Midvale Mayor says newspaper coverage ‘disrupting’ village's public meetings

From The Times Reporter

... (Mayor) 

Cross said he intends to use his office to bring order to village affairs, including meetings of Village Council, over which he presides. Anyone who disrupts the meeting will be removed from the building by a police officer, he said.

"I don't think that anybody, be it a reporter, a citizen, a police chief, a whoever-it-might-be, has any business coming into a council meeting in any village creating disruptions in a council meeting," he said. "The village cannot get no kind of agenda done because of this Police Department thing."

Newspaper labeled as disruptive

He made reference to Times-Reporter coverage of the police issue when taking about activities he considers disruptive.

"I feel as though if the newspaper is going to keep putting big articles on the front page of the newspaper, I feel as though that maybe I need to get another reporter in there, or another newspaper in there," Cross said as he held the business card of the Times-Reporter staff writer who was interviewing him. "Because to me, it's disrupting my council meeting.

"If I can do anything about it legally, or whatever I have to do, if I can get some cooperation from The Times-Reporter, or whoever you work for or whatever, I'm going to try to do that.

"I don't know if I can keep the press out of my meetings. I don't want to do that. But for all this disruption that it's caused this town, with this part-time and full-time Police Department  thing, I feel as though in my ... council meetings, it's a big disruption to me — from village people, from the newspaper, from everybody involved in it."

Ohio's Open Meetings Law, also known as the Sunshine Law, requires meetings of public bodies to be open to the public, including representatives of the news media, with only certain exceptions.

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Short list of superintendent candidates a secret, Columbus school board says

From The Columbus Dispatch

The Columbus Board of Education has a short list of candidates recommended to become the district’s next superintendent — but it doesn’t want you to know who they are.

“This isn’t ‘American Idol’ where contestants are ranked and then cut off a list one-by-one,” board President Gary Baker said in an email Wednesday. “This is an important responsibility the Board takes seriously, and we respect every one of those highly professional individuals who have expressed an interest and will provide them the appropriate courtesy.”

Despite repeated requests by The Dispatch and three days of candidate interviews in closed sessions that wrapped up Wednesday evening, the district won’t say with whom it held interviews.

The district, which said it would be transparent about the selection, said no records on whom the district met and when even exist, despite the fact the board needed to coordinate with people potentially traveling to Columbus from across the nation, typically affording them taxpayer-reimbursed transportation, lodging and meals.

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As Cleveland hides Amazon bid, other cities share details, some unwillingly

From The Plain Dealer

While Cleveland leaders refuse to share with the public the details of the public subsidies they are dangling to bring Amazon's second headquarters to the Northeast Ohio, some of their counterparts in competing cities have shared details of their respective bids with their taxpayers.

Some have done so without the blessing of the business and political leaders controlling the bid process. In other cases, politicians have remembered who elected them and made details available. Some have redacted parts of the bid, but nonetheless offered far more than anything Cleveland's business and civic leaders think you deserve.

Those details from other cities are instructive because they indicate how much taxpayers are being asked to kick in. We're talking billions of dollars, in one case. Of course, Northeast Ohio taxpayers aren't being asked anything. Their tax dollars are being pledged in secret.

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Media questions prompt joint task force on Dayton schools to cancel meeting

From The Dayton Daily News

The new Facilities Task Force studying potential closure of Dayton Public Schools buildings canceled its initial meeting Tuesday morning after the members had already arrived.

At issue was a disagreement between Task Force members and local media about whether the meeting was open to the public under Ohio’s open meetings law.

RELATED: Task force to study potential school closures

Reporters from the Dayton Daily News and WHIO-TV, plus local activist and blogger David Esrati, arrived early for the 9:30 a.m. meeting, and were allowed to set up cameras and tables.

But as the meeting was about to start, DPS spokeswoman Marcia Bonhart asked the media to leave, saying the event was not open to the public. A Dayton Daily News reporter immediately presented a letter suggesting the meeting qualified as an open meeting under Ohio law.

Acting DPS Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli, Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein and Task Force co-chairs Mohamed Al-Hamdani and Jeff Mims scanned the document, then told the media they believed the meeting was closed to the public.

