Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Columbus Dispatch

The coalition leading the effort to repeal Senate Bill 5 delivered a record of nearly 1.3 million signatures to the secretary of state today to place Ohio’s new collective bargaining law on the November ballot.

A parade of more than 6,000, led by a banner proclaiming the “million signature march,” rumbled through Downtown this morning.

We Are Ohio, the group leading the referendum effort, organized the march up Broad Street to Fourth Street, where a 48 ft. semi-truck carrying the 1,298,301 signatures in 1,502 boxes collected will be unloaded. The parade also included retired fire trucks, a drum line, bagpipes and loud motorcycles. It took about 15 minutes to pass.

Volunteers began unloading the boxes of signatures shortly after noon.

“This is the people’s parade. You are truly one in a million,” We Are Ohio spokesperson Melissa Fazekas said, addressing the crowd and the media during a post-parade press conference in front of Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office.

We Are Ohio needs about 231,000 valid signatures to have Senate Bill 5 placed before voters. Husted has a staff of 60 ready to work this weekend to sort the signatures by county, count them, then distribute them to county boards of elections for validation.

Husted’s spokesman, Matt McClellan, said the signatures will be stored in one the office’s biggest rooms on Fourth Street. He also said Husted’s staff will begin working through the signatures tomorrow and that the signatures must be validated by July 26.

Meeting the threshold also would stop the law from taking effect until the November election.

Given the number of signatures collected compared with the number of valid signatures required for a ballot issue, it’s a virtual lock that Ohio’s voting public will decide on Senate Bill 5 on Nov. 8.

We Are Ohio shattered the previous state record for the previous record for a statewide petition effort, but Fazekas said she “couldn’t guarantee” victory on the ballot.

“We can’t guarantee anything, but we’re confident with the amount of signatures we’ve collected that we have a lot of support on our side,” Fazekas said.

The previous state record was 812,978 signatures for the 2008 measure putting a proposed casino for Clinton County on the ballot. That proposed constitutional amendment was trounced by voters.

Charged with defending Senate Bill 5 this fall is Republican Gov. John Kasich, who signed the law and considers it “a tool” for local governments to use to control costs, and Republican legislators who passed the bill through the General Assembly.

During a news conference called to discuss education funding through the federal Race to the Top program, Kasich said Senate Bill 5 opponents “need to think about what they’re doing and what’s in the bill.”

“God bless them,” Kasich said. “Many of them have been misled. Some of them are frustrated. Many of them are angry. I understand that. I know. I live out there amongst all the folks. But we’ve got to be together on this. It’ll all work out.”

Building a Better Ohio, the coalition forming to defend Senate Bill 5, is adding current Ohio Senate Republicans’ spokesman Jason Mauk as its communications director.

Mauk sent out an email this morning declaring that he is taking a leave of absence from his public job with the Senate to work on the campaign.

Of the nearly 1.3 million signatures We Are Ohio collected, Mauk said “that’s a respectable number, but if you consider that Ohio has 350,000 government employees, getting immediate family to sign petitions would get you to number they’ve reached.”

“The point is not the process, but the substance of this legislation and what it will do to lead Ohio to a more prosperous direction,” Mauk said. “We have nothing but the highest respect for our government employees, but we also want them to have jobs and perform vital services for our local communities.

“Too many of them are being laid off and their jobs eliminated under the current system, and that has to change.”

Columbus Democratic Mayor Michael Coleman, who marched at the head of the parade at the outset and later stood on Broad Street shaking hands with those marching including several who appeared to be members of Columbus safety forces, echoed many in the parade when he said the referendum effort was in response to “the state legislature and governor’s attempt to bust unions.”

“This is about more than just an overreach by our state government, this is about an attempt to bust organized labor after generations of developing rights,” Coleman said.

Dispatch reporter David Eggert contributed to this story.