Ohio's new two-year budget has been signed by Gov. Mike DeWine, who also issued 67 vetoes. Among them was a measure that leaders of many public school districts said would leave them in financial chaos, because it would capping the amount of collected property tax they could hold at 40% of their operating budgets, with the rest refunded to taxpayers.
DeWine also vetoed provisions relating to emergency and replacement levies and the calculation of the 20-mill floor, which guarantees districts a certain amount of property tax revenue. While public school advocates are happy with those vetoes, they said the budget still moves districts backward.
DeWine said he knows property tax increases are a strain on many family budgets and endanger the security of many on fixed incomes. But he said that 40% cap would have "put an undue, very abrupt, create significant problems for local school districts.” In his veto statement, DeWine said the cap was "contrary to local control and will undermine efforts by school districts to manage their finances responsibly and follow best business practices."
The Director of Government Relations for Buckeye Association of School Administrators, Paul Imhoff, said DeWine made the right call in vetoing the cap provision.
“A cap would have guaranteed more school levies, not fewer, as schools would have been forced to go to voters for smaller amounts of funding more frequently just to stay under the cap," Imhoff said. He noted that in Ohio, seven out of ten new money school levies fail, and said that rate would have worsened under the cap.
DeWine said he is appointing a working group to look at the problem of skyrocketing property taxes in many parts of the state due to rising valuation. He said that group will be charged with coming up with ways to provide meaningful property tax relief to Ohioans while still funding schools and other critical services.
"We must address these legitimate concerns that Ohio voters are talking to us about quarterly," DeWine said.
Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state's largest union representing teachers, was also pleased education groups' lobbying on this provision paid off.
“He made a budget that could have been absolutely terrible, just a little bit better," DiMauro said.
But DiMauro added: “It is still a budget that fundamentally underfunds the nearly 1.6 million students who attend our public schools across the state."
DiMauro said the budget includes what he called "a cheap knockoff of the Fair School Funding Plan," a bipartisan proposal passed in 2021 that sought to bring household income as well as property tax revenue into the formula to calculate state support. This budget was set to be final two years of a six-year phase in.
Melissa Cropper with the Ohio Federation of Teachers said she doesn't believe Republican lawmakers who tout the budget as funding public education adequately.
“It’s really hard for us to accept that when we have money that went to a sports stadium and money that’s going back in the form of tax reform," Cropper said.
Cropper said this budget is disrespectful to public school teachers in ways other than school funding.
“We are taking away their voice in the classroom. We are taking away their voice on policy on the state board of education. And now we are taking away their voice in their own public pension system," Cropper said.
That provision lowered the number of elected teachers on the State Teachers Retirement System Board and added appointees.
In the last budget, DeWine and lawmakers took most of the important duties from the State Board of Education and assigned them to the renamed Department of Education and Workforce, under the oversight of the governor. This budget eliminates the 11 elected seats on the State Board of Education and remakes it into a five-member panel of gubernatorial appointees.
Some Republican lawmakers are talking about the possibility of overriding some of the governor's vetoes. But it is unclear if there's enough support to bring lawmakers back in session right away, since they're not expected to return until this fall.
