Is it time for a unified areawide income tax?
OIA moving to Beavercreek isn’t news- but, could one reason they are moving is to give their employees an instant 2.25% pay raise?
Compare Beavercreek and Washington Township- both income tax free, to Dayton and you start to see an uneven playing field.
Maybe, it’s time to look at a regional income tax, administered by a regional organization (like MVRPC only better)- that can distribute a portion of the income taxes based on what works best of the region and the rest distributed by head count.
The costs of administering so many different jurisdictions income tax to business is a counterproductive one as well. Who is going to lead this idea?
Here is the article from Dayton Politics -from the Dayton Business Journal- that got this post started:
daytonpolitics.com » Blog Archive » Dayton marketing firm headed for Beavercreek
An Oregon District marketing company is moving to Beavercreek. OIA Marketing Communications will move from its Brown Street location to Signal Hill TechneCenter in Beavercreek by the end of the month, the company announced Monday.
Didnt Paul Leonard have a similiar plan and people threw a fit? I think it might have been a lot of Oakwood residents. Sounds good to me though!
Communities like Trotwood have an income tax and rely heavily on this to support general fund expenditures like police, public works, and adminstration. Those that don’t have higher property tax receipts that support those expenses. (Notice I didn’t say higher property tax millage but that is another thread.)
How do you convince Oakwood to implement an income tax that will subsidize Trotwood, Dayton and others and not necessarily themselves. One way might be to go to a county wide income tax that will pay for all roadwork in the county. This would benefit each jurisdiction and allow the county or MVRPC to exercise some control (carefully set up)on road improvement projects that could have an effect on sprawl and other transit issues.
If not for transportation the county income tax could support countywide police services. This is the largest single cost in every jurisdiction’s budget. Centralizing police services could result in many different efficiencies and both cost and responsiveness.
Or how about fire services in the same way.
Aside from the income tax question I remain a lone advocate for creating county wide school districts in Ohio. Any one want to get on board with me?
I’d like to go a bit further. I think it’s time for Dayton to start annexing many of the surrounding areas. Look at Columbus. Nearly half of the MSA is within the city limits. There should be one police force, one united set of firefighters and so on. All this replication of services seems to be unhelpful. More importantly, decisions could be made that were good for the entire region and all the competition between different towns in the area would start to ease. I’m not saying I’ve done extensive research on it but from what I have heard (and just common sense) it could be something worth looking at.
Wow Phillip! Have you ever run for political office? I doubt the platform of ‘vote for me so we can merge our city with Dayton’ would get anyone from the burbs elected.
There are considerable benefits to merging services but you want to keep those elected officials that agree with that in office. They will be able to take smaller steps and remain successful, taking too big a step will get them booted and you’re back to square one.
I’m not familiar with the history of Columbus’s consolidation but when Dayton launched extensive land grabs on their western border with Madison Township they didn’t sell it to the community very well which resulted in the merger with Trotwood to stop Dayton’s westward march. (Part of what Dayton did was to annex vacant land and leave pockets of lower priced neighborhoods like Townview and Drexel for the Township to take care of, they almost annexed the Salem Mall but none of the surrounding neighborhoods and it got thrown out on a technicality.)
I still beleive the place to start is with schools and fire services. Schools especially would help address the rich district/poor district unequal funding that the state has had to defend in court and county wide school districts are quite successful in other states.
Dayton can’t annex a lot of surrounding areas because the townships surrounding Dayton have incorporated into un-annexable cities (Huber Heights, Riverside and Trotwood, all within the past 25 years; before that, Kettering). Dayton’s only annexation potential lies with Harrison and Jefferson Townships, and the city has been playing it cool with those two entities for years now, probably fearing they will also become cities, making Dayton completely locked in. Back in the 40s, Dayton leaders made a nearly fatal error — declining the invitation of Van Buren Township citizens to annex the entire township. Unbelievably, Dayton said no thanks. The township became the city of Kettering, to some degree sealing Dayton’s fate.
So, back to original subject, the solution for the future is some kind of county-wide revenue sharing system, if not outright merger.