The Coalition for Ohio’s Future is a broad-based, bi-partisan organization including teachers and other educators, firefighters, police, elected officials, concerned citizens, social service organizations, business people, doctors and other health professionals, labor unions, senior citizens, faith-based organizations and many others all dedicated to defeating the TEL Amendment.
A State of Decline: What TEL Would Mean for Ohio
If a constitutional amendment to limit expenditures -- similar to Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) -- had been in place over the last decade in Ohio, state and local services would have deteriorated substantially. Assuming a TABOR limit, such as the one most recently proposed by Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, had been adopted in 1994, effective for fiscal year 1995, a cumulative total of $19 billion would have been cut from state expenditures for programs and services over the ensuing 11 years.1
State General Revenue Fund expenditures in fiscal year 2005 could be no higher than $14.9 billion, had the Blackwell TABOR limit begun in 1995.
- The limitation would have held FY 2005 expenditures to approximately $3 billion below actual expenditures this year.
- Expenditures for FY 2005 would have had to be 17 percent lower than they actually are.
This report illustrates the potential magnitude and impact of such a cut. It looks at the degree to which programs and services would have to have been reduced in FY 2003 if a TABOR limit had been effective since FY 1995.2 (FY 2003 is the latest year for which full data are available.) For sake of discussion, it assumes that total expenditures would be reduced to the permitted level by cutting all areas of state government expenditures proportionally. Thus if K-12 education makes up one-third of the budget, it would receive one-third of the expenditure reductions.
1 The base used in this analysis – General Revenue Fund expenditures – is the same as that used in a recent analysis by Scott Borgemenke, House Chief of Staff. The Borgemenke analysis is based on House Joint Resolution/Senate Joint Resolution 4 sponsored by Representative Reidelbach and Senator Jordan, which is slightly more restrictive than the proposed Blackwell Amendment. The Borgemenke analysis found that a cumulative total of $25 billion would have been cut since 1995, and 2005 expenditures would fall short of actual expenditures by $4.1 billion or 23 percent.
2 Our analysis shows that spending would have had to have been $2.7 billion below actual for FY 2003, a reduction of 16.3 percent. FY 2003 is used in this analysis rather than FY 2005 because current information on government program activities is not fully available through FY 2005.
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