Speaker 1: Do you want to be in a Man County? All right,
Speaker 1: here we go at this Bengals Hangover Monday on seven
Speaker 1: hundred WLW. Awful, right, awful. There's the old adage about, hey,
Speaker 1: you get enough crumbs, you make a loaf, and that's
Speaker 1: true a lot of things, especially money, enough crumbs you
Speaker 1: make a loaf. So Hamlin County is considering a one
Speaker 1: mill increase in the real estate transfer text the hold
Speaker 1: on second, I have no idea what this means. So
Speaker 1: a millage basically is a dollar for every thousand dollars
Speaker 1: that your purchase price is. So you know, you buy
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars house every thousand dollars. Do the math,
Speaker 1: and that's paid by the subtle closing. So you already
Speaker 1: have a transfer tax in Warren County, Butler Count's about
Speaker 1: three dollars per thousand. In Clare Mountain, Hamlin County it's
Speaker 1: four dollars per thousand, and now Hamlin County wants to
Speaker 1: add another buck to that. Joining the show this morning
Speaker 1: on seven hundred WLW is Commissioner Elesa Reese Hope, trust
Speaker 1: you ad a good weekend? Alicia? How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm doing good but not good about this proposal. It's
Speaker 2: been a rough a rough month, a rough year. You know,
Speaker 2: I was young the last time I was on. We
Speaker 2: were talking about the affordability, the snap benefits, and I've
Speaker 2: been out there, you know, trying to help people. Of course,
Speaker 2: the government's opening back up, but they didn't cash at
Speaker 2: us the money. You know, we don't have it right now.
Speaker 2: We're still operating, you know, on a skeleton. And so
Speaker 2: we've got the five one to three relief bus out there.
Speaker 2: I've been out there. We've we've we've had the bus
Speaker 2: and cleeves. We're getting ready. We've been in Mount Healthy,
Speaker 2: We're going to we're getting ready to go to a
Speaker 2: new Hope and Avendale this week in Bethel and Wanner
Speaker 2: Hills food deserts. But I've been seeing and talking to people,
Speaker 2: you know, just middle class family's, even veterans who've been there.
Speaker 2: And while we're helping them with food, at the same time,
Speaker 2: they're still saying, hey, you know, there's still affordability because
Speaker 2: everything is going up and it's just making it harder
Speaker 2: and harder to afford anything. And so now we're getting
Speaker 2: ready to do the county budget and we get the
Speaker 2: proposed budget from the administrator. That's how it goes. He
Speaker 2: gives us his budget and then we've got to go
Speaker 2: in and look at it. And the thing that stuck
Speaker 2: out to me, I'm looking at the budget because I'm
Speaker 2: trying to figure out how can we make it affordable
Speaker 2: for folks who are out here struggling in Hamilton County.
Speaker 2: You know, the homeowners and you know me, I'm trying
Speaker 2: to help grandma and grandpa hold onto their house too.
Speaker 2: When we talk about we say we want to have
Speaker 2: affordable housing. Affordable housing is not just new housing. It's
Speaker 2: helping people hold on to the house they already have.
Speaker 2: And as you know on this show, I've been with you.
Speaker 2: We've been fighting on these property taxes. And while you know,
Speaker 2: the state has you know, the ultimate power, they've got
Speaker 2: to come up with a better formula, and how they
Speaker 2: fund public education can't be on the backs of property taxes.
Speaker 2: But at the same same time, the county has some
Speaker 2: things that they can do, and I wanted to look
Speaker 2: everything we've doing. One of those things was the thirty
Speaker 2: percent they promised. The voters went out voted for two stadiums.
Speaker 2: Is the only time the voters got to vote on this,
Speaker 2: and they voted and they were told that they would
Speaker 2: get thirty percent property texts rollbacks for the county's portion.
