Help Replace One of Ohio's Oldest Schools?

Fellow blogers,

In a day in age where voters help with the implementation of social and economic policies in our communities it has been a interesting turn of events with the vote for the school bond / levy.

As many of you know politicians or elected officers of government that run for office have a funding mechanism for the implementation of their seat in office. It is threw the associated funding of each candidate or incumbent that the politician makes his plight to get constituents to vote for them so they can win the election.

This basic principal of funding candidates goes back in history, with all kinds of different opinions and results from the funding. Many voters take this repetitive behavior by the candidates as part of the democratic process.

The true deception is that on issues such as the bond / levy  voters allow  the pro levy people to fund raise  and advertise while the minority gets no financial support to share their view. This is a discriminatory practice. While the bond issue seems to have passed, I will be vacating my residence in this community as a imbalance by the ones with money will impose there will on people who are less fortunate in financial matters. I encourage any one to move out of a community that dose not give equal and fair notice to all voters on issues with out using money to propagate election results. Im sure some of you are laffing , and that’s fine you will be laffing alone as more , and more people vacate this city.

Abolish the property tax for the school system!! its unconstitutional !!

Vote no on may 6 if you want to START making a change in the current system!!

Visit

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Middletown-Ohio-Vote-NO-on-Issue-3/784089358269325?ref=br_tf

and like the page to show support of your constitutional freedoms in Ohio.

please don't hesitate to tell me your opinion as

Brevity is the soul of wit  

 and with out laughter over the kinks in society anarchy might prevail.

and that's the rest of the story , good day ( Paul Harvey 1946)

Charter school advocate wants to strip requirement for public schools from Ohio Constitution

http://www.ohio.com/news/charter-school-advocate-wants-to-strip-requirement-for-public-schools-from-ohio-constitution-1.480752

Published: April 14, 2014 - 10:50 PM | Updated: April 15, 2014 - 10:57 AM

COLUMBUS: The phrase in the Ohio Constitution that requires the state to provide an adequate system of public schools would be stricken from the document if the head of a constitutional modernization subcommittee has his way.

Chairman Chad Readler, a Columbus attorney who leads the Constitutional Modernization Commission’s schools and local government committee, wants to remove the phrase “thorough and efficient” from Article VI of the Constitution.

Justice Francis E. Sweeney Sr., who wrote the majority opinion, scolded the legislature by calling for a “systematic overhaul” of public education, citing examples of unsafe buildings and poor academic programming in some districts while many suburban districts enjoyed great wealth.

“Today, Ohio stands at a crossroads,” he wrote. “We must decide whether the promise of providing to our youth a free, public elementary and secondary education in a ‘thorough and efficient system’ has been fulfilled. The importance of this case cannot be overestimated.”

If  in fact our legislators are considering changing the system of public schools in our state, we need not invest any tax collected  moneys until they have made a final decision.

Click on above link to read the whole story

Marcia Andrew  has stated that the OSFC is a reputable and accountable arm of our school funding system.
in preliminary research of this bureaucratic extension of distribution of illegally collected land tax for public schools I have found that ,

http://www.clevelandchallenger.com/arkansas-man-behind-clintons-1992-black-son-scandal-silenced/

state auditors failed to audit the Ohio School Facilities Commission. Why?

Ohio's biggest Republican names will tumble like dominoes if the Ohio School Facilities Commission is ever audited and investigated

It is an Ohio law that every unit of government must be audited no less than once every two years.  The state auditor doesn’t have the option of performing the duty.  State senators and state representatives passed laws saying they must do it.  If a state auditor doesn’t audit or cause every unit of government to be audited no less than every two years, Ohio’s revised code calls their failure to perform the duty … dereliction.  It’s a criminal offense.

The penalty doesn’t carry jail time, although it can if added to other offenses.  What it does is expose a politician or bureaucrat’s incompetence in performing the lawful duties of the jobs they hold.   Derelict public officials and employees forfeit the job and can’t run or serve anymore.  It’s a pretty good law when it’s consistently enforced.  The problem is finding an example of a politician of bureaucrat of any party who has been charged, prosecuted and convicted for “dereliction of duty.”

So the only state elected official who a Republican state auditor "special audited" as ex-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell by Mary Taylor.

So the only state elected official who a Republican state auditor “special audited” was ex-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell by Mary Taylor.  Yeah right! 

So let’s talk about the Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) that has never been audited by any state auditor since its inception in 1997.  That’s four state auditors since 1997: Jim Petro, Betty Montgomery, Mary Taylor and now David Yost.  Yost is still within the time frame required to ensure that the OSFC is audited under his watch, but the clock is ticking.

