It wasn't a good week in Columbus for Ohio's cities

Ohio's cities should be afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of a General Assembly that found it far too easy to pass a ban on residency laws for public employees.
And municipal workers should be afraid. Of what? Of an almost inevitable backlash from the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
First, the General Assembly. Its passage this week of a law outlawing residency requirements by political subdivisions is a dramatic demonstration that the current Legislature feels no particular responsibility to the state's municipalities -- at least not cities like Cleveland, Toledo, Youngstown and Warren.
State Rep. Randy Law, R-Warren, made a telling statement while discussing the residency law with an editorial writer Thursday: "I'm the only member of my caucus who represents a city like Warren." All the other Republicans in the House represent suburbs, rural areas or "cities like Dublin," that is relatively young and prosperous cities that don't have the problems of a Warren, Law said.
Individual rights
Still, Law voted with a majority of fellow Republicans and a good number of Democrats to prohibit residency requirements by the state's political subdivisions. Law said he did so because he believes people have the right to live where they want. Also, he said, while a number of constituents contacted him asking for support of the residency prohibition, not one asked him to vote against it. He said the only way he knew Warren Mayor Michael O'Brien disapproved of the law was a statement in a news story, but by then it was too late.
The state Senate sponsor of the bill, Timothy Grendell, a Republican from Chesterland in Geauga County, introduced the bill because he said he believes in giving broad rights to individuals. He compared residency rules to indentured servitude. Grendell said he is also convinced that the law will withstand challenges because the Ohio Constitution gives the Legislature supremacy in matters of public employment. That, he says, will trump home rule.
Grendell talked about doing away with mandatory residency the way school choice advocates talk about charter schools or vouchers. If cities see that their employees are going to move away, city fathers will work harder to improve their cities.
The bottom line is that this legislation passed because a coalition of legislators who say they believe that anyone has the right to live anywhere they want (but won't go so far as to say that anyone has a right to a public job) came together with some true believers in free-market competition between old cities and new suburbs (tough-love ideologues who apparently believe that elected officials won't really try to save their cities unless employees are allowed to move out). They were joined by other representatives who are so indebted to or afraid of public employee unions that they fell into line.
What members of this alliance apparently fail to see is that the state's older cities are like ocean liners; they can't turn on a dime. If the S.S. Youngstown (or Toledo or Cleveland) is in troubled waters, the job of turning it around is not going to be made easier by allowing the crew to jump ship. The passengers -- the taxpayers -- aren't going to be inspired with confidence when the guys they paid to keep the ship afloat start rowing away.
Careful what you wish for
And that brings us to the potential backlash. The public employee unions that fought so long and so hard to outlaw residency requirements may come to rue the day the law passed.
In Ohio's cities -- at least the old cities, not the Dublins -- the average pay for public employees exceeds the income of most taxpayers. In recent decades, public employee unions have done a marvelous job for their members -- and not just safety forces, but truck drivers, laborers and office workers.
If the residency ban is upheld through the inevitable court appeals, the day will come when well-paid city workers begin flocking to the suburbs. And if that day comes, those same workers are going to find that it will be much more difficult to persuade city residents to approve tax increases to pay those handsome salaries and fringe benefits. Employees who no longer live in the city will find that city council members are more inclined to listen to the people who can still vote for them when making decisions that affect the pay and fringe benefits for city employees.
Of course, that will take a while -- a decade maybe. And about a third of today's municipal employees will have retired by then, with pensions that will probably exceed the pay of the average private-sector employee in the city. But the other two-thirds -- they may find that pushing through the anti-residency law was a Pyrrhic victory.
In the meantime, Ohio's cities are going to have to watch out for themselves. Obviously the representatives in Columbus aren't listening to them, and a good number of their own employees can barely wait to abandon them.