Speaker 2: And since I've been there, this is my fifth year,
Speaker 2: my only my second term, I've been able to get
Speaker 2: it done, you know, a couple times, but every year
Speaker 2: we got a fight for it. And then this new
Speaker 2: Bingle deal. Yeah, this new Bengal deal. You know, three
Speaker 2: hundred million dollars guarantee to the Bengals, but in there,
Speaker 2: there's no guarantee to the homeowners, as I was telling you,
Speaker 2: And in this budget, the administrator only recommends for about
Speaker 2: four point five percent rollback. Now we went from thirty
Speaker 2: to now he's recommending single digits for the peace people.
Speaker 2: And then on top of that, if you try to
Speaker 2: sell your house, then they want to add add another
Speaker 2: tax to the clothing toss. So you know, this is
Speaker 2: just the craziest thing. And then we talk about taking
Speaker 2: a million that would be generated from this extra dollar
Speaker 2: per thousand, which is you know, that's a lot of money.
Speaker 2: That's not a small chunk, and we already had four.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to go to five. And that extra
Speaker 2: he said, put toward CDF. Who does affordable housing. We
Speaker 2: did sixty million dollars toward affordable housing when we had
Speaker 2: the American Rescue money. That was a one time thing,
Speaker 2: and we've been doing a lot of good things with housing.
Speaker 2: We just broke your ground on one of my major
Speaker 2: initiatives with also having housing for people with disabilities. We
Speaker 2: broke ground just last week at Coloring Township, which I'm
Speaker 2: happy about with lad who where we're gonna have smart homes,
Speaker 2: but we want to make sure that again affordability is
Speaker 2: also new homes, which we've supported, but now we've got
Speaker 2: to make sure also that the people who already have
Speaker 2: a home able to keep their home. And I saw
Speaker 2: the Inquire doing a series, and I know some of
Speaker 2: these faces of men who own their homes. One of
Speaker 2: them is in Madisonville. Worked pages dues, he retired, and
Speaker 2: now he's going to lose his home because the property
Speaker 2: tax is about to make him lose his home. Being Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's horrible, isn't it. So we have to be mindful
Speaker 2: as we're going into this budget. We can't be robbing
Speaker 2: Peter to pay Paul, robing the homeowners.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me.
Speaker 2: Shut this up.
Speaker 1: Alicia Race Hamilin County can let this up because at
Speaker 1: the intro I said, you know you already have you
Speaker 1: already have property tax valuation in skyrocket. He mentioned the
Speaker 1: rollback got it this year. Who knows it's going happened
Speaker 1: next year? Probably not, we'll see. H but Warren County,
Speaker 1: Baller County about three dollars per thousand dollars worth of house.
Speaker 1: So three hundred dollars three in a thousand dollars house. Right,
Speaker 1: that's how millage work, called millage Claremont County and Hamlin County,
Speaker 1: not four. Y'all want to add another buck, so it'd
Speaker 1: be five. Would be the highest tax around in the
Speaker 1: Tri state. And so that three hundred thousand dollars home
Speaker 1: will cost about fifteen hundred dollars at closing. Same house
Speaker 1: in Warner Butler County is nine hundred dollars on top
Speaker 1: of the property taxes as we've been talking about here.
Speaker 1: So what am I getting in Hamlin County that would
Speaker 1: cost me two thirds more in taxes?
Speaker 2: Well? I think you raised a great question. I mean
Speaker 2: that is a great question. And when this came out,
Speaker 2: I've been getting calls from people saying, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: you know, how how is this affordable because some people
Speaker 2: will sell their homes trying to you know, some of
Speaker 2: them sell homes trying to make the ends meet. And
Speaker 2: now we're talking about it's going to be hier to sell.
Speaker 2: But we can't be the champion in Hamilton County that
Speaker 2: everything is higher. We can't be the county whereas it's
Speaker 2: hard to live here. It's hard to sell a house,
Speaker 2: it's hard to you know, to be able to live.
