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Good senator faces term limit
(by Dave Lange - January 28, 2010)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Good senator faces term limit
State Sen. Timothy Grendell, R-Chester, whose district includes Geauga and Lake counties, along with the northeast corner of Cuyahoga County, is a man who stands up for his people.
He has been fighting relentlessly in Columbus in a thus-far-futile effort to overturn the unconscionable 2006 state law that stole away local communities' rights to protect their citizens from the hazards of drilling oil and gas wells in residential neighborhoods.
He has succeeded in delaying the imposition of new state regulations that would impose expensive new septic-system regulations on homeowners.
Recently, Mr. Grendell took it upon himself to file a lawsuit on behalf of homeowners in Auburn Township's Taborville community to stop the organization that oversees their local recreation center from drilling for gas and oil there. Backed by old deed restrictions, he convinced the drilling company to back out of the project and was able to protect the character of the neighborhood.
Now, Mr. Grendell is planning a class-action lawsuit against the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., which received the state's blessings to discontinue discounts that had been promised in writing to several hundred thousand area households.
The list of the senator's good work against bad state government could go on and on.
But the voters of Ohio want to run Tim Grendell out of office. He is now halfway through his second four-year term in the Ohio Senate. Back in 1992, those voters, by an overwhelming margin of 68 percent, approved eight-year term limits for state legislators, effective in 2000.
Mr. Grendell cannot run for a third consecutive term in the Senate. So last week, he announced that he's running for the Ohio House seat recently vacated by Matthew Dolan, a fellow Republican who has other aspirations. Mr. Grendell, who previously won the House seat after his wife, Diane Grendell, was term limited in 2000, is planning to run in the May primary. He may or may not face the person who is chosen by the Republican Party to fill Mr. Dolan's term through the end of the year.
If Mr. Grendell were to win the Ohio House seat to continue representing many of his same constituents, his Senate seat would be vacated, and the GOP would select someone to serve out the final year of his term.
The geniuses who dreamed up term limits don't seem to care that this is the way it works -- what with politicians hopping around from one seat to another and back again and with political parties appointing cronies to empty seats when duly elected representatives hop around.
Much worse, they don't care that Mr. Grendell and other legislators who really represent the people are forced to play this silly game.
Term limits were concocted by self-described conservatives who thought too many Democrats were getting elected too often in Ohio. But many of the victims of their half-baked scheme were experienced Republican legislators like former state Sen. Grace Drake, of Solon, who was forced out of office after 16 years of exceptional public service.
Most voters at the time indicated that they liked their own representatives, but they didn't want citizens in other districts to keep re-electing theirs.
A study done in 2004 and '05 by the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron found that 66.8 percent of respondents believed term limits produced good government and helped the state.
Mr. Grendell is a good example of how the majority went wrong.
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