Rasor for Stow

Stow company Safe Haven Homes is a finalist for a grant from Pepsi. If you vote (and vote often), it will go a long way to help SHH expand through a $250,000 grant. Below are the details:

1. CLICK ON THIS LINK: http://www.refresheverything.com/index Tip: Bookmark or add this page to your Favorites so you don’t have to retype the URL into the address bar tomorrow.

2. On the Pepsi Refresh Project home page, click on “Browse Ideas & Vote.”

3. Click on the round, yellow “Food & Shelter” icon at the top of the page.

4. Click on the $250,000 grant category icon.

5. Find Safe Haven Homes, LLC in the list of projects.

6. Click on “Vote for this idea.”

7. A Sign-In page will appear in the center of your screen. YOU MUST SIGN IN TO VOTE.

8. Input your email address and your Pepsi password. If this is your first visit to the sign-in page, click on “No, I’m new here.”

9. Type the 2 weird words into the bar just below them, then click on “Sign In.” The words are hard to read sometimes, but type what you see. If it’s not correct, 2 new words will appear, and you should type them into the bar, then click on “Sign In.”

10. The Sign Up window will now be visible. Input your sign-up information and the 2 new weird words, check any of the 3 boxes you want, then click on “Done.” You only have to sign up once. Tip: Remember to write down your password for use when you sign in again.

Also this… Remember, Matt Riehl and I won’t hold open hours this month because the committee meeting is scheduled for the date we normally hold our hours. But if you want to send either of us an e-mail, call, or show up after the committee meetings (they start at 5:30), we will be happy to chat!

In the coming weeks, I will be proposing legislation that can save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the city. And it’s a proposal that I believe a majority of council will support.

Here is some background. We spend about $12,000 on benefit packages for each employee. Many of these employees would otherwise be covered under a spouse’s plan. I seek to give those employees a chance to decline to take the city’s plan and instead have the opportunity to cash in their sick days.

It is likely to save at least $10,000 for every employee opts out of city benefits. There are about 200 employees who currently have family benefit packages. How many of those employees have spouses who are engaged in family plans at other jobs? I don’t know.

However, this is one of my key ideas for getting Stow back into the black ink. I will reveal several more once the ideas become a little more concrete.

If you are an employee, please use the “contact me” button to let me know your thoughts.

Also this … Matt Riehl and I will not be holding our usual Open Hours this month because instead we have a committee meeting on the first Tuesday of September. If you would like to talk after the meeting, I’d be more than happy to.

I have heard from two residents in the last few days who were surprised that I didn’t respond to their messages. I didn’t get those messages. My Web site is having difficulty with the “contact me” function — and my webmaster is out of town.

To be sure you reach me, please send me a direct e-mail or call. My e-mail address and number can be found here.

Congrats to new coach Mark Nori and the Bulldogs for beating Wadsworth 21-6 in the season opener.

Nori spent four seasons in the NFL and has coached college football at Pitt and Akron before coming to Stow. Like many of us, he chose to live here because he loves the city.

Wadsworth was ranked in the Plain Dealer’s top-25 poll coming into the game. Stow’s victory was considered an upset. Hopefully Nori will keep up the momentum as the season progresses.

Go Bulldogs!

I want to extend my condolences to the family of Paul Swanson, a former Summit County Engineer who lived in Stow. He died yesterday.

I knocked on his door about a year ago. Mr. Swanson was very welcoming and provided advice for my campaign. He will surely be missed.

It took a couple of hours, but we solved the term limits debacle.

After we fought an attempt by Jim Costello to completely remove the finance director and council term limits proposals, council unanimously voted to fix the broken issues. We replaced them with the originals passed by Charter Review.

The meeting began with a debate between Janet D’Antonio and me. Here are my notes from that exchange:

- The mayor first said she will not run for another term, and therefore, she argued that this was not your run-of-the-mill political mischief. I reminded that crowd that we have heard that before. A former member of council fought against term limits while reassuring the voters that he would not run again — yet he did. And plus, why would you allow for these unintended consequences of extending the mayor’s term? Certainly, there is a reason for it. Right? No one explained that reason to me, so many people fairly assumed that council intended to do exactly what the words said: extend the mayor’s term limits by eight years.