The OSFC was originally funded with $2.3 billion in 1997.  It’s no secret that ex-Governor George Voinovich’s handpicked executive director, Randall Fischer, personally awarded 1700 contracts totally $1.8 billion without public bidding or commission approval.

Compare the donors to Voinovich’s campaigns to the 1700 companies getting contracts from Fischer and the game they were playing becomes obvious.  It’s  why the 16 year lack of an audit trail is so glaring.

Montgomery can’t claim she didn’t know Fischer violated laws at least 1700 times.  She was the attorney general and the OSFC’s lawyer when Fischer’s misdeeds were exposed in the Monarch Construction v. Ohio School Facilities Commission 2002 decision.  Montgomery was supposed to represent the interests of the citizens of Ohio after the agency was sued for the wrong Fischer had done.  There’s no way for Montgomery not to know Fischer was violating public spending laws before she became the state auditor in 2003 after Petro replaced her as attorney general.

The case was heard in ex-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s court when she was a Franklin County common pleas judge.   Read what Brunner said in the decision she ruled against Montgomery’s defense of Fischer and the OSFC’s equally derelict board members.

“Nearly $2 billion of public money have been distributed through more than 1,700 contracts for the construction and renovation of schools throughout the state of Ohio, not one of which has been approved by a vote of the commission. The final word on all of these contracts has lain with one individual, who is not a public officer, has not taken an oath of office, nor is bonded. The public education of the state’s children, an essential government function, is threatened by the unbridled discretion unlawfully placed in the hands of one person, Randall Fischer. This is unconscionable.  The court finds as a matter of law that OSFC has not only unlawfully approved the rejection of Monarch, it has abused its discretion in so doing.”

Montgomery should have screamed to high heaven about Fischer’s 1700 crimes to any official who would listen, especially to the general assembly.  As attorney general she should have reviewed every illegal contract Fischer handed out and reported back to the state’s citizens.  She also should have blasted Petro for his dereliction in not auditing the agency that employed Fischer.

Once Montgomery replaced Petro as state auditor in 2003, she should have minimally performed the required two bi-annual audits of the agency during her four term in office.  But since Montgomery had first hand knowledge of Fischer’s crimes, she should have conducted a special audit and forwarded the results to the Franklin County Prosecutor.  The same applies to Taylor, who’s now lieutenant governor. Neither of the two politicians audited or special audited the OSFC.  Taylor did, however, conduct a special audit of J. Kenneth Blackwell’s “office” as secretary of state after he lost for governor in 2006.  In fact, Blackwell has been the only state official to receive a special audit.  We wonder why.

OSFC employees and the agency’s commission members have spent an unscrutinized $13 billion since its inception.  It’s understandable why Petro and Montgomery were silent as attorney generals since they would have exposed each other’s dereliction as state auditors.  But their decision to cover for each other doesn’t negate the fact that a complete, thorough and retroactive audit of the OSFC is long overdue. The fact that it hasn’t happened is proof by itself of their dereliction and of Taylor’s.  Only in politics do officials who fail to perform the duties of their elected offices get to hide their shortcomings behind fancy commercials and get promoted.

State officials appear to have gone out of their way not to audit an agency that’s handled $13 billion since 1997.  We think it’s because they know the cookie crumbs will lead to jail time for the party’s biggest names.  A complete audit will expose such widespread corruption the cast of characters it exposes will make what happened in Cuyahoga County look like petty theft.

Yost seems to be catching up on the backlog of audits his political party mates left him.  Even this writer’s 2006 through 2009 audits as East Cleveland’s mayor were finally performed six years later in 2012, and nearly three years after he left office.  East Cleveland’s previous financial audit was in 2001.  That’s 11 years without an audit for a city being in fiscal emergency under the auditor’s supervision for 18 years.

If Yost doesn’t audit the OSFC twice within his term of office, he’ll be the fourth derelict state auditor not to review how and who received $13 billion to work on Ohio schools.

Real and not “bull____” accountability demands that Governor John Kasich immediately order an intensive audit of the OSFC and let the chips fall where they may on who is held accountable. 

Another indiscretion by OSFC 

http://www.ohioconstitution.org/2010/10/18/ohio-rico-complaint-filed-to-stop-school-construction-corruption/ 

Ohio RICO Complaint Filed to Stop School Construction Corruption

October 18, 2010

1851 Center Lawsuit alleges Strickland administration and OSFC placed union financial interests and remaining in office above fiscal responsibility in building schools.