Speaker 2: And again, we can't have you know, I was telling
Speaker 2: the administrator and and and open forum, we have to
Speaker 2: have the theme. We can't have the theme that we're
Speaker 2: broke when it's time for the homeowners and the taxpayers
Speaker 2: and let's just keep putting extra burden on them. And
Speaker 2: then in the same meeting, we'll have a big idea
Speaker 2: come in and we say, oh my god, we can
Speaker 2: find the money. We can find this. And I told him,
Speaker 2: I said, let's think a lot more creative, but we
Speaker 2: can't keep taxing the homeowners. And then on the other hand,
Speaker 2: I said, well, let's give the home owner thirty percent break.
Speaker 2: Oh no, we can't afford that. Oh no, we can't
Speaker 2: give them a break. We can't give them a break
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: And so let you have money to do the stadium.
Speaker 1: And I think the way this team is this year,
Speaker 1: that's just bad optics.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, we're giving them guaranteed, which you say, three
Speaker 2: hundred million guaranteed. And when you look at some of
Speaker 2: these other deals, I'm starting to see you see Denver,
Speaker 2: you see some of these other the trend is not
Speaker 2: the trend we have. The trend of these NFL stadiums.
Speaker 2: The owners are putting in a lot more money because
Speaker 2: they know that the taxpayers are not putting up with it.
Speaker 2: You see it. You saw that in Kansas City. They
Speaker 2: put it they want to do, they put it on
Speaker 2: the ballot and the people said, we'll give you a parade,
Speaker 2: but we're not going to tax We're not going to
Speaker 2: increase our taxes. We'll give you a parade, though, And
Speaker 2: so if you look at Denver, you look at all
Speaker 2: these other teams when they're doing these new deals, they're
Speaker 2: including the taxpayers that they're in terms of a break
Speaker 2: for the taxpayers, they're putting up their private You look
Speaker 2: at you know, some of these other teams, and you
Speaker 2: look at us, and we're still stuck in the old
Speaker 2: way where the taxpayers are on the hook bear the brunt,
Speaker 2: and we don't even have to guarantee. They don't even
Speaker 2: have to guarantee a winning product. So three hundred million
Speaker 2: guaranteed in the budget, and the administrator will say we
Speaker 2: have to do that. And then when I said, well
Speaker 2: what about the homeowns, well no we can't. We're only
Speaker 2: gonna do four percent when we were we were supposed
Speaker 2: to get thirty percent. And then they say, well, that's
Speaker 2: not fiscally uh you know, responsible. But I said, well,
Speaker 2: why is it not fistically responsible for the homeowners to
Speaker 2: get a break? I mean, we are in affordability fight
Speaker 2: right now, and Sloan, like you said, all these things
Speaker 2: come together. It's not like a one thing. Now you're
Speaker 2: talking about if a Selma house, I got to pay
Speaker 2: more more than like you said, other.
Speaker 1: Counting countries, right, and it's people go around three hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars house. Not okay, it's a but again, enough
Speaker 1: crumbs you make a loaf. And I get we're Jeff
Speaker 1: Aluto County administrators. He's that's a difficult budget to balance.
Speaker 1: For sure. You got a budget that's going to be
Speaker 1: about three point three percent from this past year, just
Speaker 1: north of four hundred million dollars is the number. And
Speaker 1: you know, when you have expenditures growing just the rate
Speaker 1: of inflation and the growth and revenue is not there.
Speaker 1: You got to look at getting other income sources in
Speaker 1: there too, because you have it's mandated you balance a budget.
Speaker 1: So in your world, Alisha Rees said, what do you do?
Speaker 1: How do you balance a budget and get the same
Speaker 1: time without sticking to the taxpayers?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I think number one, you look at all funds.
Speaker 2: You don't look at each deal as a separate deal.
Speaker 2: And that's what we've been doing. We should have been
Speaker 2: saying that when we had the Bengals deal, we need
Speaker 2: to look at everything and say, well wait a minute,
Speaker 2: if we do this, it's going to hurt over here.
