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Minutes of a Public Hearing October 6, 2010 Page 10 The second thing, and it's especially true at the State level. Referendum really became popular during the progressive era because government in the United States was very corrupt. We still have parts of that. Cuyahoga County is an excellent example of corrupt government. Counties for some reason in Ohio, people don't reform them. It takes an extraordinary effort. Cities have been reformed, but counties have been extraordinarily hard to reform in Ohio. To counter the corruption, the progressives wanted referendum so that the people could speak on issues rather than have corrupt governments deal with them. Absent corruption, referendum like I said to me raised a lot of issues about deliberation. It's hard to use an election to deliberate. At the State level, more and more of these campaigns are being financed by out-of-state interests. . This is a real concern I've got. They are not only not a deliberative process, you've got people funding these from outside of Ohio. The really effective ads that give Strickland, where these people talk in their office about how he hasn't done anything, they are not made in Ohio or financed in Ohio. They are from outside the State. I watched the soda pop manufacturers which are not my manufacturers; my wife and I have lost 120 pounds in the last 10 months, we gave up soda pop; but the soda pop manufacturers used the ability of referendums in Ohio to take off the tax on them. Well, if we want public services and they aren't going to pay taxes, who's going to pay them? We are going to make up the difference. The referendum to me have a lot of issues around whether a community can really deliberate about the issue or not rather than hold the representatives accountable for how they deal with the issue. The second thing, when Lakewood went back to getting rid of the referendum on the water which is similar to what was talked about as the reasons for modifying, not totally eliminating but modifying, the referendum here on zoning is that Lakewood has a 100 year old sewer system. Your water rates finance your sewers. Lakewood has its own sewers. We don't belong to a regional sewer district. We have our own sewage processing plant which has to be upgraded in the future. The sewers are, thankfully they were built to be separated sewers which means the wastewater is different than the storniwater. Cleveland has joint sewers, one sewer that carries both. That's why you can't swim in Lake Erie after a storm in Cleveland because all of the sanitary waste gets dumped into the lake. Well those sewers were breaking down like I said. The only way to finance the repair of those sewers is to raise water rates and the estimate was that water rates in Lakewood will probably double every five years. In part because the water system itself is now 100 years old. This countty is faced with a major problem in infrastructure like that gas explosion in California. Well I'm in a house sitting on top of probably a 100 year old sewer, my house was built in 1914 and the water mains are probably that age also. So, we looked at the Charter Review Commission, we said, Lakewood's got to address those issues. If we're going to remain a