Saturday, February 17, 2007

GIRFOF: Regional Meetings Announced

The Campaign for Ohio’s Future, the ballot committee for the Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future effort is starting their signature gathering campaign with a series of regional meetings. Recall that the Campaign announced that a number of meetings had been scheduled, then announced that they would be rescheduled after the petitions came back from Ohio officialdom.

The first round of meetings appear to be aimed at smaller counties. The meetings in the (loosely defined) NEO area are:

February 20 5:00 p.m.
Mid Ohio Educational Service Center, 890 West 4th Street, Mansfield, OH 44906

February 27 5:00 p.m.
R G Drage Career Technical Center, 6805 Richville Dr. SW, Massillon, OH 44646


February 28 5:00 p.m.
Maplewood Career Center, 7075 St. Rt. 88, Ravenna, OH 44266

The full list of meetings is posted at OSBA.

1 comments:

Paul said...

I attended the Feb 22 meeting at Tolles Tech Center, which is about 20 miles west of the center of Columbus but deep in the farm country. There were only a dozen or so folks in the room. As far as I could tell, everyone in the audience were school administrators and teachers -- except me.

I picked up a couple of details I hadn't caught before:

1. The $40,000 land value exemption for senior citizens applies only to the required 20 mill local contribution. If a district has levies on top of the 20 mills, the $40,000 exemption does not apply to those additional levies.

2. Section 2a(E)(1) last sentence implies a cap. I asked the briefer about this, and she said that "it only affected a handful of districts with high property values." I asked whether the cap was per-pupil or in dollars, and she said she didn't understand the question (??). A person the audience said that it only made a difference in a growing district (like mine), and that it was dollar capped, just as it is now.

I'm concerned about the stuff lurking in the white space of this amendment. Shrewd politics on the part of the architects to include cookies for seniors and local officials.

I suspect that the amendment will make it to the ballot, and it's probably a good thing so the debate will take place. I just hope folks pay attention to the details before making up their minds.