Speaker 2: We need to be looking at all things. But we
Speaker 2: don't do that. We look at a big deal comes
Speaker 2: in and we find money, and then we come back
Speaker 2: and now say, oh we can't balance the budget. Now
Speaker 2: we won't be able to. I think you start off
Speaker 2: with who you know, who are we supposed to be representing?
Speaker 2: Who are our shareholders? And you go and say, okay,
Speaker 2: our shareholders are taxpayers of Hamilton County. So we got
Speaker 2: the number one, keep that first and foremost in the forefront,
Speaker 2: and as you saw in that article, they'll be taken
Speaker 2: right If the person can't afford it, they're going to
Speaker 2: take that home, say maybe a port authority for example.
Speaker 2: But when they take the home, they don't have to
Speaker 2: maybe pay the clothes and costs because they're gonna they
Speaker 2: don't have to pay the taxes. They're gonna put it
Speaker 2: in a land bank. So the homeowner, the gentleman that
Speaker 2: owns the house, he had to pay taxes, but now
Speaker 2: we're gonna take his same house and put it in
Speaker 2: a land bank for a couple of years and there's
Speaker 2: no tax getting collected on it. So that's another thing.
Speaker 2: The other thing, I have an idea. It's time for
Speaker 2: us to look at everything creatively. I've asked jeff A Luto,
Speaker 2: because when we get the budget, you know, we just
Speaker 2: get these you know, buckets in high level. That's great,
Speaker 2: but where I come from, we gotta have line items.
Speaker 2: And I told him, I said, I need to know
Speaker 2: every account that the county has and what's inch because
Speaker 2: what happens is maybe we can think of something more creative.
Speaker 2: The last thing I'll tell you that I am proposing
Speaker 2: that we look at is the liquor license. Now at
Speaker 2: the state, we can't come and just add a tax
Speaker 2: to the liquor license. But what we could possibly do,
Speaker 2: For example, that site where the Millennium was, and they're
Speaker 2: gonna make that ice skating of you know, free entertainment
Speaker 2: and all that, we don't get any money off of it.
Speaker 2: I said, why don't we get the liquor license as
Speaker 2: a county, which we can do, and then we sub
Speaker 2: lease it and people do this all the time, and
Speaker 2: then that can bring in additional revenues, not just at
Speaker 2: that site, but look at other things that we own,
Speaker 2: and let's come in through that. We've got to instead
Speaker 2: of taxing the homeowner, we could come in with those
Speaker 2: kind of things. We spent fifty something million dollars to
Speaker 2: buy it before I got there, and we're not making
Speaker 2: one dime off of it. It was just an open space.
Speaker 2: So that's one of the ideas. I said, we got
Speaker 2: to think creatively. Don't tell me what will you bring something.
Speaker 2: Don't bring it to me and say, oh, we've just
Speaker 2: never done it. First of all, let's see can we
Speaker 2: do it. We've got to do We're in some desperate times,
Speaker 2: and we need to be thinking a lot more creatives
Speaker 2: and not just giving away the house on all these
Speaker 2: different deals, because if you look at it, some of
Speaker 2: the new housing that comes in there's a tax abatement,
Speaker 2: but the person that's been there twenty years, they get
Speaker 2: a tax increase and they're getting ready to do another reevaluation,
Speaker 2: and they said taxes, probably taxes are going to go
Speaker 2: through the roof. So I'm saying, all hands on it,
Speaker 2: oky good.
Speaker 1: It's not good to get more people or people who
Speaker 1: would sell normally move and get new blood in there.
Speaker 1: That's not happening. But relative to this, and by increasing
Speaker 1: the millage to five dollars per thousand, Hamlin County making
Speaker 1: by far the most expensive in our region. You mentioned
Speaker 1: affordable housing, but only like a million dollars of the
Speaker 1: almost five million dollars generated goes to affordable housing. So
Speaker 1: is that just the way to sell us and go, hey,
Speaker 1: we're trying to help. I mean, a million dollars is
Speaker 1: not all that much money when you consider how big
Speaker 1: this budget is.