- Janet said the board has not taken any action. Wrong. The Board of Elections removed Jim Costello’s amendments and made another minor wording adjustment. I had the documents to prove it.

- There was some legitimate confusion about whether we needed to solve the problem before the Board of Elections’ final meeting of August. When I spoke before the Board, the answer was “yes.” When I asked the Deputy Director of the Board, the answer was “yes.” Some people have been saying “no.” If it turns out I’m wrong, I apologize. It wasn’t malicious. But regardless of the answer, it was careless to schedule our meeting after the board’s. Why take the risk?

- Janet said Charter Review did not vote on consistency. That is wrong. That was one of the only unanimous votes that came out of charter review. (By the way, I really appreciate the positive feedback from so many Charter Review members on this.)

- Janet said she has gotten mixed feedback about the former language. She said, “Some voters will get it. Some not.” That is not acceptable to me. Why make something confusing when you can make it simple? The voters are not stupid, but if you put tricky language before them, it will trip some people up.

***

To me, this was a black-and-white issue. You could only see it one way: The language was misleading and could not achieve Charter Review’s purpose. As a proponent of term limits, I never thought one of my most heated debates would be to give voters a chance to repeal term limits.

Costello’s proposal was to eliminate Section 21.08 completely. That section applies term limits to mayor and law director. He did not want to give voters an opportunity to add term limits on council and finance director until the following November. It was a compromise because it eliminated the opportunity for the mayor to run again.

I truly appreciated Jim’s attempt to compromise, but I had several problems with his proposal. The wording on the amendment created a triple-negative. It was eons more confusing than the original proposal. But it was a nice compromise attempt, because it did not permit for the mayor to run again if the issue passed. Brian Reali said the proposal would not satisfy council’s duty to put forth Charter Review’s suggestions.

The other option, of course, was to replace the flawed issues with Charter Review’s original issues. I supported this solution from the get-go. At the end of the committee meeting, the committee moved forward Costello’s proposal by a 4-3 vote. The other option passed forward 7-0.

The council meeting was fairly uneventful if you don’t count the public comment section. After Reali clarified his position on the legality of Costello’s proposal, Costello retracted it. We passed the other one by a 7-0 vote.

Long story short, we fixed it. We got a consensus, but it was not easy. I fought hard to make sure our city council — and our city — would not look bad. In November, voters will get the opportunity to clearly decide: Term limits, yes or no?

So what’s next? Two things:

1) The administration is putting forth another proposal for rental property registration. I imagine we will have extensive hearings on that legislation.

2) I am in the midst of making several proposals for cost savings. They minimally affect department budgets and don’t involve drastic salary cuts. I plan to speak with several people within the city (and outside the city) whom I respect before formally or informally disclosing the proposals.

If you haven’t seen them already, below are two Akron Beacon Journal articles by Gina Mace. She wrote about the condition of our roads/budget and the confusing ballot language.

City council will meet at 6 p.m. on Tuesday to try to repair this potential embarrassment. I am interested to see how the GOBN tries to achieve their ulterior goals now that the media and three members of council are onto them.

Tonight, we set a meeting for next Tuesday at 7 p.m. to fix the term limits debacle.

The meeting comes about 12 hours too late. The Board of Elections must certify our issues, and the last chance to do it is Tuesday at 9 a.m. If anything comes out of our newly scheduled meeting, we must rely on the Board of Elections to hold a special meeting to certify it.

To simplify: We are taking a giant risk that our meeting will be worthless and that the mayor and law director term limit language will go forward and embarrass Stow. Janet D’Antonio is “sure” that the Board will hold that meeting — only for Stow. Let’s hope.

This ballot language debacle is a new low for incompetence for the GOBN. They know they’re wrong, and they’re STILL reluctant to fix it. As someone who supports term limits, I have to take the initiative to clean up this mess because the Good Ole Boy Network is either too corrupt or too incompetent to care. Essentially, I’m fighting for voters with whom I disagree.

