Carl Hollon, who was a Lemon Twp. trustee for 20 years, said he remembers when it had its own police force, two volunteer fire companies, a road department, a township hall and other things many townships have to serve their residents. That was before Middletown and Monroe began aggressively annexing the township. He said he stopped running for office about 15 years ago because he didn’t think there was anything left for him to do.
“They have nothing as far as government is concerned,” he said of the township. “Because they don’t have a fire department, they don’t have a police department, they don’t have a road department. So for everything, you rely on the city of Monroe.”
Township trustees used to send almost half of their $1 million annual budget to Monroe to pay for police, fire, medic and road services. They renegotiated the $450,689 contract down to $391,606 last year. Fiscal Officer Rita Tannreuther said the township was only pulling in about $160,000 in property taxes so they needed to renegotiate the contracts with the city.
“We finally had to try and negotiate to try and get them to come down,” she said. “What we bring in in property taxes, we pay Monroe a lot more.”
Current trustee Kevin Majors said no resident has ever suggested the township dissolve or merge and they are very happy with the service Monroe provides.
“Every service that Monroe provides for us is an important piece of the pie for our citizens,” he said. “And there’s pieces of that service we would not, being a township have to provide to our citizens but we do. The Monroe police service could really be run through the county.”
Tannreuther said the township has responsibility for paving and striping roads — Monroe maintains the roads — and maintaining its one cemetery. The township cleans up nuisance properties but they rely on the county for zoning.
Townships are required to maintain roads, cemeteries, drainage ditches and provide safety services. Many of the townships in Butler County rely on the sheriff’s office for police protection, the county for planning and zoning, and several share fire services with other jurisdictions. Townships are permitted to provide parks.
None of the county’s other 12 townships have had such a huge shift in both land mass and population in the past 25 years as Lemon Twp., but all have experienced slashed state funding, which came right on the heels of the Great Recession.
‘A quadruple whammy’
Matt DeTemple, executive director of the Ohio Township Association, said townships all over the state are hurting after changes in the state budget.
“We kind of got hit with a triple whammy a couple of budgets ago. They basically cut the local government fund in half and then they largely did away with the tangible personal property tax reimbursement and electric dereg(ulation) payments,” he said. “Maybe it was a quadruple whammy.”
DeTemple said all governmental entities and schools were hit by the cuts, but counties have sales tax and municipalities have income tax to fall back on. Townships only have property tax revenues and state funding. Townships cannot collect income tax unless they have a Joint Economic Development District.
Randy Cole, controlling board president and policy advisor for the state’s office of budget and management, said everyone needed to make cuts during the Great Recession. However, he said the state turns back about 85 percent of its budget to local entities every year and Butler County entities — the county, cities and villages, townships, schools and libraries — received almost $362 million in 2013.
“The state and local governments had to make tough choices to make it through the recession,” he said. “Now that the economy is growing our revenues are up but their revenues are also up. We collect the sales tax the way they collect the sales tax, so our growing revenue, counties are also seeing in their collections, same thing with the income tax.”
Bob Bass, administrator for Ross Twp., said if the voters hadn’t passed a police levy in November and don’t pass an anticipated fire levy in November, cuts would likely ensue and he correlated that back directly to cuts in state funding.
“I don’t know if you could call them unintended consequences or whether they knew it and just didn’t care, or thought it was somebody else’s problem,” he said. “But essentially what I’m hearing across the county and basically in Southwest Ohio, most townships are in a similar position, that the money the state took from the townships … is essentially causing the locals to go out for additional taxes or reduce services.”
Townships, cities and villages culled $10.7 million in estate taxes in 2011 and $4.4 million in 2012 before the tax was repealed on Jan. 1, 2013. There was much debate over the repeal with some local officials applauding the move because they said it was a double tax. Many said they didn’t bank on the death tax because you cannot predict what it will be year-to-year, but it still was a help.
Milford Twp. with a budget of $771,991 for this year received $262,668 from the estate tax in the last two years of its existence. Trustee Brad Mills said their budget took a big hit when that money went away.
“The loss of the estate tax was big,” he said. “Because that’s how we do most capital improvements. If the community center needs a new roof, that’s how we would pay for it in the past … I guess this is the new normal maybe. You might see some deterioration of like your parks or community center or things that are not required services.”
Reduced personal property taxes
The tangible personal property taxes (TPP) have also been reduced, which will affect St. Clair Twp., the home of MillerCoors. The TPP is a commercial tax on things like furniture and equipment. St. Clair Twp. and the villages of New Miami and Seven Mile pulled in $221,285 in 2009 in TPP taxes mainly for safety and road services but that amount dropped to $175,384 last year.
St. Clair Twp. is currently under a fiscal emergency after the trustees and Fiscal Officer Doug Wheelright asked the state to look over their finances when they found out the former fiscal officer allegedly left bills and taxes unpaid. Wheelright said because of the state of the fiscal office he could not recreate budgets from 2010 or 2011. The $2.4 million 2014 budget started with a negative $10,823 balance in the general fund.
Wheelright said the state created a special funding formula for communities who relied heavily on the TPP income, but he was told that extra income is coming to a halt.
“Miller Brewery is in our township and we used to collect a huge amount of personal property tax. They had a phase out for people like us that had a giant within their area that was paying a huge amount of personal property tax,” Wheelright said. “But each year that’s reduced and I think we are three years from running out totally. That’s another thing that just killed our general fund.”
However, Cole said many people are misinformed about the TPP. It was cut and some jurisdictions that did not rely heavily on those funds did lose it, however, he said St. Clair Twp. will continue to receive the same amount of money it will get this year, forever, unless the legislature chooses to make a change.
Becoming a city?
The county’s two largest townships, Liberty and West Chester, are populated enough to become cities and thus would be able to impose income taxes. Officials there, however, said incorporation isn’t the answer.
“People in Liberty Twp., I don’t see their desire there,” Liberty Twp. trustee Christine Matacic said. “Because for a community to become a city you have to have the vote of the people. The way taxes are going you can sit there and say people are not going to vote to become a city because they don’t want to pay the income tax.”
Liberty Twp. has a JEDD and thus can cull income taxes in the specified area surrounding the Liberty Way exchange. The JEDD helped during the recession and with the state’s cuts, but officials are still hard pressed to keep up with road maintenance, even with a $21.3 million budget, according to Matacic.
Thee state’s largest township, West Chester, with a population nearing 60,000 and a $42 million budget, Trustee George Lang said he doesn’t disagree with the state’s cuts to the local governments.
“I’m the only one that says, ‘cut the money. Take it. Make us get by with less. Make us sharpen our pencils,’ ” he said. “Make us drop services or programs that aren’t core competencies. Force us to do that. Just do it yourself as well.”
County Administrator Charlie Young said he doesn’t believe the county has had to step up any services to help struggling townships. The county coffers were also hard hit by state cuts, but he said everyone has done what Lang said should be done.
“If there is a positive spin out of it, governments have probably collaborated more than was apparent for many years,” he said. “There is certainly more and more discussion and willingness for local governments to collaborate and share services, in an effort to reduce the cost of delivery of services.”
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