Columbiana County faces lean days with tax defeat

Area taxpayers were not in an expansive mood Tuesday.
By and large, voters approved renewal levies. They rejected additional levies. And replacement levies, which are a combination of renewal and additional, got mixed results.
The largest community to be affected by a rejected tax issue was all of Columbiana County, where a 0.5 percent increase in the county's sales tax was rejected by a vote of 10,528 to 9,397.
Commissioners were obviously unable to convince a majority of the voters that the county is in dire financial straits. By any account, it is -- but that message isn't getting through.
The county is now collecting a 1 percent sales tax. Until last August, the county had collected 1.5 percent. In separate votes last year, county residents approved renewal of the 1 percent issue but refused to renew the other half-percent.
Each half-percent represents about 20 percent of the county's revenue, so the county is now operating at about 80 percent of what it had been.
Eighty percent is a reasonable number in a fat operation, but Columbiana County services have been trimmed pretty close to the bone.
Sean Logan, chairman of the Columbiana County Board of Commissioners, says the county knows it is going to be at least $1.2 million short by the end of the year.
Unpaid bills
The county has put off payment of more than $1 million to CiviGenics Inc., the private contractor that operates the jail, is about $140,000 short in payments owed the juvenile detention consortium to which it belongs and is $32,000 short in payments to the Court of Appeals.
While the county has been able to defer payment for those services, none of which is an optional expense, that's no way to run a county.
"We're simply not paying our bills," says Logan. "It is a moral obligation to pay your debts."
Between now and the end of the year, commissioners will have the ability to tweak the budget, but that's about all. The county has about $300,000 in carry-over from 2005 that has been unappropriated, but there's an additional need for about $200,000 in departments such as the courts, the prosecutor's office and the coroner's office -- all of which are in a position under state law to demand what they need for the administration of justice.
No elected official wants to talk about going back to the voters again immediately after an issue has been rejected. When they do, it inspires a common catcall from opponents that sounds something like "What part of 'no' don't they understand."
The prospects
But if the county enters 2007 with not a penny to carry over and with more than $1 million in unpaid bills, voters must understand that the state auditor will be coming in. Eventually a state financial planning and supervision commission will take control, which will have to power to order cuts and to order commissioners to impose taxes up to the maximum allowed by law.
It would seem that residents would want to retain local control. But it also seems that the three commissioners, who made themselves available at a series of meetings throughout the county this spring, have not been able to make that case to voters.
If the issue is going to be back on the ballot in November, a broad coalition of government, community, industrial, commercial and labor interests are going to have to come together to tell the story of what Columbiana County faces. Briefly, that story is that things are going to be tough for the next couple of years even if the tax were put back on the ballot in November and approved. If it isn't approved, things are going to get really ugly.
People who care about the county's future better start coming together, and there really is no time to spare.