mjkuhns wrote:This is interesting. And I have to say that I feel quite appreciative of direct democracy's importance, in general, lately.Bill Call wrote:You are wasting your time talking to the Mayor or Council members. If you and your neighbors don't want a 240 seat bar next door you need to make the precinct dry. You can try to do it before the bar is built or after the bar is built. If you lose one vote you can petition for another. As far as I know you can force a vote every year.
Is the process simply a citizen initiative, as described in section 9.2 of the city charter? (Which is online here, for anyone who doesn't have their sample copy from last year handy.)
If that's the case, I presume that one would then consult the 2015 mayoral results, and need valid signatures equal to 1/10 the total votes for mayoral candidates within the relevant precinct?
Mr. Kuhns
Thank you again for the homework, and post. This also underlines why every vote is important! Low turnout plays out in so many ways. Voting a precinct dry, recalls, and of course who is selected.
Mr. Lee
I think what I was getting at is the never ending chase/race to capture cool. As we all know once something is branded as cool it is no longer cool.
And the problem, with no plan, except secret plans to gut the city of assets for private uses and dreams. We start to scramble a board and mix things up. Some love to mix things up. Trump would seem to thrive on it, more chaos, more control he thinks he have at the expense of the rest. It is as delusional as copying cool.
You take a sleepy, boring but quite nice community like Lakewood. Simple dreams, simple aspirations with a ton of success dedicating itself to intelligence through Schools, Libraries and public assets like parks. Then you pull City Health department trim staff, budget and hand off accountability to county. Then you dedicate yourself to craft beers and fads, and allow it to eat into residential areas, build bars across from schools, increase occupancy by 30% with outdoor dining and drinking, and slowly the sleepy, safe, clean community slips through the fingers and becomes dependent on trends. Making two sets of people happy, business owners and those selling fast enough to get out before the inevitable crash. Cool if ever captured is fleeting at best. We live in a county that is still hemorrhaging residents, while social media with very little deep thought holds up shiny object after shiny object while moving and dancing between the latest craze. Never noticing that it is an ever shrinking game of wack-a-mole. Ohio City, no Tremont, no Collinwood, no Hingetown, no Slavic Vilage, no Rabbit Island, no Downtown, no DowntowN, no Polish Village, no Euclid, no University Circle, no Greater University Circle (about to come online).
Meanwhile back in Lakewood, one of the most stable and resilient communities in the county, a small handful of small thinkers, have sold off our assets and gambled everything on a new multi-use strip mall and craft beer. Spent $200 million in actual assets that was making about $18 million a year for the community and business to something at best case scenario will bring in $1.7 million. Schools down over 500 students, bigger losses coming, as they sell off their assets for pennies on the dollars. The golden cows ares old for some magic beans watered by craft beer and fleeting fads.
Yeah the idea is a big winner in Austin, a city with nearly 20 times the population as Lakewood, in the desert with a massive college. How will it fair here? Let's throw the dice one more time we already lost our bankroll.
Change isn't hard to take, foolish changes are sometimes impossible to swallow or understand.
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