Direct Democracy Denied- Columbus Community Bill of Rights w/ Bill Lyons & Terry Lodge, Esq

Carolyn Harding with Bill Lyons and Terry Lodge, organizer and legal council for the Columbus Community Bill of Rights and the Ohio Community Rights Network, fighting to protect the water, air, soil & rights of Columbus Metro and communities facing environmental, social, racial & economic harms throughout Ohio. Bill Lyons is a mathematics and science teacher who has taught nearly 40 years on four different continents at the high school and college levels. He is a co-organizer of the Columbus Community Bill of Rights group and is president of the Ohio Community Rights Group. He has been an activist since 2015 when he got involved in the community rights and rights of nature movements because he is passionate about local democracy and social and environmental justice. Terry Lodge has 50 years’ experience as an activist and civil and environmental rights lawyer. As a field attorney for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund since 2014, he’s worked to gain ballot access for grassroots initiatives proposing controversial local laws such as the rights of nature and control of the commons. In court, he’s opposed nuclear power and weapons, corporate welfare, mountaintop removal mining, fracking, and has supported free speech and diversity in the workplace. He’s been recognized by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, has received an Access to Justice Award, and is a past Ohio Civil Liberties Union Champion. On April 16, 2021, The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, issued a press release stating, “A lawsuit demanding the temporary suspension of a unique Columbus City Charter petition rule was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio on April 14, 2021. Petitioners seeking to ban harms from the fracking industry within Ohio’s capital city and surrounding watershed filed the lawsuit in June 2020, arguing a June 2020 deadline on signature gathering was unconstitutional during the Covid-19 pandemic and should be extended. The deadline effectively killed ballot access for the in