ATHENS, Ohio — After undergoing its first formal review in 26 years, Athens County’s formula for distributing state tax revenue will remain unchanged for the next five years.
The Ohio General Assembly created the Local Government Fund in 1989 to distribute a share of state tax revenue to counties, townships and municipalities. A law passed in 2023 requires counties’ budget commissioners to review their distribution formulas every five years, Athens County Auditor Jill Davidson explained.
Athens County’s review took place Oct. 29, when representatives of local political divisions — townships, villages — gathered at an Athens County Budget Commission meeting for the first formal review since its creation in 1998.
In 2020, the state established a default multistep formula for determining how much of a county’s fund should go to different purposes. Athens County’s alternative formula has a more straightforward split: 50% to the county, 40% to municipalities and 10% to townships.
That formula will remain in effect until at least 2029, when it comes up for review again.
The amount individual townships and municipalities receive is determined by population and road miles maintained (for townships) or population and total property values (for municipalities).
“If you have more population or road miles, you’re going to get more; fewer population, you get fewer shares,” Davidson said.
Among municipalities, the city of Athens and the village of Glouster recieve the largest municipal shares. Athens Township and Dover Township receive the largest shares from the funds allocated to townships.
In 2025, Athens County’s share of state tax revenue is projected to be over $1.5 million. (Davidson said she underestimates the revenue by 5% to 10% so as to not “short-change” governments’ budgets.) Under the distribution formula, the county will receive about $778,000. Two cities and eight villages will split $622,343; 14 townships will split around $155,600.
Although the county gets the lion’s share of the Local Government fund, no political subdivisions suggested changes or objected to the current formula during the formula review, Davidson noted.
“We didn’t have any at all, which helps us to feel confident that … the formula that we’re currently using still represents the needs of our local government,” Davidson said.
Heather Rockwell, fiscal officer for both the villages of Jacksonville and Trimble, stressed the importance of maintaining the status quo at the Oct. 29 meeting.
“We’re happy with the formula,” Rockwell said. “I think as long as we can anticipate what we need to budget and what we have to work with, we can make it work with what we have, but we would be opposed to anything that would take away from us in any way.”
Glouster Mayor Nathan Simons agreed.
“It’s tough enough with the current budget — that we have to get things done and take care of basic maintenance and upkeep, so we definitely don’t want to see a reduction,” Simons said at the meeting. “It’s very important that we at least continue to receive what we have in the past, percentage wise.”
Rather than changing the local distribution formula, Rockwell and Simons said they would prefer that the state increase the proportion of tax revenue that goes into the Local Government Fund in the first place. But that would require action by the Ohio Legislature.
“We would like to see more money in the pool as well. But again, that’s a conversation for somewhere else, but we wouldn’t want to ask for a larger portion, simply because that affects everyone else in the pool,” Rockwell said.
Davidson shares that sentiment.
“We always want to advocate that we would like our percentage share to be larger for Athens County, but [that’s] a separate conversation,” she told the Independent in an interview.
