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Ohio's governor, lawmakers, and grassroots organizers are all wrestling over property tax reform • Ohio Capital Journal [1]
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Date: 2025-07-24
Earlier this week, Ohio lawmakers scrapped summer plans to take action on property taxes.
“We really need to do something,” State Rep. Bill Roemer, R-Richfield insisted. “We need to fix property taxes in Ohio.”
The state’s tax rates rank 8th in the country, he argued, ahead of New York, California and Florida, not to mention every one of Ohio’s neighboring states.
So why did lawmakers flinch?
Instead of overriding three property tax measures vetoed by the governor, they took up just one. It’s a provision limiting the sort of local levies that can put before voters in the future, but it makes no changes to homeowners’ current bills. The problem — and lawmakers from both parties acknowledge it — is homeowners are very much concerned about their taxes in the here and now.
Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman chalked it up to bad luck. Some lawmakers are out of town. Others got what he claimed was “bad information” from local officials.
“And so, you know, we should have done these two (other) things,” he explained. “But some of our folks needed more time to figure out what exactly it was that the locals were saying.”
The two remaining provisions, one granting county budget commissions more power and the other rejiggering a formula to lower taxes at the expense of school districts, could still come up for a vote when lawmakers return to work in October.
But a lot can happen between now and then.
Later today (Thursday), a task force organized by Gov. Mike DeWine holds its first meeting. He’s giving them until the end of September to produce concrete recommendations that will make a “meaningful” difference for homeowners.
In the meantime, ordinary Ohioans and even some lawmakers are looking to the ballot box, arguing the current system is irretrievably broken.
“For my money,” grassroots organizer Beth Blackmarr said, “the way to do this is a complete do-over.”
“At a boil”
At the Warren County Fair last week, Joy Broedling was working the room — chatting up families retreating indoors to cool off between rides. She had a clipboard collecting signatures for a constitutional amendment outright abolishing property taxes. In Broedling’s telling, plenty of people were ready to sign.
“They can’t afford it anymore, and it’s never ending,” she said. “Warren County, where you are right now, they’re going to have another 25% increase in January. What can we do? The officials are not representing us, so the grassroots is the only way.”
One of her takers was Steven Suever, who came down to the fair from Kettering.
“Personally, I think that a lot of our municipalities go way overboard,” he said. “They build a fire station; it’s a Taj Mahal.”
“I want good services,” he added, but argued agencies need to live within their means just like he does.
Carol McIntosh from Morrow, said her property taxes have doubled in seven years. After signing, she explained her family is restoring an abandoned 220-year-old home. Property taxes typically rise to reflect improvements like renovations, but McIntosh questions that arrangement.
“It was a decrepit old house, it was an eyesore for the county, for the city,” she explained. “So, we buy it, and we’re fixing it. We’re bringing it back to glory, and we’re being punished by our property taxes going through the ceiling as we make improvements.”
McIntosh complained an old outhouse is getting treated as an additional structure. “It’s just there because it’s nostalgic,” she said.
Citizens for Property Tax Reform spokeswoman Beth Blackmarr argued repeatedly that people are “at a boil.” She highlighted counties like Mahoning that are seeing double-digit delinquency rates and scoffed at lawmakers’ recent efforts.
“Some of the moves that they’re making are a day late (and) a dollar short, really,” she said. “I mean, this should have been done 20 years ago in order to make a difference for the people who are being pushed out of their homes now.”
She said the campaign is “going gangbusters” but declined to share information about how many signatures they’ve collected.
Citizens for Property Tax Reform missed the deadline to make this year’s ballot, but Blackmarr said that was always a bit of a Hail Mary anyway.
“We’re not doing enough”
Abolishing property taxes in the state constitution carries enormous consequences. Even if you believe Ohio’s rates are too high, no state in the country has abandoned property taxes.
According to the Department of Taxation, Ohio counties collected $18.5 billion in property taxes in 2023. For context, that’s about double what Ohioans paid in income taxes that year and a billion more than they paid in sales taxes.
No problem, Blackmarr and some of the amendment’s supporters argue: Back lawmakers into a corner, and they’ll figure out how to bridge that gap. But would supermajority Republican lawmakers in Ohio back a tax increase to make up the difference?
