An Ohio law passed late last year puts the future of many small villages in Southwest Ohio in question.
The law requires villages to provide at least five of 10 public services listed by the state and field candidates for all electable village positions in the decade prior to an audit — or face a dissolution vote.
Avery Kreemer with Dayton Daily News reports many villages are expected to fail their new state-mandated audits. WYSO's Jerry Kenney spoke with Kreemer to learn more.
This interview transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kreemer: It's straightforward but convoluted at the same time. There was a law passed late last year that looks to regulate villages. And it does so by enacting two new standards on a village: that they have to provide, and this is directly provide, at least five of 10 listed services that the state spells out, and they need to do that at the time of an audit. And that audit occurs after the decennial census. So this audit would occur sometime after 2031, most likely.
The other prong to that is that these villages have to have fielded a candidate for every single elected village position in every election over the prior decade. So when I was reviewing these two things, I wanted to find out which villages I knew would fail that already. And as it turns out, when I was looking into the bill, the villages only have to pass the public services aspect of this bill at the time of the audit. So it's now 2025, and if that audit were to occur in 2031, then these villages would have six or so years to become compliant with them. But a closer reading of the bill suggested that if a village had failed to put up a candidate for an elected position in 2021, then they already would have failed that audit.
And so failure of that audit doesn't necessarily mean that these villages will dissolve, but it automatically triggers a vote of dissolution for the villagers themselves after the audit. And so what will end up happening will be a lot of these villages, 28 of them in our area, actually, will have to have a conversation with their villagers to kind of argue that they are worth keeping around and that the governments themselves are worth keeping around for the villages.
Kenney: This looks like it all stemmed from House Bill 331, which was voted into law with bipartisan support. Can you tell us the reasoning behind the legislators' thinking, the benefit that this new law would provide?
Kreemer: I think there are two major points of consideration here. One being that I think Ohio has long been ridiculed for having too many taxing jurisdictions. And the more taxing jurisdictions that exist within the borders of the state, the less control the state government itself has on how much taxes are being paid by individual residents.
And so if you have a village that can put on its own property taxes and then you have, they're in a conservancy district that can put on their own property taxes and a library district and so on and so forth, you end up getting something that the state can't control very well. So that's one part of it.
I think the other part of is a genuine consideration that a lot of these villages depend upon the townships that they are in, or at least nearby, for the services that their villagers get, and so it almost creates a redundancy. For example, a lot of our nearby villages use... fire protection that is provided by the township, and they use water that's provided by the county, and so on and so forth.
And so there's a legitimate question, the lawmakers think, of what is the purpose of these local governments if the services that they are providing to their villagers are actually just through the townships and the counties and whatever else.
Kenney: And how are the village managers and councils reacting to all of this?
Kreemer: That's a good question. The village officials that I spoke to, they seemed aware of the bill, but they didn't necessarily seem aware of the extent of the bill and how strict the bill actually was.
I talked to the village mayor of Donnelsville who told me that he was actually encouraging his council to run for reelection instead of just relying on being appointed for reelection, under the belief that if you got enough people to run for re-election they could dodge a dissolution vote.
But Donnelsville had already failed the audit. He just didn't know that. And in fact, in 2025, the election that's coming up for them, they only fielded three out of four village council candidates anyway. So they would have failed it anyway.
In my estimation, I thought that the public perception of this bill was focused a lot more on the public services aspect of it, and from what I can gather so far, it seems like the public services aspect won't be the most difficult thing for the villages to comply with. It will actually be the village candidate requirement.
Kenney: Avery Kreemer is a Statehouse news reporter with the Dayton Daily News. The article looks at dozens of local villages facing dissolution under a new Ohio law. We'll link to that on our website. Avery, thanks so much for the conversation.
Kreemer: Thanks for having me.
