Saturday Stats

$1,088,091: Amount by which the state budget — signed last year by Gov. Mike DeWine — will underfund public schools in East Cleveland. The governor singled out East Cleveland City Schools in his State of the State address, rightly celebrating recent improvements in the district. What he failed to mention is that the final state budget of his administration will harm public school kids, their families and communities, by once again falling far short of the state’s constitutional obligation to fairly fund our schools. That is just one of the ways Gov. DeWine’s speech avoided acknowledging — let along reckoning with — the state of the state he’ll leave us with.

$140M: Annual cost in forgone revenue of one (of many) tax incentives for companies building data centers. In last summer’s state budget bill, the legislature included a provision to prevent new agreements from including the incentive, a sales tax exemption on certain data-center-related equipment. Gov. DeWine protected the tax break by vetoing the provision. Ohio’s House of Representatives has been considering a vote to override that veto, which they should do. (They’re having trouble whipping the votes for an override, which makes it a great time to contact your state representative and let them know what you want them to do!)

$2.4B: Amount to which Ohio legislators have increased the state budget for private school tuition vouchers — even as they opted to underfund public schools by $2.75B. At some point (as we said in a recent press statement), “the state must honor its constitutional obligations to public schools and confront the fact that it cannot fund two separate systems of education.” In the meantime, Ohioans deserve an accurate, transparent way to evaluate the performance of voucher-funded private schools and the impact of vouchers on public school enrollment. House Bill 715 would increase accessibility to that data.

$21B: Amount of revenue property taxes bring in annually across the state — more than any other tax in Ohio. A proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate property taxes includes no plan to replace any of it. Ohio already has some of the nation’s most stringent limits on property taxes, but rising property values  — and state legislators’ refusal to adequately fund public education — have made property taxes unaffordable for some Ohioans. Smart, equitable policy solutions could alleviate that issue. Abolishing property taxes will make things worse. As Zach Schiller put it in a recent op-ed for Cleveland.com, it’s “a profoundly bad idea.”

$300M: Amount of American Rescue Plan Act funding Ohio agreed to give Intel to help pay for a water reclamation facility for its Ohio One Campus. The corporation is contractually obligated to “expend the Grant Funds to construct … a portion” of the project by the end of this year. As the most recent issue of CHIPS Ahoy! shows, that vague, low bar could end up costing the state a lot of money that could have been used on projects that serve communities across Ohio.