CutsHurtOhio.com. The new website’s address summarizes how advocates of government spending on schools, cities and social welfare programs feel. These activists say in the current two-year budget, compared to the last, local governments have seen their money from the state slashed by $1 one billion and schools have taken a $1.8 billion hit. Go to the website, the activists say, punch up your county and you can see how the cuts have hit locally. Gavin DeVore Leonard leads a group called One Ohio Now.

“Every single county has seen major cuts around K through 12 education and local government which includes everything from children’s and senior services to filling potholes and filling swimming pools for the summers," Leonard says.

“What that means to them is they got to dramatically increase their property taxes or there are going to be fewer teachers, fewer cops, fewer firefighters and there are going to be fewer roads paved," says activist Stephen Dyer. "It’s an end some game”

Stephen Dyer is himself a former lawmaker. These advocates say there are several ways legislators can find hundreds of millions of dollars to send to cities and schools. Raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy; closing some tax exemptions and using surplus revenue that’s come in faster than expected.

All are bad ideas, though, according to Republicans who dominate the Ohio House and Senate and GOP Gov. John Kasich. Kasich doesn’t even buy the premise of the activists that local governments are suffering that much. He says they’ve actually been hiring new workers.

“We hear all this complaining about the devastating local government cuts. Now I just saw some Bureau of Labor statistics that said in the four years before I became governor, local governments cut their personnel by 31,000," Kasich says. "Since we signed the budget law into effect, local government has grown by 5,600. “

The governor figures raising Ohio’s income tax after years of trimming it would nip the state’s recovery in the bud. He also contends spending surplus money instead of socking it away in Ohio’s rainy day fund would foster government over-spending, which he says got Ohio into its budget crisis the last few years.

Kasich and the activists on the left might theoretically agree that some tax exemptions or loopholes should be closed, but they disagree on what should be done on any windfall from the state: the activists say spend it, Kasich says no, instead use it to lower still further Ohio’s graduated state income tax.

“It’s imperative that our income tax go down,” Kasich says. “You look at the fastest growing states in the country: Texas, again, number one no income tax, Oklahoma’s fighting to lower their income tax, Kansas just lowered their income tax, North Dakota doing the same thing.”

Kasich keeps contending lower taxes will lure more companies and their jobs to Ohio.

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Advocates for cities and schools say, go to a website labeled CutsHurtOhio.com. punch up your county, they say, and you can see the local fallout from the $1 billion dollar cut in state money that cities got hit with plus the $1.8 billion hit schools took. Ohio cities are not suffering, counters Gov. John Kasich. He says in the four years before he took over, local governments in Ohio lost 31,000 workers. But in the past year, the number of employees is up by more than 5,000. The governor says don’t do what the advocates want, restoring the state’s spending cuts by hiking taxes. He says move in the opposite direction: Trim the state income tax even more.