The Legislative power of the City, except as reserved to the people by this Charter, shall be vested in a Council, consisting of four (4) members elected at large and seven (7) members of which shall be elected from separate wards.So, if this thing passes, the population of a Cleveland Council ward jumps from around 22,000 (the size of Solon or Brookpark) to more than 60,000 (bigger than Lakewood).
I think it's fair to call that a two-thirds reduction in the democracy available to Cleveland citizens.
The seven new wards would have to be drawn right away, even though the current 21 wards would remain in place until the next election in 2009. So any Council Member who wanted to win one of those seven redrawn seats, let alone one of the four at-large, would have to spend his or her entire term raising money and getting known to voters outside his or her own ward. Good luck getting your Councilman on the phone for the next four years!
Of course, potential campaign bankrollers like Tony George, Michael Gibbons, and Peter Kirsanow's partners at Benesch, Friedlander -- not to mention Sam Miller, Dave Daberko, Dan Moore, Mal Mixon, Ed Crawford, etc. etc. -- would have no such problem.
Which is the whole, you know, point.
So... will this monstrosity make it onto the ballot? Probably yes. A charter amendment petition only requires signatures equivalent to 10% of the votes cast in the last regular municipal election. That'll be the one coming up, in which the turnout could easily be less than 70,000. So 7,000 to 8,000 valid signatures are probably all the Ohio Citizens' League needs to force a vote -- maybe in the Spring 2006 primary, maybe earlier.
Can it pass? Trying to cut direct Council representation by two-thirds seems like a pretty big stretch, maybe an overreach. But maybe Kirsanow and company don't care. Maybe the idea is just to keep all the Democrats in Cleveland busy and distracted next year, when the GOP wants us to focus as little as possible on the statewide election. You have to admit that would be pretty clever.
Funny thing is, there's a regular, mandatory twenty-year review of the whole City Charter coming up in 2008, a year before the next Council election. It's laid out in Chapter 39 of the Charter, right after the description of the Charter amendment initiative process. You'd think the Citizens' League folks would have noticed it when they were researching their petition. You'd think they might have said: "Oh, look... here's a process for raising our concerns about the size of City Council in an open, orderly way. Let's start educating and organizing people to participate in the Charter Review."
But for some reason, they didn't. Maybe they just didn't notice that next paragraph. Who can say?
You could ask them if they show up outside your polling place with the Democracy Reduction Petition next Tuesday.