TOLEDO, Ohio – Toledoans voted Tuesday to protect Lake Erie with its own Bill of Rights, to empower city residents to file lawsuits on behalf of the Great Lake.

But is the new law constitutional when Lake Erie is overseen by four states and two countries?

A Wood County farmer named Mark Drewes filed suit over the city charter amendment, which passed with 61 percent of 15,000 Toledo voters.

“The Charter Amendment is an unconstitutional and unlawful assault on the fundamental rights of family farms in the Lake Erie Watershed – like the Drewes’ fifth generation family farm,” Mark Drewes’ attorney, Thomas Fusonie, said in a statement. “The lawsuit seeks to protect the Drewes’ family farm from this unconstitutional assault.”

The suit argues the bill of rights violates federal constitutional rights, including equal protection and freedom of speech, and is unenforceable for its vagueness. The suit argues for an injunction to prevent enforcing the law.

In an interview with cleveland.com, Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler said the law oversteps its jurisdiction. If Lake Erie was within Toledo limits, a bill of rights would likely hold.

“The people of one city don’t get to declare how a given resource could be used or protected when that resource is shared with lots of other jurisdictions,” he said.

Other questions with the law include Toledo’s home rule authority, federal preemption and the vagueness of the law.

“Merely saying we’re protecting the lake doesn’t tell us what the policies should be and what sorts of measures should be taken,” Adler said.

The Lake Erie Bill of Rights is the first rights-based law in the United States that specifically acknowledges the rights of a distinct ecosystem, according to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which helped craft the language. The law follows the Rights of Nature movement that inspired New Zealand’s 2014 granting legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest and India’s courts ruling in 2017 that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers have rights to thrive.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund also pushed for city laws against natural gas drilling, later overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court.

Here’s what the Bill of Rights says: It “establishes irrevocable rights for the Lake Erie Ecosystem to exist, flourish and naturally evolve, a right to a healthy environment for the residents of Toledo, and which elevates the rights of the community and its natural environment over powers claimed by certain corporations.”

Toledoans have been pushing toward the ideas since 2014, when the could not use its water supply for three days because of a harmful algal bloom. People couldn’t use city water to brush their teeth or take a shower or drink.

“We take on that role of being stewards and guardians of this watershed,” Markie Miller, an organizer for Toledoans for Safe Water, told cleveland.com in January. “We’ve got plenty of examples of times when the lake and watershed are used as property. It’s like this big free regional toilet, and we want to change that.”

Markle said she hoped other cities around Lake Erie would adopt similar bills.

Adler said he understands the frustration of conventional approaches to environmental protection.

“I’m just skeptical this is a viable alternative.”

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