Ohio’s rebound depends on thriving cities

5:52 PM Saturday, March 6, 2010

In light of what you know about Ohio’s cities — their population losses, their troubled schools, their skyrocketing foreclosures — you might think they’re only a drag on the state.

Now comes a report saying Ohio has to tend to those places, and the concentrations of people in and around them, because they are the state’s future.

Researchers from the respected Brookings Institution and the Greater Ohio Policy Center have spent upward of three years taking stock of Ohio, drawn, in part, to the examination because Ohio has so many metropolitan areas. The think tanks argue that in a global, information economy, metros are where the action will occur.

The reason? Those are the places that have roads, universities, cutting-edge hospitals, waterfronts, mature parks, museums and — most of all — the people.

“Today the seven largest metropolitan areas in the state house 70 percent of the state population and produce 80 percent of the state GDP,” researchers write in Restoring Prosperity: Transforming Ohio’s communities for the Next Economy.

If metropolitan regions are indeed assets, Ohio is looking good. It has more than any state except California, Texas and Florida.

Mixed in among the three dozen recommendations about what Ohio needs to do (and stop doing), the report also highlights assets you might not know about. For instance, given all the talk about the “brain drain,” it’s interesting that Ohio is in the top 10 among the states for awarding doctorates in science or engineering.

Of course, conferring the degrees is just half of the battle; ensuring that the grads actually take jobs and start businesses in the state is the other. But certainly having people who spend years doing graduate work here is an advantage.

In pursuit of improving schools, researchers say that school districts should be required to publicize their per-pupil ratio of spending on administration to classroom instruction.

The suggestion from the report that’s gotten the most media attention is that Ohio should reduce its number of school districts by a third.

Bruce Katz, of Brookings, said he thinks that idea is actually “modest,” that even 400 districts would be too many for Ohio. Mr. Katz argues that what citizens care most about is not who runs a school district, but the quality of schools their children attend. If reducing administrative overhead means more money can be spent in classrooms, he doesn’t think voters would object.

There are precedents in other states for districts to merge administrative functions, leaving individual schools, sports teams and even school boards intact.

For those who worry about consolidation being big government, Mr. Katz says that’s getting the recommendation all wrong. Consolidation translates to “leaner,” “more entrepreneurial,” “more market-oriented” government, he said.

School districts are not the only thing Ohio has in spades. It also has some 3,800 local government units, including 250 cities, 695 villages and 1,308 townships. The result is that “total local government payroll in Ohio is 10 percent above the national average and 17.5 percent above the peer state average,” according to Brookings.

None of this government is free, which leads to another finding: Ohio residents have the ninth-highest local tax burden in the country, compared with the 34th highest for state taxes.

To know that fact is to understand that concentrating all the political fights about taxes in Columbus — as if state taxes alone define our competitiveness — is missing a big cost of doing business and living in Ohio.

Local government can be good government. But it’s also possible to have too much of a good thing.

— Cox News Service

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