Gerald Bruce may have lost the first battle in his effort to radically overhaul Ohio’s system of assessing and collecting property taxes.

But the 64-year-old Groveport maintenance worker isn’t giving up his crusade – the first step of which involves trying to personally get 1,000 voters to sign his petition for a constitutional amendment that, among other things, would cap a property’s taxable value until it’s transferred or sold.

“I don’t go around to houses now, especially after dark. Some people just are really jumpy,” Bruce said.

In an interview, Bruce said he got turned on to the issue after two properties he owns – including his self-constructed house – saw their taxable values go up dramatically last year following the regular revaluation in Franklin County. He researched the state rules for constitutional amendments and got working. His wife, Debra, wrote the language.

“I work so hard. I try to keep up the house nicely and everything. The thanks from the state I got was, ‘Thanks for improving your property. Now you can pay us more rent,’” Bruce said.

Bruce is hoping to spur a grassroots movement to support his amendment, if he can just get past Attorney General Dave Yost’s office. His chances of ultimate success are very low – it typically costs $3 million to $5 million just to make the ballot, since state rules require citizen-proposed amendment campaigns to eventually collect around 442,000 valid voter signatures, including a minimum number in half of Ohio’s 88 counties. Getting past Yost’s office is the first step in the process.

Bruce was tripped up in July, when Yost’s office rejected hundreds of his signatures on technical grounds (they failed to comply with a state law requiring petitioners to separate voter signatures by county.) 

Before, Bruce said he got help from others collecting signatures. Now he’s just doing the work on his own. He views it not as a retirement project – a project that will allow him to retire.

“It’s a sleeping issue. It’s really hunting people who are retired. It’s really hurting them a lot. I want to retire in three or four years, but I won’t be able to if my property taxes keep going up like this. It’s too much,” Bruce said.

More on property taxes

I’m interested in Bruce’s story not because I think he’s likely to succeed but because I’m keeping an eye on broader grassroots efforts focused on property taxes and the real-world impact of property-tax increases. 

There’s an ongoing property tax revaluation happening in phases around the state, which will be the first since the low interest rates of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic helped send home values skyrocketing. That means that, depending on where they live, Ohio property owners are likely to see significant increases in their tax bills soon if they haven’t already.

Around 12 people – representing several different anti-property tax groups from the Cleveland and Cincinnati areas – held a rally at the Ohio Statehouse on Wednesday, calling on lawmakers to either reform property tax laws or eliminate them altogether.

“We’re going to become a voting bloc, I know it,” said one organizer at the rally, Sarah Wolf of Cincinnati. “This is changing across the country. …. We’ve been mad by ourselves for far too long.”

There are a bunch of bills pending in the Ohio legislature to limit property taxes. Some apply to certain groups – like military widows or senior citizens – while others are more broad. Some would require the state to pay to offset property tax hikes while others would reduce revenue for schools and other local government entities. 

There’s even a proposal from lawmakers to amend the state constitution – which would require voter approval – to freeze annual tax increases at 4%. This proposal got its first committee hearing on Tuesday, roughly six months after it was introduced. 

The bills seem unlikely to pass, given the disagreement over whether state or local government should foot the bill, so to speak. But I’ll be writing more on this topic soon.

What the political landscape looks like for a proposed voter issue

Another ballot issue did manage to advance in the state’s multi-step qualifying process this week. 

The Ohio Ballot Board gave the green light to the proposed “Ohio Voter Bill of Rights,” which has more established organizational backing. It would expand the state’s voting access laws, including expanding early voting and eliminating the state’s voter-ID requirement. 

The development means the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a left-leaning group, and its allies now are allowed to start working on collecting those 442,000 voter signatures. 

It’s unclear when that might actually happen. The campaign had been targeting the November 2024 election. But its plans got ruined when Yost blocked the measure earlier this year at the first step over its proposed title, the Ohio Voter Bill of Rights, until the Ohio Supreme Court intervened.

The amendment campaign – and its financial backers – are going to have to figure out their path forward. One major decision will involve picking if they want to target the 2025 election – which likely would see lower voter turnout – or 2026, when scheduled elections for governor and U.S. Senate likely would drive more voter interest.

Democrats and left-leaning groups used to perform better when voter turnout was higher. But the opposite now appears to be true. Take the two elections this year for Ohio’s 6th Congressional District. In June, Rep. Michael Rulli defeated Democrat Michael Kripchak by 9 percentage points in a special election that saw little voter participation. In November, when former President Donald Trump drove turnout that was more than five times as high, Rulli won by 33 points.

Jeff Rusnak, a Democratic political consultant in Cleveland, said this dynamic is partially why he pushed for last year’s abortion-rights amendment to move forward in 2023 rather than 2024. 

But especially given the unknowns surrounding the incoming Trump administration in Washington, it’s hard to project what the future political environment will look like. 

“Does that mean 2025 would be a better year for something like this? I think it’s too hard to tell right now,” he said.

Changing of the guard

As expected, Ohio Senate Republicans picked Sen. Rob McColley of Henry County as the next president of the Ohio Senate in a closed-door vote on Wednesday. And Ohio House Republicans picked Senate President Matt Huffman, who was elected to the House earlier this month.

Both chambers will finalize their leadership picks when they officially meet in January.