Former Gov. John Kasich’s massive tax giveaways a decade ago to the tech giants now building data centers in Ohio will continue to plague the state for another 30 years. But that $2.3 billion in state sales tax exemptions to 18 companies is just one of many naïve and shortsighted Kasich deals, from 2011 to 2019, in which state assets were turned over to corporations – weakening the state.
Indeed, his two terms of transferring state wealth to private companies may, in retrospect, define his time in office. In addition to the tech deals that limit the state from reining in the data centers that a growing majority of Ohioans hate, Kasich’s legacy is a litany of pro-corporate/anti-taxpayer blunders:
- Offering $400 million Ohio dollars in 2011 to lure the dying Sears retail giant from a massive suburban campus in the distant Chicago suburbs to a new, sprawling rural campus somewhere in Ohio. This was unlikely to happen, but its shows intellectual bankruptcy of Kasich’s economic strategy. (The $400 million offer, incidentally, equaled the amount of federal funding Kasich rejected for a Cleveland-Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati passenger rail system.)
- Selling off farms, equipment, facilities, and livestock at 11 Ohio prisons in 2017 – when the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction was in the middle of a $9 million expansion and improvement of those facilities. Among the assets auctioned off at “fire-sale” prices were 12,500 acres of farmland, 2,300 head of beef cattle and 1,000 dairy cows.
- Creating JobsOhio and funding it with the taxpayer dollars that had supported the wildly popular Clean Ohio program.
In fact, the ham-handed and foolish Sears and prison-farm plans pale in comparison to the one-two punch of creating JobsOhio and gutting the Clean Ohio Fund in 2011.
Through creation of JobsOhio and putting state liquor proceeds into the hands of a private company, the Kasich administration did more than an end-run around the state constitution and privatizing public assets. The arguably worst facet of privatizing economic development was, ironically, Kasich’s dismantling of what was perhaps the greatest economic-development program in the state’s history – Clean Ohio…