It was the only property tax reform measure in the biennium budget DeWine didn’t veto. The commissioners here only deployed the “piggyback” Homestead exemption portion of the new law, which will reduce revenues for all taxing bodies by about $7.6 million.
When Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix and her team — the first in the state — combed through the budget bill, they discovered a glitch that would have disqualified roughly 11,000 of the 18,000 Homestead recipients due to income verification requirements. They sent letters to all those people asking for income information.
The governor has now signed a budget clean-up bill that erases the income provision. Nix said they have already received thousands of responses from the letters they mailed and said until she alerted everyone there was a problem, “there was no thought of fixing it.
“I told them this is a nightmare, you’re talking about thousands and thousands just in Butler County with a small staff trying to verify all these incomes,” she said.
“We took it on the chin for the rest of the state just because we were proactive about trying to get this tax relief for our constituents, and now they have fixed it for us,” she said “Good on them for fixing it, I wish that they would have been more mindful when they put it into law.”
The reason some Homestead recipients could have been excluded? From 2007 to 2013, all seniors were eligible for the exemption regardless of income. The law changed, grandfathering current recipients in, but setting a $30,000 income limit going forward. Today, the income threshold is $40,000.
The way the new law was written, the grandfathered recipients had to prove they make less than $40,000 annually.
Generally the Homestead exemption shields the first $28,000 of a property’s value from taxation, and the homeowner must be at least 65 years old or permanently and totally disabled. There are special provisions for veterans and their families.
Former Ashtabula County auditor Rep. David Thomas, the property tax reform guru for House Republican leadership, introduced the idea in House Bill 335 prior to budget negotiations. He told this media outlet the income verification provision could be “justified,” but they didn’t realize the impact on county auditors when drafting the bill.
“I thought it would be a much easier process to essentially vet and verify, but when actual push came to shove, what counties would have to go through to verify that income side, it would have prevented other counties from signing onto it, which is what we didn’t want,” he said adding they’ve changed the bill language so “whoever’s currently getting it, will get it.”
Nix said they paused the verification process after they were assured the legislature would fix the problem.
Property tax reform efforts
The Butler County commissioners were the first to implement the local property tax reform effort in early September. If the commissioners had also doubled the 2.5% rollback it would have cost taxing bodies a total of $16 million combined. As it stands the schools will lose an estimated $5.1 million and the governmental entities, libraries and parks $2.5 million.
At the time, Commissioner Don Dixon said, “It’s obvious the state’s not going to do anything,” and later added. “We’ve been doing kind of a balancing act trying to wait to see what the state would do, they promised and promised and promised, now they set up this new committee and they have done nothing, so we have to do it ourselves.”
The commissioners are also rolling back about half their inside millage — roughly $12.5 million — saving all taxpayers roughly $100 per $100,000 of home value.
Greene County commissioners also rolled some inside millage back saving taxpayers roughly $3.2 million. Miami County deployed the Homestead piggyback benefit, saving eligible residents $2.9 million and a $2.2 million inside millage rollback.
The County Commissioners Association of Ohio has been keeping an unofficial tally of counties offering their residents tax relief. There are 18 counties that have offered some form of relief, 10 doubled the Homestead, four gave the 2.5% rollback piggyback and 10 have reduced their inside millage.
MORE PROPERTY TAX COVERAGE
Read Denise Callahan’s previous content about property tax issues throughout Butler County and Ohio.
journal-news.com
About the Author