Setting the Record Straight — Rebuttal #2

This one comes straight from the Mayor at last night’s council meeting. And it sounds like a real concern on the surface…

OBJECTION: “This amendment is almost as long as our entire charter, which has lasted nearly 70 years.”

He’s right about the page count. The CCA is 17 pages. Our existing charter is 16. So let’s talk about what that comparison actually means… and what it doesn’t.

Length isn’t the same as burden.

The Grove City Charter was adopted in 1958. It covers the fundamentals of city government… how council is structured, how the mayor is elected, how we borrow money, how we recall an official. It’s a framework, and a fairly lean one. It was never designed to anticipate a 310-acre data center campus drawing 20 megawatts of power and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day from our community.

For context: 1958 is also before most offices were using computers at all. If you wanted city records back then, you found a filing cabinet, not a database. Nobody writing that charter was anticipating the world we live in today.

The CCA is about the same length because it’s doing something the charter has never had to do before. It creates a new process from scratch… with clear thresholds, defined timelines, a path for citizens to appeal, and enforcement language that actually has teeth. Every one of those provisions is there because without it, a well-funded legal team finds a way around it. We’ve learned that the hard way watching what happened in our neighboring communities.

Here’s an analogy. When you buy a house, the purchase contract is a lot longer than the deed. That’s not because the contract is bloated. It’s because protecting you takes more words than just transferring ownership.

Detailed protections aren’t a flaw. They’re the point.

We’d actually ask the question the other way around: what would the Mayor have us cut?

The thresholds that define when a referendum is triggered? The timeline that keeps the city from sitting on a determination indefinitely? The appeals process that gives residents a meaningful path if the city gets it wrong? The anti-circumvention language that prevents a large project from being broken into smaller pieces to avoid a vote?

Every page in this amendment is there because residents deserve protection that actually holds up. A two-paragraph amendment would be picked apart before the ink dried.

Let’s put the size in perspective.

The Ohio Revised Code section governing municipal initiative and referendum… the process our own charter already uses… runs considerably longer than 17 pages. The state’s requirements for how cities adopt zoning ordinances? Longer. The deed restrictions on many Grove City subdivisions? Longer.

Nobody argues those are too long. They’re as long as they need to be to do the job right.  AND they are referred to in the GC Charter, so if we were to include all that stuff our charter would be MASSIVE…

And here’s the bottom line.

The fact that ordinary Grove City residents… not a law firm, not a lobbying shop… produced a 17-page amendment with documented reasoning behind every provision? We think that’s something to be proud of. It means we did the work.

If the Mayor has a specific provision he thinks is unnecessary, we genuinely want to hear it. Point to the page. Make the case. We’ve said from the beginning we’re not attached to our specific words… we’re attached to the outcome. That offer still stands.

But “it’s long” isn’t a reason to vote no. It’s a reason to read it.

Which you can do right here: https://protectgrovecity.org/cca-amendment/

Heard something we haven’t addressed yet?

This series runs as long as the objections do. If you’ve come across a concern about the CCA… from a neighbor, at a meeting, or online… send it to us at info@protectgrovecity.org. If it’s a real question, we’ll answer it publicly. We’re not afraid of the hard ones.

— The Protect Grove City Team