Speaker 2: No, it's not much money. And I think that maybe
Speaker 2: it sounds good, but we got to read through the
Speaker 2: fab front. You can't Rob Peter to pay Paul No,
Speaker 2: you know, make it unaffordable. Some people are forced to sell,
Speaker 2: or some people are selling because this is an asset.
Speaker 2: They got to sell it because they got to downsize.
Speaker 2: Some people say, hey, I got I got a downsize
Speaker 2: so I can afford to live. And now you're going
Speaker 2: to make it even tougher for the person to even
Speaker 2: downsized and be able to sell the house because the
Speaker 2: market will say, well, I'll go somewhere else and buy.
Speaker 2: The bottom line is we just can't keep adding to
Speaker 2: the consumers. You know, we're talking buyer consumer. We're adding there.
Speaker 2: And again a million dollars is not going to not
Speaker 2: going to get us. We put sixty million dollars and
Speaker 2: it's a one time. I mean some stuff we did
Speaker 2: was the one time, and we did sixty million. We
Speaker 2: did it with CDs. They were able to stretch as
Speaker 2: much as possible. But you can't make it affordable on
Speaker 2: one hand and then on the other hand make it unaffordable.
Speaker 2: And at the end of the day, a lot of
Speaker 2: people they negotiate closing costs when they get ready to
Speaker 2: sign the deals. They try to negotiate somewhere can I
Speaker 2: can negotiate. What can I do? Uh, And so on one
Speaker 2: hand we're saying we want more affordable, but on the
Speaker 2: other hand, we're always adding and they always say, always
Speaker 2: just one dollar, always just two dollars, you know, and
Speaker 2: then when you add it up like a second, you
Speaker 2: know it's going up. You know. I tell people all
Speaker 2: the time, they say, oh, they're only going to get
Speaker 2: two hundred dollars. That's two hundred dollars. It's some medicine
Speaker 2: somebody can get, or two hundred dollars worth of grocery
Speaker 2: somebody can get, right, and so all these things. Sloan,
Speaker 2: I'm fighting it, but keep your eyes open. So closing
Speaker 2: costs they want to go up. Uh, property tax rollback
Speaker 2: we're going from a thirty percent now down to only
Speaker 2: four point five percent roll back. And then MSD in
Speaker 2: the budget they're going with an increase of that for
Speaker 2: four percent.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make it attractive to want to, you know,
Speaker 1: do business or of her work in Cincinnati, but in
Speaker 1: particular in Hamlin County. She's Commissioner Alisha Reese all over
Speaker 1: this one. I know it's kind of a minor point.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a little bit of real estate wonkiness
Speaker 1: going on here when you talk about these tax transfer taxes.
Speaker 1: But uh, you know, again, as we've been saying, enough
Speaker 1: crumbs make a loaf. All the basketball chat again soon
Speaker 1: be well.
Speaker 2: Okay, all adds up, Sloan, And at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, the consumer, the taxpayer, is the one is
Speaker 2: getting all these bills and everything's going up. So thank
Speaker 2: you for having me on. And keep your eyes. We
Speaker 2: got to keep your eyes on this before the bull
Speaker 2: comes to people or before they try to close on
Speaker 2: a house.
Speaker 1: You're a fiscal pit bull. Reese, You're a fiscal pit bull.
Speaker 1: All right, take care of there you go. We got
Speaker 1: news on the way, pitbull. We need a pit bull
Speaker 1: in there. Just I think the thing that rubs you
Speaker 1: to in Hamlin County is effect. And you look at
Speaker 1: the what we did for the Bengals and how bad
Speaker 1: that product is and refuse to change. And then the
Speaker 1: news is hey bye, by the way, uh, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to pay more when you want to sell your house.
Speaker 1: So we got that going on, which is terrible sloany
Speaker 1: here seven hundred w all the