prop up failing Democratic cities
Suburbanites of Ohio,
listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an
outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the
interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your
shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are
Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you.
President Obama aims to
help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring
suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the
wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It also calls for halting the sort of highway and
commercial development that brings jobs and taxes to the suburbs. The shorthand
for this is “regionalism.” Should Obama be reelected, a redistributive city based
regionalist agenda will likely be imposed on Ohio’s suburbs. The best way to
envision the future of suburban Ohio in a second Obama term is to see how close
this regionalist agenda came to enactment in
Obama’s first four
years.
Around 2006,
Cleveland-area planners began floating proposals to grant the city access to
taxes collected by surrounding suburbs. Their model was the Minneapolis–St.
Paul region, where the Minnesota state legislature forces reluctant
suburbanites to “share” their tax revenue with the cities. Cleveland’s
regionalists also touted Portland, Ore., for its metropolitan planning agency.
Portland’s planning commission has laid down an “urban growth boundary” that
forbids highway or commercial development around the edges of the metropolitan
area. Regionalists blame the plight of the cities on the loss of tax base to
the suburbs.
Blocking new highways
that could ease commutes or serve as gateways to newly constructed suburbs is designed
both to prevent further exodus and to press current suburbanites back toward
the cities. This is what Obama was getting at in that recently released 2007
video where he said, “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs.”
Redistributive tax
sharing and urban-growth boundaries are rare and deeply controversial, in part
because they are by design anti-suburban policies. They effectively permit big
cities to gut the political and economic independence of their surrounding municipalities.
The regionalist Left, President Obama included, wants to see these policies
exported to every metropolitan area in America. And Cleveland was on board with
the plan.
By 2007, the Cleveland
Plain Dealer was touting Minnesota-style tax sharing, while suggesting that the
humble “metropolitan planning organizations” (MPOs) that have long divvied out
federal transportation funding might be converted into Portland-style regional
planning commissions with the power to block suburban development. With these
changes, Cleveland’s regionalists aimed either to prevent would-be suburbanites
from moving out of the city or to capture a chunk of tax money from
suburbanites who had already left.
In October 2007,
Cleveland’s new regionalists sprang into action. The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating
Agency (NOACA), the five-county MPO that channels federal transportation
funding to the region, took an unprecedented step. Using powers conferred by
NOACA’s weighted voting system, members from Cleveland and its poorer,
inner-ring suburbs threatened to veto the construction of a highway interchange
in Avon, a fast-growing, affluent suburb in neighboring Lorain County, unless
Avon agreed to “share” taxes from businesses that moved near the new road.
Outraged board members
from outlying counties felt strong-armed by Cleveland and the inner-ring
suburbs of Cuyahoga County. Avon mayor Jim Smith said his supposedly voluntary
agreement to “share” the town’s taxes with Cleveland felt more like the action
of a hostage with a gun at his head. Cleveland’s regionalists, on the other
hand, were delighted. They saw the Avon deal as a first big step for their
ambitious new agenda to seize effective political and economic control of area
suburbs.
The Democratic electoral
sweep of 2008 quickly gave Cleveland’s regionalists the opening they were looking
for. As Obama and the national Democrats embarked on their own transformative agenda,
Democrats captured the Ohio House of Representatives for the first time in 14
years. The new House speaker, Armond Budish, a Democrat — the first speaker
from Northeast Ohio in more than 70 years — pledged to enact a bold regionalist
agenda across the state. With Democrat Ted Strickland in the governor’s mansion,
prospects looked good for Portland-style planning agencies and a state-imposed
tax-sharing program. Echoing Obama’s then–chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel,
Cleveland’s regionalists promised not to “waste” the financial crisis. They
would seize on it instead to grant Cleveland access to the tax base of surrounding
suburbs.
