"Ax the tax here!"
A small group of advocates called out to passersby who hurried past as rain fell at a flea market in Hartville on a Saturday morning in late May. They were seeking signatures for a petition to end all property taxes in Ohio.
"Grandma gets to keep her own property!"
While the flow of residents to the petitioners' tent was just a trickle on this particular day, the initiative has made waves across Ohio. It's inspired tax reform at the state level and provoked anxiety from schools, libraries and townships that rely heavily on local property taxes to fund operations.
Brian Massie, a retiree who lives in Lake County who previously ran a business selling fitness equipment, said he was inspired to co-found the Official Committee to Abolish Ohio's Property Taxes in 2025 after seeing residents struggle to pay their property taxes. His group more commonly goes by "Ax Ohio Tax."
Massie described the group as being in a "spiritual battle" of good versus evil, arguing government overspending has put a massive burden on taxpayers. He said they are not "anarchists." Their main hope in putting a petition on the ballot to end all property taxes in Ohio is to push state leaders to drastically change how they fund local services.
"I do believe any tax causing a citizen to become homeless is immoral," he said. "There's no problem with generating revenue in the state. It's a spending problem, and they need to prioritize (it) ... we can consolidate schools. I think we should also look at the number of taxing authorities in communities that we have in the state. Can we do some consolidation there?"
Home values have surged across the country since 2020 and property taxes proportionally with them. That’s hit people on fixed incomes hard, inspiring movements like Massie's. It’s also impacted farmers like Thomas Brenckle, who came up to the Ax Ohio Tax advocates at the Hartville Flea Market to sign the petition.
"They're raising the property tax so I can't keep farming," Brenckle said. "It's not profitable, you know, paying over $1,800 a month (in) property tax."
But the initiative did not garner enough signatures to get on the November 2026 ballot, Massie said at a June 5 press conference. He's vowed to try again for next year's ballot, even as he's been mum about how many signatures the group actually received.
While it's unclear how much of a chance a measure to ban all property taxes would have on local ballots, what is clear is it's prompting a showdown between school advocates and those who feel squeezed by rising taxes.
Public schools rely heavily on property taxes in Ohio. About 63% of property taxes went to public K-12 schools in the 2024 year. Abolishing property taxes without an alternate source for this funding would upend a system that advocates say is already hurting.
Tax relief versus school funding
Dozens of districts across the state have recently moved to close buildings and cut staff amid funding challenges.
One of those is the Canton City School District. It's located bout a dozen miles south of the Hartville flea market. As the rain subsided later on that same Saturday as the flea market, Board President Scott Russ gave a tour of the McKinley High School campus, just a stone's throw away from the National Football Hall of Fame.
Canton school officials said in January they would need to accelerate their plans to consolidate buildings and cut their budget due to decreased state and federal funding. Those decisions meant cutting more than 70 staff positions and closing three elementary schools.
Russ said cutting Canton schools' local tax funding would cause cause serious challenges for the district. About 20% of its funding comes from property taxes.
"That's a $36 million hit (if property taxes were ended)," he said. "That's just us. Many other public school districts are funded... up to 80% on property taxes, so you can imagine how devastating that would be."
Russ said he understand concerns about the rising costs of living. But he maintains that the Ax Ohio Tax group is playing into fears rather than reality, based on conversations he's had with some advocates for it in the community."
"I say, 'give me one example of a senior citizen that's lost their house due to property taxes,' and they can't give it me," he said.
Massie pointed to interviews with several senior citizens on the Ax Ohio Tax website when asked about his contention some are losing homes due to taxes. James Wilson, a veteran who lives in Warren County told Massie the state of Ohio could "run me out of my house because of the increase in property taxes."
However, there's a lack of easily available data on how much this might be occurring according to Greg Lawson, senior research fellow with the The Buckeye Institute, a Columbus-based think tank that has advocated for reigning in unvoted property tax increases and other tax reforms.
"It is difficult to nail down an exact number of homeowners losing their homes due to property tax delinquency, but it is clear that there are increased foreclosure starts," Lawson said. "It is also important to clarify that many people, especially fixed-income seniors, may be deciding to sell homes they otherwise would not sell because of the stress associated with increased property taxes. This is why government leaders at both the state and local levels need to continue finding ways to alleviate these burdens."
