Wealth of fees to go up in Ohio

By MARK NIQUETTE

The balanced state budget counts on $1.5 billion in funds from higher user fees.

State leaders from both political parties have been trumpeting for weeks how this year’s budget process did not raise taxes on Ohioans, even in the face of plummeting state revenues.

But that doesn’t mean Ohio consumers and businesses won’t have to reach deeper into their pockets, whether it’s $15 more for a vanity license plate or an additional $100 to have an elevator inspected.

The state transportation budget passed in March included little-publicized fee increases, including those for vanity plates, truck plates and other vehicle registrations. Most take effect Oct. 1.

And the two-year, $50.5 billion state budget signed July 17 includes at least $1.5 billion in revenue from higher fees that take effect in the coming months, the Legislative Services Commission said.

Some critics of the fees point out that, two years ago, Gov. Ted Strickland said, “I think higher fees are higher taxes.”

“This year, it sounds like fees aren’t taxes anymore,” state Rep. Randy Gardner, R-Bowling Green, said before voting against the state budget. “I wonder what taxes are going to be called in two years.”

Strickland and others have defended the fee increases during the recession as more of a payment for state services than a tax. They say some fees haven’t changed for years, or that the increases will put Ohio more in line with other states.

“Not every fee is like every other fee, and not every economic situation is like every other economic situation,” Strickland said this year.

The fee increases in the two-year, $9.6 billion transportation budget range from $3 to $26, including an increase in three-year license-plate fees for all-purpose vehicles to $34.75 from $8.50.

The $15 increase (to $50) for vanity license plates takes effect on plates expiring or issued after Oct. 1, as do increases for replacement plates ($5.50 more), commercial truck plates ($19 more) and certain late fees.

The fee increases in the transportation budget are expected to raise about $55 million a year, much of which will be used to help offset a shortage of money for the State Highway Patrol, a spokesman for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles said.

The bulk of the fee increases in the state budget come from higher franchise fees for hospitals and nursing homes.

The new hospital franchise fee, for example, will collect $718 million. Hospitals will recover all but $145 million of that through federal Medicaid payments.

But the Ohio Hospital Association calls the $145 million a new tax and says it will ‘stress the already-stretched health-care safety net in Ohio, causing further hospital layoffs, reduced services and increased health-care costs to all Ohio patients.’

About 140 other fee increases scattered throughout the budget affect a variety of services, from business inspections to making copies of records, such as birth and death certificates.

Consumers and businesses will pay some of the higher fees directly, while they’ll be hit indirectly by others. For example, some Ohioans’ trash bills will rise because the state fee for dumping garbage at landfills is going up to $4.75 per ton from $3.50.

In some cases, industries asked for the higher fees.

The Ohio Association of Tobacco and Candy Distributors, for example, sought hefty increases in the annual license fees for selling cigarettes and other tobacco products as a way to increase the amount spent on catching tax cheats.

Legitimate wholesalers or retailers’ prices have been undercut by tobacco sellers who were not licensed or improperly bought untaxed products for resale, said the association’s Beth A. Wymer.

‘Our members are willing to pay a higher license fee, with all of that money going to enforcement,’ she said.

mniquette@dispatch.com