Mid-2009 saw the high
tide of regionalism in Ohio. A group of mayors and city planners had
established the Regional Prosperity Initiative (RPI) for 16 counties in
Northeast Ohio. The RPI was floating proposals for regional tax-base sharing
and consolidation of the four Northeast Ohio MPOs into a single regional planning
agency. Consolidation would grant Cleveland and a few other urban areas the
power to clamp down on development in suburbs across the region.
At this point, the
anti-suburban agenda of Cleveland’s regionalists began to stir opposition. Alex
Kelemen, a businessman and a soon-to-be member of Hudson’s city council, led
the charge, often locked in debate with Hudson’s mayor, William Currin, a
leader of the regionalist forces. Kelemen pointed out that under the RPI’s
tax-sharing plan, a small municipality could be forced to divert local
voter-approved education funding to a large city in a different county. Not
only would that be undemocratic, it would make school levies nearly impossible
to pass. Kelemen decried the RPI’s regionalist plans as the product of “a Cleveland-centered
bureaucracy with contempt for growing suburbs and ignorance of business.”
In Democrat-dominated
Columbus, objections by Kelemen and a growing number of suburban mayors across
Northeast Ohio carried little weight. Yet by late 2010, the tide had turned.
Overreach by Obama and congressional Democrats on health care and the stimulus
package had stirred up the tea-party rebellion.
Although Ohio’s
Democrats held majorities capable of imposing regional tax-base sharing and
urban dominated planning councils, they held back, sensing the conservative
tide in the upcoming midterm election.
A massive corruption
scandal just then breaking in Cleveland-centric Cuyahoga County also stymied
the regionalists’ plans. The idea of forcing suburban taxpayers to bail out a
corrupt and mismanaged Cuyahoga County government in an election year was a
nonstarter.
With President Obama’s
help, however, that was far from the end of the line for Ohio’s regionalist
agenda. Deeply committed to redistributive regionalism, in 2009 the Obama
administration hailed Ohio’s RPI proposals as a national model.
A year later, Northeast
Ohio received a coveted “regional planning grant” under Obama’s little-known
but potentially revolutionary Sustainable Communities Initiative. Despite a Republican
resurgence in Ohio and victory for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, John
Kasich, in 2010, the regionalists in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County would get a
new shot at transforming the state.
The same crowd that ran
NOACA and the RPI now took on leadership roles in the group created by Obama’s
federal grant, the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC).
That gave Cleveland’s regionalists federal recognition, and potentially the
ability to place federal-aid leverage behind their policy preferences.
NEOSCC has seen
factional struggles between its bolder leftists and its more cautious political
hands. The more progressive faction floats proposals like Portland-style
urban-growth boundaries. Savvier regionalists understand that a piecemeal
approach may quietly achieve the same end. If NEOSCC manages to merge the four
metropolitan planning organizations in the 16-county region, it can then create
a de facto growth boundary without formally declaring one. With weighted voting
for cities, the new planning commission could block suburban development
projects on a case-by-case basis.
Either tactic would
deprive Ohio of jobs. For example, the state was thrilled in 2009 when a large
new Barbasol shaving-cream plant located in the Cleveland exurb of Ashland,
Ohio, rather than Syracuse, N.Y. Ashland extended rail, sewer, and road
infrastructure out to semi-rural land to service the plant site.
Urbanbased “smart growth”
planners would have forbidden all that as “sprawl,” and Barbasol’s new plant
would now be in New York instead of Ohio. NEOSCC is due to issue its final
report in 2013, and that could spell trouble for suburban Ohio. Leaders of NEOSCC,
as well as spokesmen for the RPI (often the same individuals), can be expected
to press their agenda on the Ohio state legislature in 2013, particularly if
Obama and the Democrats do well in 2012. A safely reelected Obama could put
considerable regulatory muscle behind the group’s findings.
Back in 2009, Secretary
of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan floated the idea of doling out
federal aid in such a way as to advance the goals of Northeast Ohio’s
regionalists. All Obama would have to do is condition Ohio’s receipt of various
federal-aid programs on the state’s adherence to NEOSCC’s recommendations. It’s
a tactic he’s used on other issues.
