BY LISA DONOVAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
A local sports and entertainment coalition is trying an end-run on Cincinnati City Council with a direct appeal to voters not to raise the city's ticket tax.
Tuesday, the Hamilton County Board of Elections confirmed that the group, which includes Bengals and concert promoters, has enough signatures to put a no-tax-increase charter amendment on the Nov. 3 ballot.
The measure calls for capping the ticket tax at the current 3 percent and mandating that the only way to raise it is at the ballot box.
The tax applies to a range of venues, including movie theaters, private golf courses and Bengals, Reds and University of Cincinnati sports events.
The ballot initiative would eliminate an alternative that city council has resurrected several times to meet its 1995 commitment to spend $100 million over 20 years for the construction and repair of Cincinnati's crumbling public school buildings.
But council has never figured out a way to honor its pledge.
One council member says this initiative would ensure council never raises the tax.
"We plan to go all the way. This isn't procedural. We plan to fight this and promote this all the way through November," said Councilman Charlie Winburn.
Mr. Winburn and several other council members worked with the sports and entertainment coalition in June after it appeared a majority of council was going to meet the commitment to the schools by raising the admissions tax.
The plan called for raising the 3 percent admissions tax to 4.25 percent for 11 years, starting in 1999, before gradually returning it to 3 percent in 2020.
Under that proposal, $85.7 million would have been generated to meet the $100 million school funding commitment, according to the city's budget office. The remaining $15 million would have come from other sources, including $5.7 million in unspent surplus from the city's 1997 general operating fund.
Opponents of the increase vowed to overturn any tax increase through a ballot initiative.
But as the measure headed for passage, one of its backers -- Mayor Roxanne Qualls, who is running for Congress -- announced she had worked out a deal with the coalition.
What emerged was a funding package that would maintain the admissions tax at 3 percent and would take money primarily from the city's general fund. The proposal has been tinkered with but still doesn't have the five votes necessary to pass.
Without a majority of council supporting any other school funding plan, members of the sports and entertainment industry maintain that the ballot initiative is the insurance policy they need in case the ticket tax hike is proposed again.
"The entire coalition believes this admissions tax is not necessary," Chip Hart, president of Hart Productions Inc., said in a statement. "There's a school funding plan already in place that doesn't raise taxes."
The initiative calls for nullifying any ordinance or policy pertaining to the tax that is enacted before the November vote. Councilwoman Minette Cooper said that taking money from the general fund to pay for the schools could hurt in the long term.
"To take money out of the pot . . . that's going to compromise the quality of the city and alter the quality of life," she said. "I hope the citizens realize, if they pass this, they're doing the city and themselves a disservice."
Councilman Tyrone Yates, who also supports the tax hike to pay for schools, calls the ballot initiative a "mockery of the democratic process."
"It's sad and unfortunate that a fairly narrow special-interest group . . . would put this on the ballot," Mr. Yates said. "Ballot issues should be substantial questions (posed to the voters), and this does not qualify."
During the past six weeks, members of the sports and entertainment industry and others have been gathering signatures in front of stores, restaurants and bars.
In all, they gathered 18,004 signatures, but needed only 8,331 valid signatures from Cincinnati voters to put a charter amendment on the ballot. County election officials validated signatures as petitions were handed in and believe that 8,369 are valid.
It is expected that council will approve an ordinance during its Sept. 2 meeting to put the proposed tax cap on the ballot.
