OHIO Board member aims to establish tax break holiday on school items

The tax break helps many families cope with a yearly expense.
By NORMAN LEIGH
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Shopping for back-to-school items can be expensive, and city school board member Kathryn Hawks-Haney would like to ease that burden.
Hawks-Haney said she will try to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation that would add Ohio to the list of states that declare sales tax holidays before schools open in late August and early September.
The holidays -- the first was instituted in New York in 1997 -- enable parents to stretch their buying dollar a little further by permitting purchasers to forgo paying sales tax on certain back-to-school items, advocates say.
Critics, though, decry the break as nothing more than a gimmick.
Typically, the holidays occur in August when parents are doing their pre-school shopping.
The break usually applies to merchandise like clothing, footwear and computer equipment.
Eligible merchandise
States generally restrict the holidays by setting limits on the price of merchandise eligible for the tax break, says the Federation of Tax Administrators.
Usually it's $100 to $300 per clothing item sold and $1,500 to $4,000 for computer equipment.
The average family last year spent $483.28 on back-to-school items, a nearly $33 boost from 2002, according to School Board News, a the National School Boards Association publication.
Hawks-Haney said she got the idea of lobbying for a tax holiday in Ohio when her son, Robert, called her from Georgia, where he lives. Georgia's tax holiday helped him save. The state is one of 12 in the country that offers the tax break.
"It's exciting to me," Hawks-Haney said of the prospect of getting a tax holiday set for Ohio.
Succeeding in that effort "would mean someone's paying attention to the common people," she said.
It's too late to get a tax holiday established in Ohio in time for this school year. But it's a good time to start lobbying for next year, Hawks-Haney said.
State Sen. Robert Hagan of Youngstown, D-33rd, said he supports the idea and pointed out that a bill to establish a tax holiday in Buckeye state has been languishing in the Legislature.
It was introduced in February 2003 by state Rep. John Willamowski of Lima, R-4th.
Willamowski's measure, House Bill 35, calls for exempting purchases of clothing and footwear from sales tax for nine days each year, beginning the second Saturday in August. A $100 limit is set on the price of each exempt item. The proposed law excludes jewelry, watches, handbags and umbrellas.
The bill's probably stalled because it doesn't exclude the sales tax gathered by many local governments, Hagan said. Mahoning County, for example, collects a 1 percent sales tax.
Getting a tax holiday established probably would mean writing a bill that would permit local governments to continue collecting their share of sales tax and making the tax break apply only to the state's 6 percent sales tax, Hagan said.