Some of the people holding “Vote No on Issue 4” signs outside Cincinnati polling places on Election Day were not volunteers — they were being paid $200 to be there, and at least one of them had already voted the other way. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Phyllis Mathews, 65, held an anti-levy sign at the downtown library poll site even though she had voted in support of the Cincinnati Public Schools levy during early voting.
“I’m just holding this sign,” Mathews told The Enquirer. “I needed a dollar, so.” Mathews said she learned of the paid work through her sister, was earning $100 per shift, and worked back-to-back shifts from 9 a.m. through 7:30 p.m. for $200. A list Mathews shared with The Enquirer showed more than two dozen Hamilton County polling locations where anti-levy demonstrators were directed to go.
The payments came through The Coalition for an Affordable Cincinnati, the political action committee bankrolling the campaign against the school district’s tax levy. Ozie Davis, one of the coalition’s founders, confirmed to The Enquirer that demonstrators were being paid to display “Vote No on Issue 4” signs at the polls, though he said he could not estimate how many demonstrators showed up Tuesday.
Issue 4 is a 7-mill property tax spanning five years that Cincinnati Public Schools proposed to fund day-to-day operations. The levy would provide more than $66 million a year for the district, which serves about 33,000 students, and would cost about $245 per $100,000 of a home’s assessed value annually — about $698 a year for the average home in the district, valued at $285,000, according to figures the district provided and The Enquirer reported.
The coalition was founded September 29 by Davis, who briefly served on the CPS school board filling a vacant seat in 2018, and political strategist Jay Kincaid. Kincaid previously told The Enquirer he opposes the levy because he does not believe district officials have made a compelling case for how the money will be used and because he fears the cost to taxpayers is too great.
The campaign followed a September 14 letter in which leaders from the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber and the Cincinnati Business Committee called the levy “ill-advised” and asked the district to remove it from the ballot, The Enquirer reported. Kincaid previously told The Enquirer that neither the chamber nor the business committee contributed financially to the anti-levy campaign.
Cincinnati Public Schools last passed a new-money levy in 2016, a 7.93-mill, five-year tax that raised about $48 million a year for the district’s preschool program; new funds for general operations were last secured in 2008. What happens next: Hamilton County voters had the final word on Issue 4 on Tuesday, and the unofficial result — and the debate over the tactics used to fight the levy — will be settled in the county’s certified returns later this month.
Photo: EEJCC, CC BY-SA