Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

I wanted to start a new thread to respond to one of Mr. Wizard's claims.

Pickerington school district did not participate in ''win-win''. Someone from the district was part of the talks early on, but nothing came of it.

The area that is now Columbus was once unincorporated Violet Township farmland in the school district. When the farm owner started annexation talks with Columbus, a citizen's group tried to block it by getting Pickerington to annex the land. Unfortunately, this happened over the holidays, and by the time Pickerington got its act together, Columbus had annexed the area.

Now when property is annexed into Columbus it automatically goes to the Columbus School District, but that wasn't the case for the Columbus part of the PLSD.

It now takes pretty much an act of God to get the Ohio Department of Education to agree to split a school district. The thousands of families (over 1,000 in Park Place alone, not including Park Place West, the apartments along Tussing and the other streets off of Hines and Refugee) who live in Columbus within the PLSD would oppose going to Columbus schools, as Pickerington schools is the reason we all moved here.

Many of us Columbus residents are decent, hard-working families just trying to get the best possible education for our kids.

The funny thing is, many Park Place and Park Place West residents opposed the low-income and section 8 housing that Columus placed out here.

The PLSD is not alone in struggling with trying to educate these kids. Mayor Coleman ''cleaned up'' Columbus by splitting up all the low-income and section 8 housing and farming them out to surrounding school districts within Columbus boundaries. Most of it is ''win-win'', we are not.

Another funny thing - most of us didn't know we were buying a house in Columbus. My husband and I thought we were buying a house in Pickerington. The realtor didn't try to clarify this, of course. She told us that utilities would be provided by Columbus, but being first-time homeowners we didn't connect the dots.

I double checked

My posts and your facts. I stand corrected on the win-win thing. You obviously became well-informed after buying in Park Place. Didn't the zip code tip you off at some point?

Buyer's remorse sucks, doesn't it?

By Mr. Wizard

In Fact

Mr Wizard, the zip code for Park Place is 43147. Just thought you'd like to know.

By Any Mouse

My mailing address

To Mr. Wizard,

My mailing address is Pickerington, Ohio 43147. That, combined with living in the Pickerington school district, made it obvious to me that I lived in Pickerington. Live and learn, I guess.

Here's something else that's funny now, in retrospect - we didn't pay Columbus city taxes for the first couple of years we lived here - we didn't think we had to! After a couple of years, we found out we lived in Columbus, and started paying taxes to the city. I guess we thought no one would notice, or would assume we had just moved here.

Long story short - we were audited by Columbus and had to pay back taxes, interest and a penalty. Yikes!

We felt a little better about it after reading an article in the Dispatch a while back that many people around the outerbelt had been hit by the exact same situation.

My only defense remains that as first-time homeowners we didn't know what we do now! I suppose it's good to make those kinds of mistakes initially so you don't have to make them later in life.