Charlie Russo, research professor of law at the University of Dayton, said the Task Force’s attempt to meet in private did not seem to fit the requirements of Ohio’s open meetings law.

“The spirit of the law, not just in Ohio but elsewhere, is that public business should be the business of the public. People should know what’s going on,” Russo said. He acknowledged that there are some exceptions allowing private meeting. “But none of those exceptions applied. I don’t believe they made the right call.”

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Dispatch Editorial: Think before saying 'no'

Columbus Dispatch editorial

For central Ohioans, the $26,000 legal bill the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio owes for fighting a public-records request adds insult to injury: First SWACO tried to keep public records away from the public, and now the public gets stuck paying for it.

And the worst of it is, the public still doesn’t know why a private yard-waste company was allowed free dumping of an astounding amount of garbage — enough to ordinarily have run up tipping fees of nearly $700,000 — at SWACO’s publicly owned landfill.

That’s why The Dispatch demanded to see emails that went between SWACO employees last May, when the newspaper ran a story by reporter Bill Bush revealing that Kurtz Brothers, the Groveport company that SWACO pays to take the yard waste collected from central Ohio households, dumped nearly 800 truckloads over a six-month period without payment.

Kurtz Brothers said its 2005 yard-waste contract with SWACO allows it to dump, at no charge, the odd bits of garbage — pop cans and plastic bags and such — that inevitably get mixed in with loads of yard waste. Over the years, Kurtz typically dumped a few dozen such loads per year.

When that turned into hundreds in 2016, Kurtz claimed that the extraordinary influx was all “foreign material” that it had plucked from yard waste and allowed to build up on its property over the years. Experts are skeptical that anywhere near that much garbage could have come from a decade’s worth of yard waste.

SWACO officials said they were concerned about the dumping, yet couldn’t explain why the public landfill allowed it to continue for so long.

Clearly, every central Ohioan whose trash fees (paid through private haulers or through municipal taxes) support SWACO had an interest in knowing what was going on. When SWACO refused to provide emails without redactions, The Dispatch went to the Ohio Court of Claims, employing a year-old mechanism that allows anyone denied public records to seek mediation.

Rather than release the emails, SWACO lawyered up. It claimed that the emails are exempt from public-records law and argued they are subject to attorney-client privilege because the agency’s in-house attorney had been copied on them.

Simply involving an attorney doesn’t make a conversation privileged; public records can be withheld for attorney-client privilege only when the discussion involves a pending or imminent lawsuit — suing someone or being sued. That wasn’t the case with the SWACO emails.

The Court of Claims public-records appeal, created by state statute in 2016, has given any member of the public an easy and inexpensive way to challenge a government body that denies a request for public records. A $25 filing fee, no lawyer required, triggers a process that begins with mediation and can elevate to formal hearings and a court ruling.

About 90 cases have been filed and, so far, more than half have resulted in Ohioans getting access to records that bureaucrats initially denied.

Open-government advocates say it’s prodding governments to think twice before denying records requests improperly. If SWACO had done that, it could have saved central Ohio taxpayers $26,000.

AEP seeks exception for notices on hearings

From The Columbus Dispatch

American Electric Power failed to publish legal notices for hearings held last April on a rate proposal, and now the company wants a mulligan.

Columbus-based AEP disclosed its error with a filing last week and is petitioning the Public Utilities Commission to make an exception to the rule that requires that notice of those hearings be printed in local newspapers. As an alternative, AEP suggests holding an additional hearing, which would receive proper notice.

The move is an unusual one. The PUCO has no record of a utility company making this type of mistake since the law for rate plans was updated in 2008.

The rate proposal at the heart of this issue is still under review and would run through 2024.

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Fight against mugshot sites yields little success

From The Herald Dispatch

Mike Anderson was an 18-year-old freshman at Texas State University when he was busted with less than a gram of weed. Police arrested him, took his mugshot and he spent the night in jail.

The legal consequences for being caught with such a small amount of marijuana - just enough for a joint or two - were minimal, but expensive. Prosecutors offered to drop the charges if he attended a drug program and did community service, and he could later get the record of his arrest expunged for about $500, wiping the history of his arrest from public view.

