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Chamber breakfast focuses on levies
By Elise Franco
Canfield
Tax levies were the topic on everyone’s mind during the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber’s Good Morning Canfield breakfast.
The annual breakfast Friday at the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center welcomed chamber members as well as city, township and school-district officials to hear the 2010 happenings in their community.
The focus was three tax levies that voters will decide Nov. 2 — a 0.42-mill tax-renewal levy for the Cardinal Joint Fire District, a 6.8-mill new operating levy for the Canfield Local School District and a 1.8-mill new operating levy for the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.
With one of the larger local levies on the ballot, Canfield Superintendent Dante Zambrini discussed how vital it is to bring new money into the district next year.
Zambrini said the levy will generate about $3.8 million annually for five years. This is the first new levy the district has placed on the ballot since 2002.
“If it doesn’t pass and we have to wait [until 2011,] we’ll start to spiral into deficit spending,” he said. “Voters in Canfield understand that you don’t want to put debt on top of debt.”
Zambrini said the district prides itself on an excellent quality of education while using minimal resources.
“When Campbell got a $400,000 computer grant, I bought their old computers for $55 each,” he said. “You don’t need a fancy school and equipment when you have teachers like I do.”
Carlton Sears, library director, said the library levy will generate about $7.3 million annually for five years, allowing the libraries to continue operating at the current level.
“Locally, people have never realized how much it’s costing to fund the library,” Sears said. “It’s not about status quo, but about maintaining our level of operation.”
He said the libraries are funded partially by the state, but the annual amount given has decreased by about $3 million over the past 10 years.
“If it doesn’t pass, the honest trajectory is probably closing five or six buildings,” Sears said. “That’s not a threat. It’s reality.”
The third levy discussed Friday was the fire district’s five-year renewal levy, which is expected to raise $206,720 annually, said Deputy Fire Chief Don Hutchison.
He said the quality and dependability of the department rides on voter approval.
“We need to pass this to continue out services. ... No added taxes will be incurred,” Hutchison said. “We need to continue the quality of the fire and EMS services.”
Hutchison said the department has 32 firefighters — eight full-time and 24 part-time — and an average of five minutes as a response time. He said the department won’t be able to operate at that level if the levy isn’t passed.