By Brian Massie, A Watchman on the Wall
Thanks to Mahoning County patriot Mark Brandenstein for send this article to me.
https://www.wkbn.com/news/ohio/senator-anti-tax-attitudes-making-things-more-expensive
Senator: ‘Anti-tax attitudes making things more expensive’
by: Laurel Stone
Posted: Mar 2, 2026 / 11:18 AM EST
Updated: Mar 2, 2026 / 12:36 PM EST
WKBN) — There’s a growing movement in Ohio to eliminate property taxes, with opposite sides of the issue maintaining strong opinions in either direction. Senator Louis W. Blessing III says he is “deeply opposed” to the movement, stating that ultimately, it would cost Ohioans more in the long run.
The idea of property tax abolishment has garnered support groups, forming an ‘AxOHTax’ movement with petition signings across the state, including Columbiana, Mahoning and Trumbull counties. The Valley has also seen its own group advocacy for property tax abolition, which held petition drives over the summer. In previous talks, the tax relief group said the funding for services that come from property taxes will have to come from elsewhere.
Mark Brandenstein with Mahoning County Tax Relief calls the process of property tax collection “immoral and criminal,” stating no one should be at risk of losing homes they own due to taxes. He maintains property taxes should be completely eliminated, suggesting lawmakers “blow up the whole system and start over.”
“The government will find a way [to recoup the money] — these people can’t,” Brandenstein said.
Property taxes in Ohio generate around $24 billion each year. Senator Blessing said even if income and sales tax were adjusted to make up for the deficit that eliminating property taxes would cause, it would have a major impact on real estate, ultimately costing Ohioans more.
“Even if we were able to make it up with sales and income tax — which by the way, you’d have to more than double both of them to do it — there’s no talk about the real estate side of this, which I, I have complained about bitterly in the sense that property taxes operate like interest rates,” Blessing said. “So if interest rates are near zero, that’s going to be very bullish for housing, and it’s going to push up housing prices.”
Brandenstein believes that the state would never OK the steep increase in sales tax, stating it would crash Ohio’s economy, sending businesses and shoppers over the border into Pennsylvania.
Brandenstein’s suggestion is that the money generated from property tax gets pulled from another source, offering examples like redistributing the taxes from natural gas or kilowatt-hour tax. Another option he suggested is that necessary services — like police and fire — send residents a yearly bill.
Blessing said the elimination of property taxes in the state would trigger a mad dash of investors looking to scoop up property, sitting on the tax-free land indefinitely.
“What that would lead to is, OK for a young family, and you’re looking for a home in Ohio or even an apartment. Now, either your rent or your mortgage — your mortgage in particular is going to be going through the roof. Instead of getting a property tax break, now, instead of paying local government, county, city, township, school districts, you’re going to be paying the bank,” Blessing said. “Oh, and by the way, you’re also going to have higher income and sales taxes. So for the vast majority — if not all Ohioans — they are going to see a tax hike from this, as counterintuitive as that sounds, that would be the net effect of it.”
Blessing said he understands where those in support of the movement are coming from, particularly seniors on fixed incomes, but complete abolishment is not the solution. Instead, he suggested other forms of less drastic relief, like homestead exemptions.
“The real key here is property taxes are high — obviously, we’ve had, you know, significant real estate inflation. That’s not unique to Ohio, but that’s part of what’s driving the valuation increases, which is also driving then the increases in tax revenue, not entirely because we have tax reduction factors in this state, but beyond that, we have had a significant shift in the burden and property taxation.”
Blessing cited economist Howard Fleeter, stating tax burdens used to fall significantly more on businesses but have shifted to residential and agricultural outlets.
Brandenstein said lawmakers and local officials are doing too little too late.
“Now all of a sudden, we’re right at the doorstep of abolishing taxes, and they’re saying ‘We can’t do that,’”Brandenstein said. “They should’ve done something decades ago.”
“There are a lot of property tax exemptions that have basically shrunk the pie at the same time demand on the pie is growing,” Blessing said. “That means, you know, regular Ohio citizens have been squeezed.”
While schools get the majority of the revenue, Blessing said Ohio is 37th in the country for state-level per-pupil public education funding. He proposed a two-fold solution:
- Taking part in the fair school funding formula — or some similar plan that significantly boosts state-level public education funding.
- Enabling land value taxes.
For the first step of his solution, Blessing said if schools could rely on state-level funding, they’d no longer need to go to the ballot and likely allow previous levies to fall off, removing some of that financial burden from local taxpayers.
The second part of his plan is a little more nuanced.
“The reason being is that property taxes tax the land and improvements. As you know, when you tax improvements, you get less of them,” Blessing said. “Land value taxes have no such hang-up. Economists broadly support them. But the key is they’re also very pro-housing development in density. So what will happen is when you build a lot more housing under a tax regime like that, and admittedly none of this would affect property taxation in Ohio, what I think will happen is the pie will start to grow, and the tax burden will be spread across more people.”
Blessing said he believes that between more state-level school funding and a regime where land value taxes are possible would serve the problems long-term. In the short term, Blessing pointed to his Senate Bill 215, which he described as a “significantly beefed-up” homestead exemption that looks at income and benefit drops on a sliding scale.
Brandenstein said schools need to be removed from property tax and funded by the state.
“We can’t snap our fingers and fix all of this, you know, the long-term part of it overnight,” Blessing said. “But we can put the sort of pieces in place to get this where five, 10 years down the road, we’re in much better shape now.”
“We’re not giving up, we’re going to fight this all the way through,” Brandenstein said. “We’re going to keep going until the deadline, which is June 1, and we’ll go from there. They just have to leave our homes alone.”
Editorial comments by Brian Massie:
Senator Blessing mentioned something about a land value tax (LVT). We will do some research on this new boondoggle and publish our thoughts on it.
Categories: Real Estate Taxes, Uncategorized