State Reps. Tex Fischer, R-Boardman and Beth Lear, R-Delaware, are hoping it doesn’t come to that. They’re working on an amendment that would cap property taxes at 1.25% of a home’s total value for ordinary Ohioans and 1% for seniors who have been in their home at least five years.
“The people of Ohio are demanding action,” Fischer said, “and we’re not doing enough at the state level.”
Fischer sees the citizen-led initiative gathering steam, and he believes they’ll get the signatures they need to make the ballot. He thinks it will pass if lawmakers don’t do “something drastic” in the meantime.
Fischer’s current tax rate comes out to about 1.8%, but in faster growing areas of the state, he said, taxes can creep up to 3%. The state caps other taxes levied at the local level, Fischer argued, and doing the same for property taxes is “one option” voters could consider.
One person who might bite? House Speaker Matt Huffman. Following the override vote, the speaker repeatedly referenced California, which limits annual property tax increases to 2%.
“We should have an absolute limit inflation-wise, much like California does,” Huffman said. “California is the state to look to when it comes to real estate tax.”
Even if Fischer and Lear can get their proposal on the ballot — they’ll need support from three-fifths of members in both chambers of the General Assembly to do so — Fischer acknowledged voters might do away with property taxes anyway.
“And I certainly understand where they’re coming from,” he said. “I think the longer we continue to not act, the more likely that that outcome is.”
A “complimentary” mission
On the other hand, former state lawmaker Bill Seitz is skeptical of the effort to repeal property taxes. DeWine tapped the long-serving Cincinnati Republican to co-chair his property tax reform working group.
“I will not be surprised if they get enough signatures to put it on the ballot,” Seitz said of the repeal effort. “But I would be shocked if it passed.”
Seitz brought up two points of reference.
In the 1970s, “because I’m old enough to remember this,” he said, Democrats held sway in Ohio, and they instituted the state’s first income tax. Conservatives in the state tried to get rid of it — twice — and failed both times.
More recently, Republican lawmakers passed Ohio Senate Bill 5, eliminating collective bargaining for public sector unions, only to see voters repeal the measure easily.
In the voting booth, Seitz argued, Ohioans cast their ballots to protect public services each time.
“Once the people are educated to the fact that an abolition of the property tax in Ohio would create a $23 billion hole in the provision of local services?” he asked. “I think most rational people will get over their anger over current high property tax rates and realize that we can’t just throw the baby out with the bath water here.”
Still, the working group could face an uphill climb convincing lawmakers and citizens to take it seriously.
Huffman complained he hasn’t gotten a straight answer about what happens if they come up with proposals the governor doesn’t like. Many others, inside government and out, have pointed to a joint committee on property tax reform that produced an 800-plus page report just last year.
Seitz said that’s a good start and framed the working group’s mission as “complimentary” to that effort.
“They’re mostly good recommendations, but they weren’t prioritized,” he said. “By their own admission, some of them were contradictory to one another, and none of them were reduced to anything resembling legislative form.”
Seitz added the working group might also work on tweaks to some the provisions DeWine previously vetoed.
One of those measures gives county budget commissions the authority to reduce or eliminate voted levies if they’re “unnecessary, excessive or unneeded.”
Seitz argued none of those terms are defined, and there’s no timeframe which could give local officials an opening to overturn a levy a few months after voters approved it.
“That’s not a huge change,” Seitz said, “it just requires some more work.”
Should Ohioans buck history and vote to repeal property taxes, Seitz doesn’t envy the lawmakers tasked with cleaning up the mess.
At 10%, Louisiana has the highest sales taxes in the country. Seitz has heard Ohio would need a sales tax rate of 15-20% to replace $23 billion in lost revenue.
“And by the way that would be very stupid,” he added, noting residents like him who live near the state border would just take their purchases elsewhere.
And after bragging about cutting state income taxes to a flat 2.75%, Seitz said, Republican lawmakers would be loath to reverse course.
Good tax policy works as a three-legged stool, he said, combining property tax, income tax, and sales tax.
“The three of them tend to counterbalance each other and provide a reliable source of revenue to fund basic state and local services,” he said. “I still believe that. Whether we can convince the public of that, that remains to be seen.”
Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.
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