"After I got it expunged, I thought it was pretty much a done deal," he said of the order granted earlier this year.

But the next time he Googled his name, he realized the ordeal was far from over. His arrest photo was posted on Mugshots.com. The page was one of the top results for anyone who might be looking for him. And as Anderson applied for internships - a graduation requirement for mechanical engineering majors - recruiters who initially seemed interested would offer the spot to someone else.

"It wasn't right," said Anderson, a junior, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of drawing further attention to his mugshot.

"I called (Mugshots.com) on the phone, and they told me basically the only way I could get the mugshot to come down was to pay a certain fine. Proof of expunction wasn't valid."

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Court to review lethal drug records Ohio wants to shield

From The News Tribune

Ohio's prison system must produce records about lethal drugs it wants shielded from public view for justices on the state Supreme Court to review privately as part of an open records dispute, the court ruled.

At issue is a lawyer's request for multiple records about Ohio's lethal injection drugs, including who made them and when they expire, and whether a state secrecy law prohibits that information from release.

The high court ordered the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction on Dec. 29 to provide the records for justices to review within 10 days.

Among other disputed documents are correspondence related to Ohio's efforts to obtain those drugs, and correspondence from the prison system to or from any manufacturers.

The open records complaint was brought on behalf of Elizabeth Ochs, a Denver lawyer whose firm, Hogan Lovells, previously represented a Virginia death row inmate challenging the constitutionality of that state's lethal drugs. Killer Ricky Gray was executed in January 2017 for killing a family in 2006.

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Lawsuit claims Kidron Volunteer Fire Department should be subject to Ohio’s Open Meetings Act

From The Independent

Three Wayne County men have filed suit asking that the Kidron Volunteer Fire Department be declared a public agency subject to Ohio’s Open Meetings Act.

The Kidron Volunteer Fire Department, and its operation, is once again under scrutiny.

Three Wayne County men have gone to court, arguing that the department, a nonprofit agency that receives public funding, is not a private agency.

Earl Miller, of Dalton; Mark Greer, of Lawrence Township; and Jedd Sprunger, of Dalton filed a second lawsuit in September in Wayne County Common Pleas Court seeking to have the department declared a public body that must hold open meetings and advertise its meeting schedule. The lawsuit asks that the department be ordered to comply with Ohio’s Open Meetings Act.

Ohio’s Sunshine Law requires public bodies to hold open meetings, and offers specific reasons for allowing public entities to meet behind closed doors.

The same men, plus a fourth person, had filed a lawsuit early this year in the Ohio Supreme Court alleging the department did not comply with requests for financial documents, minutes and other information the group considered to be public records.

The men argued in court documents that the fire department has a legal duty to provide the requested information because “both fire prevention and EMS are defined as governmental functions.”

The fire department settled the public records case by agreeing to produce documents requested in the future, according to a news release from law firm representing the men. However, the department maintained it was not subject to the Open Meetings Act.

James Matthews, an attorney with Baker, Dublikar, Wiley & Matthews in North Canton, represents the Wayne County men. He said the fire department believes it does not have to hold open meetings because it’s a private fire company.

Matthews said the department “functions largely off of tax money and also public grants. It’s our position that, since the board has agreed it is structured under the Ohio Revised Code, that it does have to comply with open meeting requirements.”

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Florida officials indicted in public records scandal

From The Miami Herald

In a move that should send a chill down the spines of thousands of elected officials in Florida, former Martin County Commissioner Anne Scott, a retired judge originally from Chicago, and current Commissioner Ed Fielding were booked Tuesday night into the county jail after being indicted in a public records scandal that already cost taxpayers upward of $25 million.

Scott, 69, who lives in Hobe Sound and lost her seat after one term in November, and Fielding, 73, were charged with two counts each of failure to permit inspection and copying of public records.

Each count is a misdemeanor that could, at worst for them although unlikely, see the elected officials spend up to a year in jail.

The arrests came hours after another sitting commissioner, Sarah Heard, was charged with a noncriminal violation of the same statutes, a set of laws that force public officials to surrender records of communications with other politicians, staff members and the public. Heard’s charge is a civil violation akin to a parking ticket, and she faces fines of up to $500.

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