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Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Council February 27, 2006 Page 3 LEGAL DEPARTMENT - Ms. Calta The legal department had nothing to report. FIRE - Chief Mohr Chief Mohr reported that this coming Wednesday at 7:00 is the first volunteer meeting for the Big Shot program. Approximately 225 volunteers will be meeting over at Highland Heights' Community Room for the inoculation shot program. The gears are being shifted out of first from the planning stage to the actual operation part of this. Everyone is invited at 7:00 at Highland Heights' Community Center. Mayor Rinker added that volunteers are the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot of volunteers who axe professionals, medical healthcare and safety forces. It is a pretty comprehensive group of people coming together in this. Cheryl Garinger from Mayfield Village has taken the lead on this. It is something that County-wide is being supported by the Board of Health but has not really achieved quite a comparable framework that we have developed through Chief Mohr, the fire department and Cheryl's taking the lead. In a way, we are the model test case. Only a couple of places in the City of Cleveland on the west side is starting this up. We are cutting teeth on the east side with our program. It is very impressive. FINANCE - Phillip Brett Mr. Brett alerted Council that on this November's ballot there will be at least one, possibly two constitutional amendments offered to the voters of Ohio. One is going under the name of TEL, the Tax Expenditure and Limitation constitutional amendment and the MFOA, Municipal Finance Officer's Association as well as the Mayors and Managers Association are going to be spending the next months until November spreading the word about what bad legislation this is. This is an absolutely terrible constitutional amendment proposal. As it is written now, it would be virtually impossible for any school levies to ever pass again because it requires a majority of the electors in the community, not the majority of voter turnout to pass a spending measure. This is those who are registered. You would be required to have a turnout of at least 50% of all of the registered voters and all of those people would have to vote "yes" before an issue would pass. This is as it is written now. Additionally, it would limit your expenditures to 3.5% of your total expenditures from the year before, regaxdless of what happens to your healthcare cost, if for example we have a winter like `77 -'78 and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on salt, our only recourse would be to cut those expenditures somewhere else. We are going to try to get a facts sheet on this, but we will be writing letters to the editors and try to pinpoint exactly what this is. If anything, this is not so much an expenditure control as it is a disenfranchisement constitutional amendment because it is really saying to people, "You don't know how to govern yourselves, so we are going to make it so that your vote does not count and that is how it is perceived. They did something less onerous in Colorado. It was there for about 10 yeaxs. They went into the last rankings across the country in a number of areas. It was finally the business communities who thought it would be a good idea at the time it was proposed who really spearheaded a drive along with the Republican Governor to put a