On Friday, June 16th, again at Talkies Film & Coffee Bar in Ohio City, the Bloggers Met John Corlett, senior fellow at The Center for Community Solutions (CCS) and a contributor to its own public policy and advocacy blog. The discussion centered on Tax and Expenditure Limitation (TEL) and branched out into public policy issues all around Ohio. There’s a whole lot of great content here. In addition to John, we had another special guest, Jonas Miller of Connecticut, who has a lifetime of practical expertise in government policy issues and procurement. Jonas is also the dad of our own Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks. This was a good session.

We began talking about the costs and benefits of government in terms of dollars, Colorado’s TABOR amendment and its recent suspension, the fact that TEL’s not really dead and buried yet, the looming illegalities of TEL as originally proposed, perverse consequences, attorney David Langdon of Cincinnati, David Brennan and White Hat Management and his financing about 75% of the $1.5 million behind TEL, Perry Homes of Texas and the Swiftboaters, economist Milton Friedman, and the curious fact that, although TEL was to motivate a conservative base to the polls, most of the pushback to TEL came from Republican elected officials. We touched on one of Blackwell’s cronies, Grover Glenn Norquist, who wants to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” and why making things like TEL a constitutional amendment and not just a statutory change is simply a bad idea. Here also surfaces the fact that Reform Ohio Now and TEL petitions were circulated simultaneously, with mixed, and perhaps tainted, results.

John then keyed us all on the flawed economics of what we do here in Ohio, “Ohio’s low road strategy� that ignores human capital and hands out incentives that make almost all of us a bit poorer. Jonas weighed in with how “we must change the structure of procurement� and place oversight on how we’re spending the dollars, taking the focus off the amounts and putting it on what value you’re getting. Home rule and regionalism figured in, with mention of Bruce Akers of Pepper Pike, the “practical regionalism� already in place, Cleveland’s poaching in Beachwood, Cool Cleveland, Thomas Friedman’s new book, “investing� in education, and the drag of health care, utilities, pensions, and new accounting standards on government budgets.

A critical distinction also appeared: What was subject to the TEL caps, and what was exempt—roughly $16 billion of $28 billion is affected, which leaves $12 billion unaffected, which leaves the door wide open to shifting any number of things. We wrapped up talking about the unknown effects of the new CAT tax, the competitiveness of Ohio in terms of tax-burden rankings, the magnitude of the Ohio budget, the fact that Ohio has a very low corporate tax, The Tax Foundation, and the labels “conservative� and “liberal� as applied to thinktanks. This whole discussion was very revealing and points up we need to be talking about the numbers as well as the ideas in our community dialogs.

I regret to say that we are unable to provide the audio for this interview because of an equipment failure with the recording device. I’ve put a different system in place for now, and will be qualifying it for future recordings. We’re probably going to have to find another recorder—one that doesn’t use flash memory. Fortunately (and part of the intention of Meet.The.Bloggersâ„¢) in addition to this post Scott Piepho has blogged about it and Jill Miller Zimon’s post is forthcoming. Perhaps Bill Callahan will do a post @ his new home once he gets things settled.

From Scott Piepho:

First off, what we learned about the TEL effort. The removal of the ballot issue is pretty much wired. The special legislation passed recently compels the Secretary of State to remove an issue if the sponsoring committee requests him to. The TEL sponsors have delivered such a letter to Blackwell (insert joke about weight of paper here.) Once the new law goes into effect in August, Blackwell must remove the issue and that’s that.

In addition the Coalition for Ohio’s Future is still pursuing one of the legal challenges against the issue. This is important because no one knows if the legislation allowing the committee to say “Never mindâ€? is actually constitutional. For that matter, no one knows if anyone has standing to challenge the procedure…