The House of Representatives for the state of Ohio proposed house bill 96, which includes a tax reform provision in section 5705.316, or also known as the claw-back. The claw-back seeks to reduce the property taxes Ohio residents pay, by reducing the amount of money residents pay to local schools. This has many school districts worried across Ohio.

“So the callback provision first of all reduces future levy collections dollar for dollar by any amount that your general fund carryover is above 30%,” Olentangy Treasurer Timothy Jenkins said.

What this means is that for every dollar that a school is over that 30%, the amount a taxpayer will pay for the following year will be ‘discounted,” meaning a tax payer will have a reduced amount of taxes owed to school districts.

“The way the claw-back works is to reduce your cash reserves, they reduce your tax revenue,” Jenkins said. “The problem we see as a district is that that would be a very very short-lived experience. Residents might have a lower tax bill in January, February of 2026 but then we as a district would be sent because of such a dramatic reduction in revenue next year we would get what we believe in fiscal emergency.”

Fiscal emergency is when operating revenues are not enough to keep up with operating expenses. Specifically is operating costs exceed 15% of your revenues.

“If we go into a fiscal emergency we have to start seriously considering any and all ways to get out of the fiscal emergency which would include programmatic changes and adjustments,” Jenkins said.

If a school district were to fall into fiscal emergency it could mean serious changes to curriculum. 

“We would have to seriously look at ways for us to cut our expenses to match our revenues. That means also that we could be going back to the ballot for additional levies,” said Jenkins.

“They would have to be smaller levies because of the claw-back you couldn’t do a big levy only to have it clawed back again because you went above 30%.”