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Minutes of a Public Hearing October 6, 2010 Page 11 competitive community and attract ,people to live in the community, we can't do it with infrastructure that doesn't work. We've had four sewers collapse in the last five years. Again, from our viewpoint as a Charter Review Commission, it was very difficult to see how a referendum would deal with that issue consistently over the long term. We can't replace all these sewers avernight. What we're doing is kind of street by street and there's a nice plan, depending on the age, the condition of the sewers, pick certain streets, replace the pipes in those streets, rebuild those. Well, that means you've got to have long-term funding in order to do that and you're going to borrow some of that money and people are not going to be willing to lend money if a11 of a sudden people can refuse to raise the rates in the middle of the process of doing that. So I would argue that in many many ways you are not losing the ability to vote because the main vote you are going to cast is for your representatives. That's what you want to follow. One of the major i'ssues, at the local level, we don't have good media at the local level. We know more what the President does than what the Mayor does in most communities. That's not a good sign because what the Mayor does is going to be more important to you than what the President does in your daily life. There's a group in Lakewood, we started our own newspaper, The Lakewood Obsef-ver, it's an on-line print newspaper which I contribute to periodically and we have our own what we call the observation deck where citizens can interact about issues in Lakewood. But that's absent in most communities. That, to me, makes it very difficult to hold elections on issues where's there's not going to be much coverage. There may not be a lot of understanding of those issues and the consequences of the issues can be dramatic sometimes for the future of the community. Now, if your values really value voting, then that's a whole different issue and that's legitimate. That's the Jeffersonian type of perspective, so you're probably going to like having referendum. But you've got to be careful how you do it because they can have consequences, especially for any kind of long-term planning. So; in Lakewood, even though we knew the water rates are going to rise and they're going to be unpopular, surprisingly they turned out being relatively quiescent. People haven't complained about the water rates. My water bill more than doubled since I was on the Commission. To us it was important for the future of the community and it's the kind of issue that I would not want to see go to an election because people aren't going to listen and we've got a 100 year old sewer and a 100 year old water main and we are going to replace these in a overall long-term plan street by street which is going to require increasing revenue over time. ? I ?