Roughly $21.4 billion dollars was collected in property taxes in Ohio 2024, and about $14 billion of that went to schools. Russ said public schools are battling increasing costs of goods and services, too. Meanwhile, schools are seeing more students with special needs, who are more expensive to educate. Cutting funding would come at the cost of the majority of the Ohio students who attend public schools, Russ said, including some who are among the most vulnerable populations.
"We have kids in Canton who don't know where their next meal is coming from; their meals that they eat are at school. We have kids that don't where they're sleeping that night. We have kids that have never slept on a mattress before," Russ said.
'Ax Ohio Tax' has already made an impact
Ohio Rep. David Thomas, R-Jefferson, credited Massie's group for pushing the conversation about tax relief for property owners.
"I talk with them frequently. I thank them quite a bit because they've helped us to have pressure to pass these bills. And they helped the governor to have pressure to sign them," Thomas said.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed several measures into law in 2025 that will impact schools' funding. One measure caps the funding school districts get from taxes when property values go up. Thomas said the intent is to cut down on unvoted property tax increases. But this will also reduce revenues for schools by at least $1.7 billion dollars over the next three years.
The Ohio Legislature also did not fully implement the Fair School Funding Plan in the current biennial budget, basing costs on old data. That means schools are missing out on $2.75 billion over the next two years, according to one analysis.
Thomas defends the legislature's decision-making. He said public schools have seen enrollment decline significantly, without cutting their expenses to match lower demand.
"We can't just keep having a blank check, which is kind of how I view the Fair School Funding Plan. You're essentially reimbursing or rewarding spending," he said.
Many districts rely heavily on local taxpayers for funding. Even so, some like Cloverleaf Local Schools in Medina County — which receives about 50% of its funding from local taxpayers — say they want to be part of the solution for taxpayers feeling burdened by increases.
The district has voluntarily ended five school levies since 2020, said Superintendent Daryl Kubilus, mostly thanks to a windfall of revenue from a natural gas pipeline.
"I hope that it shows our community that we're trying to look out for them as well," he said.
Despite that, the district was almost penalized due to another property-tax related reform from the state earlier this year. The law empowered county budget commissions to return school tax revenue to voters if they deemed it "excessive." The Medina County Budget Commission had sought unsuccessfully to return millions in local schools' funding to residents, citing large cash reserves held by districts.
Is elimination of all property taxes actually feasible?
No U.S. state has successfully eliminated all property taxes so far despite attempts throughout the last century like the recent one in Ohio, said Michael Hayes, an associate professor of public policy at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.
However, plenty of states have seen efforts to "limit" property taxes, Hayes explained. Recently, inflation and rising property taxes inspired a constitutional amendment that legislators placed on the November ballot in Florida which seeks to eventually phase out all non-school property taxes.
While eliminating property taxes might seem attractive to homeowners feeling squeezed by rising taxes, Hayes said there's "no free lunch." Typically, states with lower property taxes make up for that lack of revenue with higher sales or income taxes.
"You can't have both. You can't continue to have quality local services like school quality or other non-school local services, but also not have revenue increasing," he said. "You have to pick one path or another. There's a trade-off, and you're never gonna maximize both."
Brian Massie from Ax Ohio Tax said if the ballot amendment banning all property taxes eventually passes, the impetus would be on the state to find a way to fund local governments. In 2011, Governor John Kasich moved to greatly reduce the Local Government Fund, which directed state revenue to support essential local services such as police, fire and EMS. Since then, instead of finding a better way to support local government, Massie said the state has been lining its own pockets and funding "special interest groups." He cited the funding for the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park as an example.
But Cloverleaf superintendent Daryl Kubilus, said putting the ball in the state's court entirely to solve Ohio's local funding issues is not a great solution. He said the state has created the very issues Massie's group is trying to solve, shifting the burden of funding schools onto residential property owners through business and other tax cuts. The state has also prioritized funding for private school vouchers in recent years, with more than $1 billion a year going to that program.
Putting the fate of all school funding in the hands of the state would erode communities' control over their schools, and where their local taxes go.
"When our taxpayers at Cloverleaf approve a Cloverleaf property or income tax, 100 cents out of every dollar stays right here in Cloverleaf," Kubilus said.
