To Oberlin voters:

When a disaster or infectious disease hits, rules get broken. We don’t need to change the Oberlin City Charter to acknowledge that. If the Charter is to speak to communications technology issues, it should do so explicitly — not merely delete a line that sets forth a public-access ideal.

This is the proposed change, proposed as “Issue 10”: Shall we vote to approve this strikethrough?

All meetings of the Council, whether regular or special, shall be open to the public except as is otherwise authorized by State law. Meetings of Council shall be conducted in accordance with the provisions of State law or as may otherwise be prescribed by Ordinance of Council approved by at least a 5/7th majority of its members and provided that said Ordinance shall assure that the public is able to hear and observe the discussions and deliberations of all of the participating members of Council.

I plan to vote NO on Issue 10.

This change is being proposed to accommodate times when City Councilmembers might only be able to participate in City Council meetings via an audio connection. But it does not insert any language about technology. Instead, it solely removes a line that expresses explicitly an important spirit and requirement of public participation in our local government. The Charter Review Committee, who proposed all of these ballot issues, perhaps was reacting to the Zoom practices of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was not thinking about technology broadly. They might want to think about “deep fakes” too. I don’t think that we’ll have any City Council member, nor faker, calling into a City Council meeting with their “sorry, I’m sick” voice, but that is now more possible. I have heard the proponents of Issue 10 merely say that they want to make sure that the city has “technological flexibility” in the future.  If technological change is the issue, then they need to consider it directly, and speak to it explicitly.

I will be voting NO on Issue 9, of course. All City Councilmembers should be accountable to us, the voters every two years. Let’s keep this democratic control of our local government.

Though I will probably vote yes on Issue 15, I encourage a different approach, in general, for many aspects of nondiscrimination statement lists: aspects of being, rather than more socially constructed boxes. If we simply say that we “do not discriminate on the basis of beliefs, birthplace, appearance, nor anatomy,” that covers most of the issues often referred to with these terms: creed, religion, country of origin, ethnicity, race, sex, size, disability, sexual orientation, gender, gender presentation, gender identity, and gender expression. We all have those four aspects of being even and especially when we don’t know our birthplace or the birthplace gets re-named or destroyed, regardless of the terms applied by various cultures, time periods, and viewpoints.

Aliza Weidenbaum