By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. – James Baldwin
Toledo spent more on public safety this summer than it could afford. In November, it will ask voters to make up the difference.
With the summer that Toledo has had — a mass shooting at a community festival, graduation brawls, officers caught on video cursing at children on a street corner — nobody blames residents for wanting somebody to do something. That something currently on the table is a proposed quarter-cent temporary income tax.
Toledo knows what it means to run out of budget before you run out of need. So does Vanice Williams.
“Everybody is struggling now,” the council president told The Blade. “I am struggling right now financially to figure out what to pay and how to pay it.” That is why, she said, the decision belongs to voters.
She is right. It deserves a serious conversation.
Why the Tax Makes Sense
Toledo’s police department entered 2026 already bleeding — and the state of Ohio is partly to blame, according to Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz. “Since 2008, Columbus has cut $288 million in shared revenue from Toledo, roughly $16 million every year — the financial equivalent of the Jeep plant closing every year for 20 years,” he said.
The $25 million the proposed tax is expected to generate annually is roughly enough to restore what the budget took away: a recruit class cut from 25 officers to 20, ShotSpotter — the gunfire detection system that gave the city ears on its streets, and equipment purchases delayed across police and fire. A department losing more officers to retirement than it gains from each class cannot hold the line indefinitely.
I get it. Toledoans are living with something heavier than frustration — the low-grade fear that nowhere is safe, the anxiety that follows a summer like this one. And, after the Old West End Festival shooting, we are fed up on top of that. We have every right to be ALL of that.
But fear and being fed up, without resources to respond, are just dread and anger with nowhere to go.
Who Is Being Asked to Carry This
Toledo’s median household income is $49,724. A quarter-cent tax on that is $124 a year — $2.39 a week. For a household with some cushion, that is manageable, if not welcome. But Toledo’s Black households earn a median of $33,912. The same rate costs that household $85 a year — $1.63 a week.
On a budget already stretched thin, in a city where nearly one in four residents lives below the poverty line — almost double Ohio’s statewide rate — the level of sacrifice is determined by how much is left after you pay the tax. For Black households, that margin is already thin.
Council President Williams is not alone in her struggle to pay her own bills. Thousands of Toledoans in the neighborhoods most affected by crime sit in the same spot — asked to fund the safety infrastructure and supports their streets need most, to replace resources the state cut.
What the Tax Cannot Do
A public safety tax buys a response. It does not buy prevention. Malcolm Cunningham’s Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement — and the Save Our Community initiative it oversees, run by Raymond Campos with eight violence interrupters working in schools, neighborhoods and community centers — have produced a documented 50 percent decline in citywide violence since 2021, running on patchwork federal grants with no permanent line item in the city budget. This tax leaves that unchanged. The communities asking why they can’t be safe need both: resources that respond when violence happens and investment in what prevents it. Half a solution dressed as a whole one won’t hold.
The Question Worth Asking First
If this tax passes, demand to know publicly what happens to the prevention side of the ledger — whether Malcolm Cunningham’s MONSE and Raymond Campos’s Save Our Community get a permanent line item, and whether the churches, block clubs and community organizations holding these neighborhoods together get the same urgency that a tax ballot measure got.
Toledo wants to feel safer — a tax is a start. But it is not the finish line.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org