Session: The Budget: Challenge, Opportunity and Ohio's Future

Moderator John Begala, Executive Director, The Center for Community Solutions
Panel:
Gene Krebs, Senior Director of Government Affairs, Greater Ohio Policy Center (non-partisan non-profit)
Mary McCleary, Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions
Zach Schiller, Research Director, Policy Matters Ohio
J. Matthew Yuskewich, CPA, PFS, Partner, Winterset CPA Group

Krebs: Spending at the local government levels is one of the problems... every ten years we face a budget crisis, usually ending in the years ending in the number "1"
We need to re-structure the fragmented government structure... 3800 local taxing jurisdictions..."No one can answer the cost of local government because there is no central report" Ohio ranks 34th in STATE taxes...ranked 9th in LOCAL taxes. For example, what is a township, but a surveyor's construct on which we have imposed a level of government? Does Ohio need 1300 townships? 33 of our 88 counties are losing sales tax revenues... bleeding across borders... counties are based on a model from the 1800s... how long it took to ride a horse to the courthouse. Does Ohio need 88 counties? How do we do revenue sharing across the boundaries? Economics need to be done on a regional basis... we need a regional approach. Collaborate and consolidate. State needs to incentivize and mandate sharing, regional business plans, 8.65 billion dollars on schools - 614 SCHOOL DISTRICTS! SHARED SERVICE AGREEMENTS AND REDUCED ADMINISTRATION NEEDED. Getting rid of bureaucracy...doing more with less. He tells us "we are employed by the status quo to be sure that the status quo continues - sorry, it is not going to continue" Are we going to manage the change or will the change manage you? If Ohio were a house, we would have built the house so that every bedroom has their own stocked kitchen and we don't even buy our milk at CostCo or Sam's... we go to the corner convenience story and buy half a pint at a time...