Roldo: Why Does Cuyahoga County Always Eye Sales Taxes to Fund Projects?

It has become too easy for politicians and the string-pullers who guide public decision making here to add taxes on products everyone buys.

And leave the more wealthy to enjoy the benefits.

The sales tax, paid by anyone buying things, falls on most people. Rich or poor

It is highly unfair for that reason. And more costly as prices rise.

What would be fairer?

An income tax. Highly graduated so those with high incomes would pay the greater share.

Sales taxes are being used to build and upkeep sports facilities, a convention center and the arts.

It is highly unfair.

But our leaders seem to go there first, often and fairly exclusively.

No matter how low your income, you pay the full cost of the sales tax.

It can hurt.

So it’s become very easy to use sales taxes, even when voted upon.

County Executive Chris Roynane and the County Council recently voted to extend a 0.25 percent increase in the general sales tax. It now stands at 8 percent total in the county, highest in Ohio.

The voters had no say. It lasts another 40 years!

This increase extends the tax through 2063. It is said to raise some $3.4 billion.

The tax originally was also passed without a vote.

Remember the hip hip hooray about the Medical Mart, one of its recipients.

That’s when former County Tim Hagan helped bring MMPI of Chicago and its owner, a Boston Kennedy family friend of his, to town for a pie-in-the-sky plan. The Med Mart was supposed to lure big profits from medical-related businesses to Cleveland.

Cuyahoga County ended up paying MMPI $32,854,730. But the County, after building the “Med Mart” for $46 millio,n had to redo it. The refix recently cost the County another $56 million.

Hagan allowed no public vote for the sales tax for the med mart.

This is an incredible filtering of small cashflow that may not hurt those with high paying jobs but becomes an almost daily drain on those with low incomes.

It is easy for the politician. Especially when you have a docile news media. And it’s easy for those who set the pattern of decision-making here. For example, Dave Gilbert, of Destination Cleveland, the convention business mouthpiece, is often quoted by local media on downtown and visitors to the city. No sales taxes bother him. He earned an income of $536,000 in a recent year.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership, which a few years ago combined a number of other corporate mouthpieces – the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, Cleveland Tomorrow, and the Greater Cleveland Roundtable – into a single powerful corporate mouthpiece, helps set Cleveland’s public agenda.

The Partnership doesn’t push taxes that might affect their business leaders wallets. Heavens no.

Baiju Shah, who heads the Partnership, made $198,000 in a recent years. The sales tax has no impact on him.

Former Partnership boss Joe Roman called the sin tax “a small tax.”

He was making $1.5 million in 2021.

And these people are deciding what tax should be levied on Clevelanders.

Destination Cleveland and its ilk have been making these decisions essentially without opposition since 1980.

They were so confident in their power that they boasted about its nature to Fortune Magazine.

The magazine headlined the article: “How Business Bosses Saved a Sick City.” Took over is a better description.

The article was blatant in its description about how the Cleveland business leaders drove a business putsch of city government here, calling it “a benign conspiracy of top executives.”

They have not loosened their grip on the city and county now preparing a new tax thrust for the Browns stadium deal.

The next sales tax measure will be on the November ballot. It will raise the cigarette tax to 70 cents a pack. No little amount.

And it will take out of the pockets of smokers who are generally lower income, as one study shows 18.3 percent low-income are smokeers, 12.3 percent middle-income and 6.2 percent high-income.

The total take expected: an amazing $160-million in its 10-year duration. Again, not pennies.

These are not trifling figures, especially when they land largely on low income families.

And the politicians never offer an alternative method of financing.

The big one, possibly likely to get larger with the pressure for a new football stadium and constant request from Gateway’s baseball stadium and basketball arena, will be the so-called “sin” tax.

First passed in 1990 for 15 years, it was extended twice.

The sales tax on beer, cigarettes, wine, cider and liquor raises about $13.6 million each year. That should produce another $272 million in new sin taxes in its latest iteration.

Of course, those subsidies only trigger many more subsidies from city, county and state.

I remember the first sin tax vote in May 1990.

Unlike today, there was organized opposition. Presently, the city has no real organization that speaks for those without power. It shows why so few people even vote anymore in the city. They see no reason for hope.

Many likely don’t remember but that first sin tax for Gateway FAILED in the city of Cleveland where most low income people live.

Why? Because the 21st District Caucus, then a creation of Carl Stokes, strongly opposed it. Stokes was a judge at the time, so he didn’t participate, but his brother Louis Stokes was the Congressman of that district.

I spoke at a 21st district rally meeting held to oppose the measure. I recited facts and figures in a non-dramatic way.

Bert Jennings, an activist, followed me with a rip roaring attack on the tax measure, raising the crowded room to a roaring objection.

The Cleveland suburbs passed the measure with enough votes to tip the negative city result.

That may have been the last gasp from those who knew the deal cost them a high price.

Now, without an organized citizen opposition, measures that hit the “little guy” pass with little reaction.

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