Portage County man asks Ohio Supreme Court to impose $7,000 in fines for township’s violations of open-meetin - cleveland.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A Portage County man asked the Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday to order Rootstown Township to pay him $7,000 for 14 violations of the state’s open-meetings law, but Republicans and Democrats on the court didn’t appear convinced the amount was appropriate.

Between 2015 and 2016, the Rootstown Township Board of Trustees went into executive session over a dozen times without appropriately moving into the closed-door session with a roll-call vote. Brian Ames sued in 2017 over the illegal sessions. An appellate court ultimately determined the township was in violation of Ohio’s open-meetings law 14 times.

The state law governing open meetings says that any person can sue a governmental body in common pleas court to enforce the state’s open-meetings law within two years of the alleged violation. If the court agrees a violation occurred, it grants an injunction to prevent similar actions from happening in the future and orders the entity to pay a civil forfeiture of $500 to the person who sued, plus court costs and reasonable attorney fees.

But Ames only received $500 for one injunction despite 14 violations, as well as $1,000 in attorney fees.

“The issue before the court is simple and straightforward: When a public body commits multiple violations of the open meetings act, may a court ignore all the violations, save a single violation?” said Curt C. Hartman, a Cincinnati attorney who specializes in open-meetings act cases and is representing Ames. “Because that is the practical effect of what the 11th District (Court of Appeals) decided in this decision.”

However, Rootstown believes that $500 for one injunction is an appropriate fine. So do the Coalition of Large Ohio Urban Townships, the County Commissioners Association of Ohio, the Ohio Municipal League, the Ohio School Boards Association and the Ohio Township Association.

In a friend-of-court brief, the groups said that $500 per violation incentivizes open-meeting “bounty hunters” to bring claims that are ultimately paid for by taxpayers.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost submitted a brief in favor of Ames’ in the case.

James F. Mathews, a North Canton attorney representing Rootstown Township’s trustees, said that if the violations were for different sections of the state’s open-meetings act, there could be separate injunctions and separate fines.

In addition to executive-session provisions, the law has numerous sections, such as how the entity has to provide advance notice of the meeting, how minutes of the meeting need to be kept and exemptions to the public-meeting law.

But in the Rootstown case, only one section of the open-meetings law was violated, so only one injunction and fine is necessary, Mathews said.

Hartman however, said that despite only one injunction issued against Rootstown, each violation should have generated its own fine.

“As a practical matter, a court does not need to issue the same piece of paper two times, 10 times, 20 times,” he said. “An injunction doesn’t become all the more powerful because the court published it 14 times.”

Justices seemed skeptical of Hartman’s arguments.

Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, asked why violations couldn’t be consolidated as injunctions. “So you can consolidate 14 injunctions into one?” she asked.

“Correct, as a practical manner,” Hartman said.

“All right,” O’Connor said. “Why can’t you consolidate 14, $500 civil fines, civil forfeitures into one?”

“Because I believe that is not consistent with the purpose and intent of the General Assembly in passing the open-meetings act,” Hartman said.

Justice Michael P. Donnelly, a Democrat, asked Hartman if “any person who becomes aware (of violations) be allowed to watch a public body and see violation after violation, and then in order to get the statutory damages wait to file an injunction?”

Hartman responded that the legislature wrote the law so that ordinary citizens could enforce it.

“It’s being done in the public interest,” he said.

Hartman said that the injunction addresses future actions of the public body, but the fine is for the past violations.

“The civil forfeiture addresses the past violations that have already occurred,” he said. “It would be redundant to say it takes care of future events too. It’s actually remedial, it’s punitive and it’s vindicating to those who bring these actions. Because the General Assembly has the expectation that public officials are supposed to comply with the law. They’re supposed to get the training. They go to the township association, municipal league, conferences and get the training, yet they consistently and repeatedly violate these laws.”

Justice Patrick F. Fischer, a Republican, probed the case from several angles.

He said the legislature may not have intended to impose the $500 fine per violation because it didn’t make it explicit in the law.

“They could have added two words, ‘per violation,’” Fischer said. “And those words are not there.”

But he also wondered whether a $500 fine would be severe enough to punish governments for violating the law, except for the possibility that judges hold elected officials in contempt for future violations of the injunction.

“Not only contempt, your honor, but a prosecuting attorney or the attorney general can bring a claim to seek removal of a member of a public body that’s violated” the injunction, said Mathews, the Rootstown attorney.

Hartman, however, disagreed, saying that for many elected officials, $500 is just the cost of doing business.

“I do a lot of public records, open-meetings act (cases) and I’ve found, to my shock and dismay, when pubic officials are not using their own money but are using taxpayers’ money, their attitudes and their perception changes,” he said. “And it’s not their money, so they’re not as concerned as you or I would be or as they would be if it’s their own money.”

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source: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/03/portage-county-man-asks-ohio-supreme-court-to-impose-7000-in-fines-for-townships-violations-of-open-meetings-law.html

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