By Mike Curtin
Guest Columnist
The Ohio Constitution, our second, is from 1851. As befits a 172-year-old document, it endures by changing with the times, as voters see fit.
The constitution holds many stories of how ordinary Ohioans confronted change, argued over how to adapt and voted to amend their founding document to enable progress.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed Ohio from a largely agrarian to a highly urbanized, heavily industrialized state. In 1900, fewer than half of Ohioans lived in cities. By 1940, two-thirds did.
This led to significant constitutional change. In 1912, voters adopted an astonishing 34 amendments to usher in a new era. One of them authorized municipal home rule, allowing cities to adopt charters to govern many of their own affairs.
Among other powers, cities won the right to acquire, build and operate utilities — street cars, electric plants, gas, water and sewer.
However, the 119 delegates to Ohio’s 1912 constitutional convention had argued long and hard over how to provide equity in the coming competition between publicly owned utilities and investor-owned utilities.
The compromise: the home-rule amendment would limit public utilities to servicing customers mostly inside their municipal boundaries. Services sold outside city limits could total just half the amount sold within.
For about four decades, this restriction caused few problems. But after World War II, suburbs boomed as automobile-loving Ohioans moved to them.
As the 1950s unfolded, smaller-scale, privately-owned providers of water and sewer services struggled to meet rising demand in both cities and increasingly crowded suburban communities.
Homeowners, health officials and newspapers urged removing the 1912 limits on the sale of municipal water and sewer services. The General Assembly listened and placed State Issue 1 on the November 1959 ballot. If approved, the amendment would remove the limits — but only for water and sewer, not other utility services.
On the Sunday before the vote, the Columbus Dispatch strongly urged passage, calling it “a simple matter of necessity and health. Our urban areas are becoming more and more thickly populated. If they are denied sewage and water facilities as they continue to expand, the time could come when sanitation would break down to the detriment of us all.”
Ohioans approved, with 58.3% of the vote.
History has a way of hiding behind the headlines. Over the long course of Ohio’s constitutional history, this is just one of many noncontroversial but vital amendments to win passage with less than 60% approval.
Statehouse lawmakers who now propose requiring future amendments to attain 60% approval to win passage have paid scant attention to the lessons of Ohio constitutional history.
In the 20th century, Ohio voters approved many amendments to reform government and improve their quality of life — amendments that won with less than 60% of the vote.
Among them: civil service reform, a 10-mill limit on unvoted property taxes, bond issues for roads, buildings and other infrastructure, county home rule, a minimum wage, eliminating straight-ticket voting, anti-monopoly safeguards and more.
Now some lawmakers want to rush the 60% barrier question to the November 2023 ballot in hopes of undercutting an expected reproductive rights amendment.
Since 1851, Ohioans have been trusted to decide scores of proposed constitutional amendments — from momentous to mundane — by simple majority vote.
Moving the passage threshold from simple majority to 60%, history shows, would have significant consequences — including unintended ones — on Ohioans’ ability to guide their state.
If enacted, the 60% proposal would have a profound effect on self-rule in Ohio. Lawmakers owe Ohioans much careful research, a thorough process of public education and debate and consideration of likely long-term consequences.
Mike Curtin is a former editor and associate publisher for the Columbus Dispatch and a former two-term state representative who served on the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission. His column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Lima News editorial board or AIM Media, owner of The Lima News.