Compared to a year ago, people are learning a lot about Stow’s government and its propensity for disaster. But it’s not enough. I’m going to start advertising this blog. And soon.

In other news…

Service director Dano Koehler gave us a tour of the roads today. It was good to hear him describe how the city goes about making repairs. It was discouraging, however, to hear that Stow is about $7 million behind on repairs. This year, for example, Stow’s roads fund is $600K. It needs to be at least $1.3 million. Before long, Koehler said our roads will start looking more like Kent or Cuyahoga Falls.

And this is the one type of spending cut that actually costs you money in the long run. As I’ve said, Stow has allowed roads to slip beyond the relatively inexpensive resurfacing into repairing the structure of the road, which is much more expensive.

Council will have a special meeting to discuss the mayor and law director term limits at 7 p.m. on Monday.

Based on what I wrote to you earlier this week, something has to change. In the past 24 hours, Matt Riehl and I worked to get council to agree to a special meeting, which requires consent of four members, the council president, or the mayor.

The council president, Janet D’Antonio, was at first very opposed to the idea, so Matt and I started making calls. After it appeared we were going to get four members to agree, she called the meeting herself.

The purpose of the meeting is to discuss to possibility of calling a regular meeting for early September. At a special meeting, we cannot vote on anything pertaining to an election because of Charter provision 4.09. But we can deal with election issues at a regular meeting. I suggested that we call the special meeting for the purpose of calling a regular meeting, at which we can fix this problem that threatens to make the entire city look foolish.

Matt Riehl, Joe Hickin and I are working to ensure that the Good Ole’ Boy Network does not try to trick voters. We believe ballot issues should be clear, fair and legal. That will be the goal at the regular meeting.

Before the special meeting, the Roads & Safety Committee will take a tour examining how bad the roads are in Stow. It’s an open meeting, so anyone can attend the bus trip. It starts at 5:30 p.m. on Monday.

As expected, the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office said that Stow’s term limit language won’t have the effect that its proponents hoped.

The prosecutor says that a “no” vote on the mayor and law director language will “keep the charter as-is.” Therefore, the people of Stow will have NO opportunity in November to remove term limits, despite what Charter Review and four members of council had hoped.

The prosecutor is the Board of Elections’ statutory legal counsel regarding ballot language. The final approval comes from the Secretary of State. Below is a letter I received via public records request from the prosecutor to the board of elections:

I see what these people are upset about, but I’m not sure that they have any recourse other than through public opinion and the casting of votes. A “no” vote on these issues will keep the charter as-is. Legislative bodies are not liable for doing imprudent things such as passing poorly drafted legislation. And the BOE has no authority to reject these ballot proposals as long as the proper procedures have been followed. See State ex rel. Semik v. Cuyahoga County Bd. of Elections (1993), 67 Ohio St.3d 334, 617 N.E.2d 1120. The city charter already has term limits for the mayor and law director, and these amendments could be construed as allowing those current officeholders to serve an additional eight years, though this is not certain. If these officeholders file to run for these additional terms, a declaratory judgment or mandamus action would have to be filed by those affected – opposing candidates or citizens. If these amendments were not intended to extend these two officeholders’ terms, the legislation should have been specific to leave no doubt, but it didn’t. The amendments limiting city council and the finance director’s terms seem appropriate given that term limits are not currently provided in the Stow charter.

Hope this helps.

Marvin D. Evans
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney

So where does this leave us? 1) Term limits will remain on those two offices, regardless. 2) Mayor Fritschel’s career could continue. If the mayor issue passes, she would have the ability to run for two more terms. The prosecutor is not clear about that, but I think the answer is easy. 3) The Charter Review Commission’s hard work and brainstorming on term limits was all for naught. The commission unanimously desired a chance to give voters consistency. Council wanted simplicity. Neither will happen.

The board also axed the “Yes for Term Limits” and “No against Term Limits.” Jim Costello added that language through an amendment. The board also cleared up the wording so that it begins with the word “shall.”

Politically, this was a big victory for term limit advocates in Stow. The November election can do no long-term harm. Still, I think it’s sleazy. And despite my support of term limits, I will fight to rectify the problem.