Jeff
From downtown Cleveland to deepest Appalachia, Ohio's public libraries are the envy of the United States. But on the apparent theory that there's no failure like success, the General Assembly, with Gov. Bob Taft's connivance, is poised to choke library funding.
Ask anyone who moves out of Ohio, especially parents: One of the first things they miss, besides grandparents left behind, are the fantastic libraries - treasure-houses for children, people's universities for adults, workshops for the very brand of "by-the-bootstraps" self-improvement Ohio's Republicans say they want to promote.
Thanks to a bipartisan General Assembly consensus reaching back to the 1930s, Ohio public libraries are so good that in the 1990s a big national newspaper reported that Pennsylvanians and West Virginians were flocking to such garden spots as Youngstown and Steubenville so their kids could find materials they needed to do homework.
Unfortunately, Taft and Ohio's legislators won't do theirs: Like the pupil in Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World," they don't know much about history.
State support for Ohio's public libraries was the mid-Depression brainchild of "Mr. Republican" himself, then-state Sen. Robert A. Taft, the governor's grandfather, no spendthrift of taxpayers' money. The elder Taft earmarked a stock-and-bond tax to aid public libraries.
In the 1980s, a Public Library Financing and Support Committee, which included another conservative Cincinnatian, future Senate President Richard H. Finan, fine-tuned Taft's legacy.
Taft's library law tended to benefit urban counties, because that's where the stocks and bonds were. Thus, while Greater Clevelanders and other big-city Ohioans often had superb public libraries, small-town, rural, and Appalachian Ohio sometimes did not.
In 1983, legislators set in motion eventual repeal of the stock-and-bond tax. They instead designated a slice of Ohio's income tax for libraries and local governments. The library-study committee, chaired by the late Dennis G. Fedor, a Greater Cleveland lawyer, one of the best friends libraries ever had, helped work out implementation of the tax change.
The Fedor panel wanted to make sure that even residents of poor Ohio counties could build, stock and staff great libraries. The magnificent result, 20 years later: While Ohio's state universities are so-so and its public schools, often as not, founder, the Buckeye State is unquestionably No. 1 in America in libraries - and in very little else, except Statehouse torpor and statewide pessimism.
Of course, in today's Columbus, it's considered un-American to leave well enough alone, especially when there are so many options for risking rather than bolstering a public investment.
So, consider this Statehouse "logic": Libraries are Ohio's most cost-efficient engines for economic (and human) development, as well as Ohio's most popular public service. So, pathetically in Alice-in-Wonderland Columbus, that makes libraries targets rather than trophies.
Here's the plan: Even though Ohio's public libraries haven't gotten their "guaranteed" slice of state income-tax money since 2001, Gov. Taft wants (and the Ohio House has agreed) to sweat 5 cents out of every $1 public libraries might otherwise still manage to coax from the state.
And even forgetting that, Taft's (and the legislature's) plan to prune Ohio's income tax means that even the pre-2001 library-fund guarantee probably would result in a net loss, to libraries, of state aid.
Meanwhile, amid supposedly tight times, Taft wants voters to agree to rack up $500 million in debt for economic "development." Anyone unwise to zany Statehouse ways might wonder why Ohio would sluice cash from a genuine knowledge enterprise (libraries) and use credit cards on a "Third Frontier" quest for gasless cars or genetically engineered corn dogs. Answer: Off-year bond campaigns such as "Third Frontier" generate fees for political consultants and fund-raisers otherwise out of work till the 2006 gubernatorial race heats up.
True, it was the 1991-98 administration of Republican Gov. George V. Voinovich that first monkeyed with state aid to public libraries. That, too, was a grotesque mistake. But Bill Clinton's economy helped bandage that wound by boosting Ohio income-tax collections - and the bigger the collection, the more Ohio libraries might get from Columbus.
Now, Ohio is poised to scuttle one of its few public-service glories. There's a descriptive word for that kind of dim-bulb decision, but it can't be printed in this newspaper. So here's one that can be: Despicable.
