. They might even blame them for business unfriendly policies that helped to empty the city of residents who might have otherwise attended their venue.

Some of the levy efforts however are not so much evil as they are pitiful. The Toledo Public Libraries might fit into this category, not because reading is any less important than it’s ever been (in fact, quite the contrary), but because libraries have diluted their mission in attempts to expand it into competing in the private sector. Like museums, they too are incidental victims of a public education system that’s graduated far too many functional illiterates. Increasingly unable to appeal to its core audience and having failed in attempts to expand their relevance, too much of their recent funding has been used to allow them to “rent” DVDs for free and act as an Internet Cafe. Their talk about expanding and modernizing their system seems well-intentioned, but appears to mean updating their movie collection and obtaining more up-to-date computers with faster Internet access. It’s unlikely to gain much in the way of excitement in spite of providing some real value to the community.

Truly unfortunate in all of this however are far more worthy efforts that get lumped into this steaming pile of odious natural fertilizer and painted with the same wide brush of barely suppressed outrage more voters are beginning to feel at pickpocketing efforts that are beginning to threaten their own livelihoods.

Certainly one might believe that both Children’s Services and Mental Health Services belong in this category; but they can’t serve themselves well lumped in as part of a process long contaminated with cronyism, graft and patronage. One can’t help but wonder in looking at their more modest requests if they might be filled from the generosity of local citizens; something far more likely to occur if they abandoned the increasingly disreputable levy process and went directly to the public. Certainly other worthy organizations like the United Way manage to meet budgetary goals through the continued generosity of local citizens without using local government’s protection racket to provide it.

After so many years however, the levy process is beginning to show some cracks. Call it the Tea Party influence if you will, or merely an acknowledgment that the sleeper is finally awakening. The American taxpayer is at long last beginning to draw lines in the sand where these ever-growing taxes are concerned; and make no mistake about it, levies are taxes. I’m afraid that well-intentioned, misguided or simply wrong, many of these efforts may drop faster than the leaves that highlight their season of decision.

Tags: Children's Services, Division of Recreation, Imagination Station, Just Blowing Smoke, levies, Mental Health Services, Metroparks of the Toledo Area, Metroparks of Toledo, Tim Higgins, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2012 at 11:59 am and is filed under Just Blowing Smoke, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.