Ohio is offering alternative energy incentives.

The Ohio Wind Production & Manufacturing Incentive Program will have $5 million in grants available to qualifying applicants seeking to generate electricity through wind turbines. Under the new program, grantees will receive a one-cent-per-kilowatt hour incentive for energy generated through wind sources. Projects that make use of Ohio-built turbines will be eligible for an additional 0.2 cent per kWh incentive. To be eligible for wind energy production incentives, projects must begin commercial operation on or before December 31, 2008. The Ohio Department of Development also supports wind development in Ohio by maintaining an on-line high resolution, interactive Ohio wind map and by participating actively in the Ohio Wind Working Group. More Information is available at www.odod.stat.oh.us/cdd/oee.

Area Affluent Communities

Five Lake County communities cracked the top 55 northeast Ohio affluent suburbs in 2006. Cuyahoga County had 29, Summit eight, Lorain five and other counties less than five. This indicates that the wealth of the area is in the suburbs and the central cities are left with dealing with issues of the less well off.

Strategies for regional reform call for sharing the wealth among area communities.

Strategies for Regional Reform

Regional competition for tax base and uncoordinated growth are hurting almost every city and suburb in Ohio’s metropolitan areas - leading to concentrated poverty and abandoned public facilities in central cities; growing social and fiscal strain in at-risk suburbs; and traffic snarls, overcrowded schools and degraded natural resources in communities on the urban fringe.

These problems diminish the quality of life throughout a region. They require region-wide solutions. Broad policy areas where reforms are most needed to combat social separation and wasteful sprawl include:

● Greater fiscal equity to equalize resources among local governments.

● Smarter land-use planning to support more sustainable development practices.

● Accountable metropolitan governance to 
give all communities a voice in regional decision-making.

In Ohio, the nature of residential and commercial development largely determines a community’s local tax capacity, because local governments are highly dependent on locally generated taxes for their revenues.

This produces a wide variation in the ability of local governments to generate revenue from their tax bases.

It also creates large incentives for communities to compete against their neighbors for tax-generating developments, regardless of how they would best fit into regional land-use patterns.

There are regional policies that can both reduce the inequalities between local governments and decrease the incentives for them to engage in wasteful competition for tax base.

The seeds of equity-based fiscal reform are already in place in Ohio. Montgomery County has established the Economic Development/Government Equity (ED/GE) program to "share some of the economic benefits...resulting from new economic development among the jurisdictions of Montgomery County." The program provides an annual countywide funding pool for economic development projects, as well as a "government equity" fund that shares a portion of growth in municipalities’ property and income tax revenues each year. All 30 of Montgomery County’s cities, villages and townships have chosen to participate.

Each one contributes to a regional pool based on its growth in property and income tax bases. Funds in the pool are redistributed back to communities based on population. The process has a redistributive effect -- tax-base poor communities get back more than they paid into the pool, while tax-base rich communities get back less. Because all communities keep a majority (but not all) of the growth within their borders, the program reduces the incentives for inter-local competition for tax base while still allowing communities to cover the local costs of development.