That only begins to
describe Obama’s efforts on behalf of the regionalist agenda in Ohio. A group
called Building One America (BOA) has attempted to draw politicians from
inner-ring suburbs across Ohio into an alliance with city-based legislators on
regionalist issues. BOA’s goal is to create in Columbus a political coalition
capable of forcing tax-base sharing and large-scale regional planning on Ohio’s
suburbs. BOA is run by some of the same community organizers who trained and
worked with Barack Obama in his early Chicago days. Those left-leaning
activists see regional tax-base sharing as the antidote to what they characterize
as the greed of America’s suburbanites.
President Obama has lent
BOA’s anti-suburban efforts the full prestige and resources of his
administration. The White House hosted a BOA-organized conference attended by
numerous Ohio politicians, for example, in July 2011. The assembled Ohio
politicos heard speakers tout the advantages of Portland’s planning system as
well as those of regional tax-base sharing in Minnesota. Obama’s ties to the
regionalist movement run deep (as I show in my book on the topic, Spreading the
Wealth).
Reelect Obama and he’s
sure to push for regionalism in Ohio and beyond. In short, if President Obama
is still around to help them, Ohio’s regionalists will get another bite at the
apple in 2013. Tax sharing and large-scale regional planning were close to
passage in 2009. With Obama backing up NEOSCC by putting strings on federal
aid, and the White House supporting BOA’s coalition-building efforts in
Columbus, prospects for a regionalist triumph in Ohio would be good. If Obama
was in the White House and a Democrat took Ohio’s governorship in 2014, a
regionalist revolution in the state would have to be reckoned more likely than
not.
Be assured that if Ohio’s
legislature sets up a regional tax-base-sharing scheme, it would transform the
state. Legislation enabling and incentivizing the practice would surely be
seized on by interests well beyond Northeast Ohio. The regionalist agenda may
have come out of Cleveland, but every suburbanite in Ohio would feel the effects
of its ratification by the state government.
Ohio’s regionalists will
tell you that their tax-base-sharing plan is strictly voluntary. Don’t believe
it. Their goal is to have Washington and Columbus create incentives and
disincentives that leave suburbanites little choice but to sign on. Tax-base
sharing in Ohio would be no more “voluntary” than was the agreement by Avon’s
Mayor Smith to tax sharing in 2009.
So listen up, suburban
Ohioans. When it comes to protecting your middle-class communities, President Obama
talks a good game. Unfortunately, his well-laid anti-suburban plans tell a
different story. The president and his fellow Democrats are coming for your tax
money. Redistribution is the goal, and suburban Ohio is target No. 1. More
broadly, Obama’s regionalist agenda is an attack on the values and way of life
of suburban America. How odd it would be were Ohio’s suburban taxpayers to hand
Obama the key to their own undoing. Forewarned is forearmed. Suburban Ohioans,
it’s up to you.
— Stanley Kurtz is a
senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This piece is adapted
from his new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to
Pay for the Cities.
Source: Free Republic; National Review ^ | 10/08/2012 | Stanley Kurtz
Posted
on October 8, 2012 9:54:05 AM EDT by
SeekAndFind
Where I live, the city
has been charging an occupation tax to people who live in the suburbs, but work
in the city. There have been efforts to permit the city schools to absorb some
suburban school districts, but so far, that hasn’t gone over well. None of this
is new, and yes, it’s a scam for the suburbanites.
Comments:
We dodged the bullet
when we voted down the T-SPLOST, but now we see the same useless T-SPLOST projects
being funded with Obama’s extra Trillion a year. He will bribe our elected officials at all
levels with squander-grants from his perpetual QE3 printing press. Common sense resistance caused Alabama and
other states to ban Agenda 21 implementation to escape the dissolution of
elected government and home rule through regionalism. We won’t be safe from this tyranny until we
ban Agenda 21 in Georgia and repeal all 14 laws that put regionalism in place
in Georgia. Notice, all the grants that come
from regional entities.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA
Tea Party Leader
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