Lakewood Officials Not Impressed With State of the State Address

Gov. John Kasich delivered his second State of the State Address in Steubenville on Tuesday.

He touched on subjects ranging from drilling to job training to the Ohio Turnpike.

However, Lakewood officials paid particularly close attention to what Kasich did not say.

Mayor Michael Summers, who listened to a portion of the address on his car radio, said he didn’t hear anything from the governor that he hasn’t already heard.

“What I would have loved to have heard, is that the decision to end the estate tax is either being postponed or repealed,” Summers said. “They believe rich folks leave Ohio because of the estate tax. I believe rich folks leave Ohio because of the income tax. 

“The timing couldn’t be worse for this ideological move to that has a huge impact on our budget and no impact on the state budget.”

Lakewood city officials began when Kasich signed the , which slashed the city’s local government fund to the tune of about $1.1 million and eliminated about $200,000 in commercial activity tax.

“It’s a big hit to our revenues at a time when we’re already stretching and crawling,” Summers said. 

, known to oppose many of Kasich’s policies, said that he shared a couple of initiatives she’s interested in.

One of them, the Safe Harbor Act, a bill she co-sponsored, seeks to prevent human trafficking in the Ohio.

“(The address) pointed out some of the positives — a lot of which are the result of the past administrations,” she said. “We are seeing some of the results of the Strickland administration during the first year of the Kasich administration.”

She also noted another hot topic was hydraulic “fracking,” a process used to extract subsurface natural gas deposits. 

“I would have been happier he said there would be a moratorium on fracking until we know that there’s no danger to the drinking water,” she said. 

“I have a lot of concerns about his policies that didn’t go away with his presentation. I continue to have the same concerns that I had before.”