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Every spring during primary season, most attention goes to recognizable races like Governor, Congress, the Statehouse. Campaign ads fill the airwaves, mailers stack up in the mail and it’s easy to feel these are the only offices up for election. If you’ve ever worked your way to the bottom of a primary ballot, you’ve probably seen something less familiar: candidates for state and county central committees. It’s not surprising many voters skip those races. In most cases the na

Ohio is rapidly becoming one of America’s fastest-growing hubs for massive data centers, the digital warehouses powering artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big tech. State leaders are celebrating the investment. Local governments are chasing development. Utilities are preparing for unprecedented demand. But one question is becoming harder to ignore: who is going to pay for all that electricity? The answer: possibly you. Data centers don’t just use a lot of electrici

Recently, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) dropped a 200-page organizing manual, a detailed roadmap aimed at fixing what went wrong in 2024 and winning in 2026 by building stronger local relationships. Democrats openly admit their strategy failed and are shifting how campaigns operate on the ground. In 2024, Democratic campaigns became obsessed with massive output, such as phone calls, texts, and door knocks that looked impressive on paper but didn’t translate into mea

The city of Beavercreek is doing something many communities have talked about for years but rarely acted upon: rethinking how it taxes its residents. For decades, Beavercreek has been an outlier in the region. The city is one of the few sizable cities in Ohio that never adopted a municipal income tax, relying almost entirely on property taxes to fund services. Note, most townships in Ohio rely solely on property taxes for revenue. However, in Beavercreek it was not by acciden

Nearly every election season in Ohio, voters are asked to decide on another local school levy. If education is already supported through state taxes and if lottery profits were meant to help fund schools, why do districts keep needing additional funding? Public schools in Ohio receive about $18,300 per student annually, according to the Ohio Legislative Service Commission for FY2025. The figure combines funding from local taxes, state aid, federal programs, and smaller revenu

The Ohio property tax debates are red hot now. With the debate raging, homeowners are comparing increases, talking about rising property values for their 2027 tax bills and questioning whether taxes are getting too high. This debate has missed a larger reality: property taxes don’t affect only homeowners. Across Ohio, property taxes greatly impact the cost of running a business, influence rent rates and ripple through the entire local economy. Ohio’s effective property tax ra

On a quiet street in Dayton, a retired couple opens the mail and finds the familiar envelope from the county treasurer. The house is paid off. The mortgage is long gone. They’ve lived there for 30 years, but the tax bill keeps coming. It’s a scene playing out across the Miami Valley from Springfield to Middletown, in neighborhoods where people thought they had financial security. And it helps explain why an idea that once sounded radical is now getting nods and applause: get

For far too many Ohio homeowners, property tax season no longer feels like a routine civic obligation but rather a financial squeeze tightening year after year. This frustration is grounded in real numbers that should be concerning. According to the Tax Foundation, Ohio’s effective property tax rate, the amount paid annually as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value, stands at 1.31%, placing the Buckeye state among the highest property tax rates in the country. Ohio ran

On a routine stop at a neighborhood convenience store, you might hear: “Can I get a couple of lottery tickets?” It’s a small purchase for the hope of instant wealth while being beneficial to the Ohio education system. Anyone concerned about school funding in Ohio, the bigger question isn’t who wins the jackpot, but wasn’t the lottery supposed to fund education? Since Ohio voters approved the state lottery in the 1970s, Ohio’s constitution requires all net profits from the Ohi

School funding in Ohio is a hot topic, and continues to get hotter as several school districts in the region have placed property tax levies on the ballot this coming May election. However, in Ohio, there is an alternative means than districts just relying on traditional property tax levies. These levies aren’t abstract ideas. According to the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission (LSC), one-third of Ohio’s 611 school districts have adopted a school income tax. Many

Small businesses play a vital role in economic life throughout the Miami Valley. From Dayton’s urban neighborhoods to Springfield’s service sector employers and Hamilton’s Main Street storefronts, locally owned businesses help define and in many ways fund the character of each community. These businesses create jobs, circulate money locally, and give downtowns a reason to exist and sponsor local little league teams. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), s

The American Dream and homeownership have been linked for generations. From Eaton to Xenia, Springboro to Troy, each surrounding community and county, families are laying down roots, raising children and investing in places they have known for generations. Recent years have seen homeowners and commercial property owners facing a new, growing reality: growing property taxes that are uncoupled from their ability to pay. All someone has to do is go online to your Auditor’s Websi

Many have heard stories and even seen chemically modified THC “legal hemp” products being sold in gas stations, smoke shops and CBD stores in Ohio that resemble marijuana. Unfortunately, some of the consumers of the intoxicating products were underage. The main reason this occurred was due to lack of oversight and loopholes being exploited from some bad actors and creative marketing. There were examples of hemp gummies with intoxicating effects packaged marketing being identi

Every election season, the same scenario plays out across Ohio: school districts put levies on the ballot, and taxpayers are told to vote yes or risk “losing our schools.” For residents across the Miami Valley, I have to ask: are repeated levies really the solution, or just a band-aid for a broken system? As someone who has watched local politics and public policy closely for decades, I promise you: relying on levies to fund schools has become the default, not the exception.

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