Anti-fracking proposal back on Youngstown ballot for 6th time; failure doesn’t faze proponents

Two citizen-initiative charter-amendment proposals will be in front of Youngstown voters in the fall election.

One of them should be extremely familiar while the other will probably leave plenty of people wondering what it’s about.

The first is the Youngstown Community Bill of Rights anti-fracking proposal back for its sixth effort.

It was rejected twice in both 2013 and 2014, and lost by only 2.5 percentage points in November 2015, the last time it was on the ballot.

If it fails again, members of the committee that backs the proposal say it will return until it passes.

You’ve got to give them credit for persistence.

Also, the committee’s ability to not only get the needed valid signatures, but to have so many of those signing petitions to get the measure on the ballot is impressive.

The committee turned in 2,445 signatures and needed 1,259 valid ones to be placed on the ballot.

The Mahoning County Board of Elections determined 1,993 signatures were valid. That means 81.5 percent of those signing the group’s petitions were registered voters with their correct addresses, and their signatures matched what is filed with the board of elections.

The collection of signatures was done by committee members.

Part-time workers’ rights

Also qualifying for the ballot is a proposal requiring employers in Youngstown to give part-time workers increased rights such as health care benefits and equal hourly wages as full-timers.

Bob Goodrich of Grand Rapids, Mich., who is backing and funding the part-time issue, paid $15,000 to a professional firm out of Chicago to have people circulate petitions. By coincidence, Goodrich said, the firm hired people from Grand Rapids to come to Youngstown to gather the signatures.

The part-time workers organization turned in petitions with 3,500 signatures. The elections board ruled that only 1,636 were valid.

That’s more than enough to exceed the needed 1,259 valid signatures to get on the ballot, but the success rate was only 46.7 percent.

Many of the rejected signatures were because those signing either didn’t live in Youngstown – it’s amazing how many people have no idea where they live – as well as not being registered voters, and their signatures and/or addresses weren’t legible, Goodrich said.

“It was a little bit of a struggle” to get valid signatures, he said. “It took us five weeks for a small number of signatures.”

Even though the firm Goodrich hired had a low success rate, he said he isn’t concerned.

“You can’t do it with volunteers,” he said.

Well, you can as the anti-fracking backers showed. But it would have been a good idea for the firm Goodrich paid to hire local people who know Youngstown from Boardman, Campbell and Coitsville.

As I reported in June, Goodrich’s goal is not only to increase the rights of part-timers in Youngstown, but to get women – particularly unmarried lower- to middle-class – to vote in the general election.

He said he chose Youngstown and Cleveland because they’re both in Ohio, a key presidential swing state, and the number of valid signatures needed isn’t very high.

Cleveland City Council on Wednesday approved the proposal – like Youngstown, it doesn’t have a choice – and it will appear on the ballot in that city, too.

Youngstown council will meet next Wednesday to approve four items for the Nov. 8 ballot. Three of them are merely housekeeping measures that are already not being enforced.

Those three from a charter review commission are: deleting a $12 meeting penalty when council members don’t attend meetings, eliminating language requiring the city to disburse money by check only, and removing a reference to appointing a member of the abolished park and recreation commission to serve on the planning commission.

City council rejected four other commission recommendations.

Redistricting

Among the four was a proposal to require the redistricting of the city’s seven wards no later than 90 days after a decennial census if it shows at least a 7 percent difference in population between the largest and smallest wards.

Instead, council agreed to redistrict if the difference is at least 10 percent and have it done no more than 180 days after the census.

Of course, it will be up to voters whether to accept or reject the two citizen-initiatives and the four charter proposals.