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Minutes of a Public Hearing October 6, 2010 Page 6 1912, like I said was the last time Ohio held a Constitutional Convention. They added basically Article XVIII to the 1857 Constitution which is still our Constitution today. I would love to attend a convention because I would like to edit the Ohio Constitution which is like 43 pages and has a lot of outmoded provisions so I can't resist my red pen when I deal with that Constitution at some future date. So charter review commissions are very frequent around communities. Usually on a 10-year basis. Mayfield Heights has 5 years. They debated once whether to extend that to 10 years. I think they are very fruitful for the community because you get to rethink how we want to govern ourselves. There's two basic perspectives on government. It's kind of what's dividing the country today in some ways. I always trace them back to two of the founders. T'homas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton who fought each other tooth and nail, but both of them were very important to founding our govemment. I always like to say that there's only one place that I have seen in the country where they sit side by side. That's Cuyahoga County. But they don't look at each other. They didn't like each other. , Jefferson really believed in trying to have government as close to the people as possible and attentive to the people as possible. Ohio joined the Union in 1803 with Jefferson as President so we have kind of been a Jeffersonian State in many many ways. So we like to vote on a lot of things because that's typically what Jefferson advocated by keeping the government really close to people. In contrast, Alexander Hamilton really talked about representative government. What you wanted to do was create a system in which representatives of the people could meet and talk in detail about how to govern. They would be accountable to the people. But for Hamilton, and even for Jefferson, the people are not the voters. That's Andrew Jackson's view. The founders talked about it and that's what you are talking about in the community really. The people as past citizens and the traditions that they started for the community, the current citizens and their needs, and the future citizens in making the community sustainable for the future. That's how the founders really visualized to people. So Hamilton said you can address those three types of people best by having a system in which representatives can meet and really talk through a lot of the issues. What you want to make sure of is that those people really do represent the community. . That's why Mayors are not representatives of the community, that's the Council. One person can't represent. The President does not represent the United States, it's the Congress that does that. So, for Hamilton's