By Cindi Andrews
Enquirer staff writer

Undaunted by the anti-tax message that voters sent earlier this month, 19 school districts and 35 communities in Southwest Ohio will ask for money in November.

In Butler County alone, seven of the 10 school districts are requesting money. Hamilton County has eight districts asking for money, including renewal of a $65 million levy for Cincinnati Public Schools.

Three school districts in Warren County and one in Clermont County also are seeking tax money.

In addition, dozens of requests to fund local governments, police and fire departments, park districts, programs for the mentally retarded and other services beat Thursday's deadline to get on the ballot this year. Several municipalities and townships have other ballot issues.

Some school districts are looking forward to their second or third ballot appearance of 2004.

Eight of 10 school levies went down in August, including ones for the large Fairfield and Sycamore districts.

School leaders, trying to learn from campaign mistakes, have scaled back their requests. Fairfield and Lakota have each cut their levies by roughly a third - Fairfield to $6.5 million a year and Lakota to $12.4 million a year for operations, plus $80.3 million in one-time construction money.

Sycamore dropped its request by about one-fourth - to $8.8 million a year - after residents handed the district its first defeat in 25 years.

It's not clear whether such concessions will be enough to spell success at the polls.

Fairfield levy supporter Dave Holthaus is hopeful: "I think this is recognition that some sort of compromise was needed."

However, Todd Bitter, a Fairfield High School graduate, said the district didn't go far enough.

"I won't vote for a levy unless they get this spending under control,'' Bitter said.

Montgomery resident Fred Benz, an 81-year-old retired fire chief, said his retirement income simply can't stretch to pay for the Sycamore schools and other county and local tax increases.

"We're getting slammed here," Benz said. "We're getting dramatic increases in our taxes and health care, and even though we love our schools we can't afford it."

Schools shouldn't read too much into their August levy failures, said Al Tuchfarber, a University of Cincinnati political science professor who has worked on several levy campaigns.

"Voter turnout is always abysmally low (in August) and the one group of people that always comes out to vote are senior citizens," he said.

November's presidential election, on the other hand, should bring out the more levy-friendly voters such as those under-40 and in the upper middle class, Tuchfarber said.

Vulnerable to opposition

That doesn't mean passage is a sure thing. Levies are more vulnerable to negative campaigning than are candidates for office, Tuchfarber said. Even loosely organized, temporary groups can defeat a levy with a bunch of signs, he said.

"When your neighbor puts up a yard sign for George Bush or John Kerry, you can dismiss that because you say they're a Republican or Democrat," he said.

A levy, on the other hand, is a proposed change in the status quo, and too much opposition can make voters jittery about change, according to Tuchfarber.

That's where Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) and its offshoot, North COAST, come in.

COAST plans to fight an $80 million , five-year levy that would largely go to Drake Center Inc., a long-term, acute-care hospital in Hamilton County. COAST and its allies have questioned why Drake is the only such hospital in Ohio with its own levy.

The fledgling North COAST formed in February, primarily to fight school levies in Butler and Warren counties.School taxes are climbing faster than salaries and inflation, said co-founder Del Landis, a Deerfield Township resident.

One target in November: Kings Local Schools, which is seeking $3.2 million a year after a larger levy request failed last year.

"We feel like Kings has really not done enough to cut costs," said Deerfield Township resident Del Landis, a former Kings school board member turned anti-tax activist.

"The strategy was right, but they didn't go far enough. We think it's still more than they need."

Sue Kiesewetter contributed. E-mail candrews@enquirer.com