In our current system, Ohio cities are able to collect Municipal Income Taxes from people that work in or live in their communities. In the past, most cities offered a reciprocal income tax credit to the residents in their cities who worked outside of the city limits. (For example, If you lived in City A but worked in City B, City A would give you credit for the income taxes paid to City B so that you were not paying municipal income tax twice.)

Unfortunately, as municipal incomes decrease due to shrinking subsidies and job loss cities are looking for ways to increase their revenue...often times reducing or eliminating the reciprocal credit and increasing the tax burden on hard working residents.

Every city in our state is in the same boat. They are ALL struggling with budget deficits and they are essentially fighting over scraps. They must look out for themselves and they, individually, cannot be counted on to solve this problem of double taxation because it is a STATE WIDE SYSTEMIC PROBLEM.

We are asking the Ohio State Legislature to take action to ensure that there is a standard and fair municipal income tax system in place.

We agree that out-of-town workers traveling into our cities for employment do indeed use some of our 'city services'.  However, residents living INSIDE of the community use a significantly higher portion of said services.

We agree that it is our desire as members of our communities that our income taxes go directly to the communities that we use the greatest portion of services in: Our HOME COMMUNITIES.

Therefore, we assert that it would be most fair to implement a state wide law in which communities were only able to tax out-of-town workers at 25% the rate of city residents. This change would allow cities to collect income taxes from out of town workers to pay for their portion of used city services while allowing home communities to collect income taxes from their residents (where city services are mostly used) without the punishment of double taxation.