Issue 39: Sinclair Community College begging for your tax dollars

Posted by DarthDilbert at 3/02/2008 03:16:00 PM

One of the many choices we here in Montgomery County are faced with on Tuesday is that of Issue 39, a measure to send taxpayer funds to finance Sinclair Community College. A few weeks ago when Dr. Steven L. Johnson came to the Montgomery County Republican Party asking for an endorsement he was peppered with a number of direct questions. For example, he was asked several times if the money raised from the taxpayers would go to dramatically curbing the delay of nearly five years in their nursing program. This is a known issue that is growing worse each year with no clear signs of being addressed. Rather than provide a clear concrete yes or no answer he chose to deflect the question repeatedly from several people. He regurgitated the same talking points that are found in CitizensForSinclair.org's commercials on TV, radio, and in mailings.

Currently, commuter students at Wright State University pay around $400 per credit hour. However at Sinclair with the taxpayer subsidy students only pay around $45 per credit hour. Houston, we have a problem.

The levy talking points that are regurgitated by Johnson and other backers keep emphasizing the same figures: that the proposed 3.2 mill levy would cost the homeowner of a $100,000 house around $42 annually. The problem with this as with most taxes is that little things like facts get in the way of their argument. In the minutes for the 30 November 2007 meeting of the Sinclair Community College Board of Trustees they note that the actual cost is $98 per year for each homeowner, and not the $42 they have been marketing. The main talking point heard over and over is that Sinclair is affordable. What they fail to recognize is that the reason it is affordable is that the taxpayers of Montgomery County have been picking up the tab for quite a while now.

The backers of this tax advise that it will bring in an estimated $35 million in revenue annually or an average amount of $1500 for each student and/or faculty member. In numerous letters to the editor in the Dayton Daily News and in their Speak Up column one person after another has raised the one solution that the school isn't doing: raising tuition. Currently, any increase in tuition is capped by the state legislature, and is frozen through 2010. The backers of this tax should have used the thousands of dollars spent advertising on TV, radio, and in mailings and used it to lobby the state legislature to properly pass the cost on to the students to pay for their own education rather than taxpayers of Montgomery County.

Please join me in voting No on Issue 39.