When politicians cost you money

Dayton Public Schools went to court to stop a stupid new state law, pushed by Representatives Phil Plummer and Tom Young, that would have banned DPS high school students from using the downtown RTA hub to transfer buses. The law was written in such a way that it only applied to one county in the entire state: Montgomery County. In other words, it was aimed squarely at DPS.

The court agreed with DPS. A magistrate ruled that the law is likely unconstitutional and blocked it from going into effect. That means DPS will be able to buy bus passes for students to use the RTA system to get to school. It was such a stupid law that it just stopped DPS from buying passes- not the parents or non-profits. Families don’t have to suddenly come up with hundreds of dollars for transportation, and attendance won’t continue to collapse just because the legislature decided to punish Dayton.

The Question of Legal Fees

Normally in Ohio, each side pays its own lawyers. But because DPS also raised federal constitutional claims; Equal Protection and the right to travel, there’s a chance down the line that the district could go back to court and ask the state to pay its legal bills. That only happens if DPS wins a final judgment on those federal claims. A temporary victory doesn’t qualify. Still, the door is open, and if the state keeps fighting and loses, taxpayers across Ohio could end up footing the bill for the state’s overreach. In the mean time, the districts law firm, Frost Todd Brown got to bill a lot of money to the tax payers to undo Plummers stupidity, Note, Dayton Mayor Jeff Mims doesn’t get off the hook either, he stood right next to Plummer announcing that kicking the kids off the buses was a great idea.

How Plummer and Young Screwed Up

Let’s be clear: this mess was manufactured by Rep. Phil Plummer and Rep. Tom Young. They singled out Dayton students and families, wrote a law that was never going to survive constitutional scrutiny, and forced DPS to spend time and money fighting for a basic right, safe, reliable transportation to school, and they used the unfortunate shooting death of a student outside the bus hub to justify it. No mention of the problem of too many guns in this country.

Their stunt backfired. Not only did they lose in court, but they also exposed themselves as politicians more interested in punishing Dayton than in solving real problems. They wasted legislative time, taxpayer money, and put kids’ futures at risk for the sake of pandering.

That’s not leadership, it’s recklessness. And it’s exactly why Phil Plummer and Tom Young should never be re-elected. To ANYTHING.

When politicians could save you money

We have too many jurisdictions, too much duplication of services, too many chiefs, superintendents, mayors, treasurers, courts, school boards, website etc in Montgomery County- Over 30 jurisdictions- or as better described, Banana Republics. This doesn’t bring us better government, we can barely find competent people to run for office anymore. Instead, we have HB 331.

What HB 331 does

Ohio House Bill 331, effective April 2025, gives voters a new way to shut down villages that no longer deliver. Every ten years, after the census, county officials have to ask two simple questions. First, is the village providing at least five core services such as police, fire, water, sewer, garbage collection, or road maintenance. Second, are people actually stepping up to run for every elected office. If the answer is no on either front, the village’s future goes to the ballot. If voters say yes to dissolution, the debts are paid, and the assets and taxes roll into the surrounding township or another local entity. It is a way to trim the fat when a village government is little more than an empty shell.

Why it’s a bad joke

This may sound like reform, but it is really the smallest step politicians can take without offending anyone who matters. It is picking on the tiniest players while leaving the bloated, overlapping layers of local government untouched. Eliminating a deadbeat village saves a few bucks, but it does not address the inefficiency of having dozens of mayors, councils, clerks, and school boards all tripping over each other. It is the legislative version of a schoolyard bully, pushing around the little guy because going after the big guys would actually require courage.

What real reform looks like

Unigov in Indianapolis showed what real reform means. Instead of swatting at mosquito-sized governments, it consolidated the city and county into one structure. That move did not just get rid of redundancies, it created scale, efficiency, and a clearer line of accountability. Where HB 331 tinkers with symptoms, Unigov treats the disease. If Ohio politicians were serious about saving taxpayers real money, they would stop flexing on the weakest jurisdictions and start talking about merging cities, townships, and counties into something that actually works. Until then, the bullies will keep picking on the little guy while the big waste rolls on untouched.

This is why I set up www.reconstructingdayton.org to coordinate and showcase how much all this stupidity costs us. Unfortunately, it’s been on the back burner for a bit.

It’s all a different kind of expensive gerrymandering

Ohio’s original county lines were drawn during the Northwest Territory era in 1788, starting with just Washington County, then Hamilton (1790) and Wayne (1796). At statehood in 1803 there were 9 counties, and by 1851 Ohio reached its permanent total of 88. And since then, no one has considered redrawing them. That’s why parts of Warren and Greene County feel more like they should be part of the urban Montgomery County, and parts of Montgomery County should probably be in a rural county like Preble. But that would make too much sense- and bring real operational efficiency.

And if the county map is frozen in time, the congressional map is its Frankenstein cousin. Districts are twisted and stretched every ten years to give one party or the other an advantage, and the result is communities with little in common being forced into shotgun marriages. Add in school districts, townships, municipalities, judicial districts, and special taxing authorities, and you end up with a patchwork quilt of government that almost no one can keep track of. The average voter has only the vaguest idea who represents them at which level, or which office is responsible when something goes wrong.

This fragmentation makes it almost impossible for the press to keep up. A true fourth estate should watch over power, but with so many layers of government, the watchdog gets spread thin. Every board, council, and commission is its own little fiefdom with its own budget and its own chance for mischief. When no one is watching closely, accountability collapses.

A business consultant would laugh at how we run Ohio. No sane manager would build this many overlapping structures or divide responsibility so haphazardly. They would reorganize for scale, efficiency, and clear lines of authority. They would redraw the lines not to rig elections, but to actually make government work better, cheaper, and faster. The tragedy is that everyone knows the system is broken, but the people who could fix it are the same ones who benefit from keeping it broken.

The ultimate insult to Ohio voters: The Boards of (S)elections

And here is one more criminal mistake Ohio has baked into its system. Out of 8,060,554 registered voters, only 817,063 are Democrats and 1,508,641 are Republicans. That is about 10 percent and 19 percent. The other 5,734,850 voters, more than 71 percent, are unaffiliated. Most of those unaffiliated voters skip the primaries, which means they never get to help choose which names even make it to the general election ballot.

Yet every county Board of Elections is made up of four appointed members, two Republicans and two Democrats, picked by party executive committees that are often half empty and barely functioning. If House Bill 331 applied to political parties instead of villages, most of these committees would already be dissolved for lack of participation. And the majority of Ohio voters, the independents, are left without a single seat at the table.

The real reform would start with allowing independents to elect an independent voice to the Boards of Elections, to act as a voice of reason, to break ties, and to give voters a say, instead of just the parties, in who and what gets on the ballot. Right now, they are dens of political patronage and corruption.

So the people who have the least power to shape the ballot end up being the ones who decide whether a candidate’s handwriting is neat enough to qualify for the ballot at all. That is not a Board of Elections, it is a Board of (S)elections, and it is long past time to stop pretending otherwise.

Song: The 71% Shutout Blues by David Esrati