COLUMBUS – Tax dollars have been wasted and continue to be at risk due to an unlawfully cozy relationship between the Strickland administration and labor unions, claim a group of Mansfield-area taxpayers. The residents today filed an Ohio Corrupt Activities Act complaint against Gov. Ted Strickland, Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) Executive Director Richard Murray, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and others. The suit will demonstrate members of the Strickland administration, organized labor, and Murray used the OSFC and school building construction contracts to engage in pattern of corrupt activities expressly prohibited under Ohio’s RICO laws.

Click on the above link to read the whole story.

Another indiscretion by OSFC

http://thetruthaboutplas.com/2010/06/30/columbus-dispatch-examines-value-of-plas-osfc-director-loosens-corrupt-grip-on-ohio-schools/

Columbus Dispatch Examines Value of PLAs, OSFC Director Loosens Corrupt Grip on Ohio Schools

1 June 30, 2010  School Construction, State & Local Construction

With Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland’s appointed director of the Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC), former Big Labor boss Richard Murray, under investigation for pushing school districts to use union-favoring project labor agreements (PLAs) as a condition of receiving funding from the OSFC, the media stands ready scrutinize these corrupt and wasteful agreements.

Click on above link to read the whole story

Marcia Andrew  has stated that in her view I was irrational and incoherent with my post on the blog.

Lets review the definitions,

Irrational

adjective

    1. not logical or reasonable.

                            reason / Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things,  applying logic, for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

    synonyms:     unreasonable, illogical, groundless, baseless, unfounded, unjustifiable;

                         absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous, preposterous, silly, foolish, senseless 

incoherent

adjective 

not able to talk or express yourself in a clear way that can be easily understood

 not logical or well-organized : not easy to understand

1:lacking coherence: as

2:lacking cohesion :  loose

3:lacking orderly continuity, arrangement, or relevance :  inconsistent

4:lacking normal clarity or intelligibility in speech or thought

In my view I hardly think that I’m Irrational.

It is only rational thinking that gave our forefathers the idea that you could not have

equal taxation with out equal representation.

Taxing the land owners for the benefit of all taxpayers is discrimination.

In my view I hardly think I’m incoherent.

I  have written and copy’d and pasted many opinions that state clearly and have simple language that gives a specific fact based opinion that land based tax in unconstitutional.

Its your duty as well as the governments constitutional duty to “provide for a thorough and efficient system of common schools" common denotes that the school in Indian hills should be a carbon copy of the school in middletown. They are not because people like y the pro levy / bond lobby continue to violate our constitutional freedoms by propagating a illegal form of funding schools.

Tha above paragraph shows that I have continuity in thought , that there is in fact logic to the argument as detailed by the supreme court in 1997.

Threw out your country's history it has always been the case that one citizen or resident starts the process of renewed justice for all.  It's is in many cases it's a life's work. Just look at the life of Martin Luther King.

What do you represent as a upright, compassionate, benevolent resident or citizen ?  I urge you to consider that looking the other way as the status quo indoctrinates discrimination as a form of legal taxation, that the unraveling of your own community will continue as social injustice will be the norm with no one standing up for constitutional principals and freedoms.

And additionally with the favoritism used by OSFC in its distribution of state tax funds I suggest that all taxpayers land owners or not should reconsider the continued abuse of educational funds for the prosperity of the few. Do you as a tax payers want the continued abuse of your hard earned tax dollars to empower special interest groups that are selected by your politicians to receive the contracts for your institutions ?

The above items along with other opinions that I have posted are relevant to the ideal that the current  bureaucracy is tainted in many ways besides  the fact that it dose not “provide for a thorough and efficient system of common schools funded by the state threw contributions from all tax payers, not just tax paying land owners.

'Your positive vote'

... What you do will impact thousands. A win for Middletown makes everyone in this town stand a little taller, (and) makes those people who don't live here think about moving in. There is something special about Middletown.

As a commercial and industrial real estate broker and a native Middletonian, I have seen how the attitudes and perceptions, real or otherwise, have impacted our appeal to those companies and businesses looking to locate in southwestern Ohio. Our neighboring communities continue to prosper, despite having significantly higher tax rates when compared with Middletown's, even with the proposed small increase. Only the New Miami School District's rates are less than Middletown's ...

Your positive vote on Issue 1 is crucial to help all of us, not just our young people. It is important to help attract new people to our area, new businesses and entrepreneurs. It will help to reverse the trend of falling home prices and show those around us that we, as Middletonians, continue to be proud of who we are (and) where we live ...

Leonard L. Robinson

President

Robinson Inc. Realtors

Middletown