Seeing that Marty came out swinging at the Republican last week, as usual, without even quoting his side of the story makes me want to re-evaluate my own position on the amendment to the budget that eliminated the city of Riverside's ability to collect taxes from civilian employees of Wright Patterson Air Force Base.Contrary to the belief of SOME people, I'm all for lowering taxes -- including local taxes. In fact, that was my point when I first heard about this move from State Rep. Kevin DeWine. Where is my protection from local taxes? It isn't as if Riverside was attempting to tax members of the military, these are civilians; why do they get special protections from taxation that the rest of us don't.
Unlike Mr. Gottlieb, I emailed Mr. DeWine and received this response from his Senior Legislative Aide, Maureen Beaver:
When Ohio first implemented an income tax in the 1970s, the legislature made the policy decision to make it extremely difficult for municipalities to levy income taxes on civilians who work on WPAFB. That legislation was successful in for almost 3 decades until Riverside found an imperfection in the law, a legitimate legislative oversight, which allowed it to tax within the gates. As a result, only civilians who work in the approximately 12 buildings on base that fall within the city's boundaries would be subject to the tax. The amendment does not reflect new policy - it merely corrected this oversight and sought to ensure that all civilians who work on base continue to be treated identically.Clearly the city of Riverside ought to find another solution to their problems or strongly consider dissolving itself as a municipality.
While Representative DeWine will always stand with the taxpayer, the imposition of this income tax has larger implications. WPAFB and the Miami Valley are working everyday to bring new jobs - high wage, high value jobs - to the base and the region. This new tax, applied to a handful of workers in a handful of building is sending exactly the wrong the message to decision makers in the Air Force, Department of Defense and the contracting community.
It is the Representative's hope that the uniform treatment of workers across the base and the elimination of piecemeal taxation will serve as a small incentive for investment on our base and in our region.
