Vote No on Issue 39

Update – this posting has attracted quite a bit of attention from folks at Sinclair as well as the Southwest Ohio area (perhaps they have Google Alerts for any mention of “Sinclair”).  If you have a disagreement with any of my assertions below, I encourage you to leave a comment.  I don’t claim to have “a lock on brains” on the subject.  Perhaps there are arguments in favor of Issue 39 of which I am not aware.

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As you may have seen from my earlier posting, I am a strong supporter of Sinclair Community College.  However, I am adamantly against Issue 39 (increasing the tax assessment for Montgomery county citizens to help fund Sinclair) for the following reasons:

1) Sinclair has expanded into communities outside of Montgomery county.  For example, Sinclair has built a large facility in Mason, Ohio near Kings Island.  The last thing that citizens of Montgomery county need is to subsidize the college education for citizens in prosperous Warren county.

2) Rather than renewing the taxes, Sinclair Community College elected to increase the tax rate from 2.5 to 3.2 mills.  There is no justification for this increase in funding other than to support the growth plans to other areas outside of the Dayton area.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of having the Dayton Daily News trying to convince me that every new tax is a great bargain, and the new tax will only add $XX per $100,000 of house value.  I see this every election cycle.   I live in Northwest Dayton area and I’ve watched real estate values in this area decline for years before the housing bubble hit the rest of the country.  I am paying over $8,000 per year in real estate taxes (in Dayton, Ohio, housing values are less than half compared to other areas of the country), and these tax increases don’t help the real estate commerce in my area.