'A right to know': Granville village, township sued over alleged open meetings violations
A former Granville Village Council member and mayor has sued the village and township over the municipalities' draft community plan as well as their procedures for executive sessions.
Dan Bellman, who served two terms on village council and as mayor for two years before leaving office in 2003, filed a lawsuit Aug. 11 in Licking County Common Pleas Court, alleging the village of Granville, Granville Township and their comprehensive plan working group violated the Open Meetings Act and procedures for executive sessions.
The lawsuit, which was mentioned Saturday during the village council's biennial retreat, names all the council members, township trustees and the comprehensive plan working group.
The lawsuit alleges the township and village created a public body when they created the comprehensive plan working group and that the group unlawfully met in private without complying with the Open Meetings Act. The lawsuit also alleges trustees and council members went into executive sessions, which are lawfully closed sessions in which public officials may discuss sensitive and confidential issues, without properly stating the reason for them.
Matt Miller-Novak, a Cincinnati government accountability attorney representing Bellman, said if governments deliberate in private, deprives people of their right to access that information, which Ohio law provides.
"Individuals have a right to know what's going on. It's not necessarily about agreeing or disagreeing necessarily with everything your government does, but people are entitled to have as much information as they are entitled to have to make whatever decisions they make," he said.
The township settled its side of the lawsuit Feb. 1 after going through mediation and will pay Bellman $6,000, according to court records.
The village also went through mediation with Bellman on Jan. 23 but could not resolve the matter, Mayor Melissa Hartfield said while reading a statement about the case during the council's retreat.
"We shortly realized that Mr. Bellman's interest was less about open meeting laws or executive sessions and more about a desire to make himself the eighth member of council with unfettered power beyond the one vote democracy affords each of us," she said.
When asked why they couldn't come to an agreement with the village, Miller-Novak said Monday he was not allowed to share information about a court-ordered mediation.
"We understand that the government seems to have done that a little bit at a meeting, but we're inclined to actually follow rules on our side, even if they're not," he said.
The case will continue with discovery, Miller-Novak said. It is scheduled for a pretrial conference April 15 before Licking County Pleas Judge Thomas Marcelain, according to court records.
In April 2022, the township and village created an 11-member working group of community stakeholders to update the area's joint comprehensive plan, which outlines the community's future as it prepares for Intel's arrival at Licking County's western edge. The working group included representatives from the Granville area's core entities: the village, township, Denison University, Granville Exempted Village Schools, Granville Recreation District and Granville Area Chamber of Commerce.
Hartfield said Saturday that Bellman's allegations are an attempt to conflate a group of stakeholder volunteers into a public body that would comply with meeting notices and meeting minutes, which is not the case. She said the group collected information and data from the public and provided that to village staff for compilation.
After a year of work, a draft plan was prepared and shared with the community through the village's website, talks to different community groups and public session at the township service complex and village hall. Feedback from community members, including Bellman, was added to the plan after those sessions, Village Manager Herb Koehler said Monday.
The impact of the lawsuit is two-fold, Koehler said. Work on the comprehensive plan, which is still in draft form, has halted while litigation is ongoing; and the litigation will take up significant time and resources, when the village should be focused on protecting its water source, water and sewer service partnerships, establishing economic development tools and other priorities as the area faces generational change because of Intel.
"We have a community here without a comprehensive plan at a time when it's sorely needed, and this distraction of litigation. We have to proceed through this in a certain way and it becomes this massive distraction that, boy, I could use this time to focus on other things that are more important," he said.
mdevito@gannett.com
740-607-2175
Twitter: @MariaDeVito13
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Granville village, township sued over alleged open Meetings violations
