Credit: Avery Kreemer
Credit: Avery Kreemer
More villages may also find themselves on the chopping block if they can’t prove they provide enough services to justify their existence under the new law.
Joint sponsor of the state’s new bill, Rep. Adam Mathews, R-Lebanon, described the measure in a recent interview with this outlet as a way to ensure that villagers are getting services that are “commensurate” with the amount of tax its residents pay into that government.
But standing in the still-operational Historic Clifton Mill that his family has owned for decades, its inside walls covered with reminders of the past, Clifton Councilman Anthony Satariano said the bill is a major concern for people like him who have devoted themselves to their small communities.
“One of our concerns is outsiders, if they were to take over, would they appreciate, would they want to fight for and keep that beautiful quaintness, that history, when they don’t live here and didn’t grow up here,” Satariano said. “It’d be devastating. It chills us to think about somebody outside, unconnected, making decisions about all this quaintness and this beauty and this history. I shudder to think about that.”
The new law
Known as House Bill 331 and passed by the Ohio General Assembly late last year with near-unanimous bipartisan support, the new law will require every Ohio county to audit its villages after every decennial census.
The audit must be completed within the year after the U.S. census results are published. Failure to meet the audit’s standards will put the fate of the village’s government in the hands of its voters in the next general election that is more than 90 days after the audit’s findings are reported.
If a simple majority of villagers do vote to dissolve, the village’s laws become extinguished, its officials no longer hold office, and its territory becomes part of the township(s) the village existed in. Some resolutions, including zoning resolutions, would still apply.
This new audit will check whether villages are providing at least five out of the 10 following services: police protection, firefighting services, emergency medical services, garbage collection, water service, sewer service, road maintenance, parks or recreation services, human services, or a village-operated library.
One caveat: A village’s agreement to use another local government’s services (like the village of Donnelsville using Bethel Twp.’s fire and EMS services) doesn’t count toward the village. The law states that the village must provide the service itself, through a contract with a private entity, or through a contract “with a regional council” of three or more governments.
It’s also notable that villages will only need to pass this test at the time of the audit, which gives them from now until at least 2031 to become compliant.
But the new law’s second requirement is less forgiving and casts a wider net, and has already put dozens of nearby villages at risk by mandating that at least one certified candidate appear on the ballot for each elected village position — which can include mayors, clerks, councils, commissions and boards of public affairs — over the course of the decade.
In other words, any village that did not field a candidate for every single one of its open elected positions in the 2020s will automatically face a dissolution vote in the early 2030s, Mathews confirmed with this outlet.
‘Horribly unfair’
The Dayton Daily News analyzed local election data to find this requirement will automatically trigger 27 dissolution votes among the 37 villages in Montgomery, Clark, Butler, Greene, Miami and Warren counties based off failures to field at least one candidate in the 2021 or 2023 elections.
Another 10 villages could still be at risk if they can’t field at least a write-in candidate for every race this year, as well as in 2027 and 2029.
Villages guaranteed to have a dissolution vote under the new law include: Bowersville; Bradford; Casstown; Catawba; Cedarville; Clifton; Corwin; Covington; Donnelsville; Farmersville; Fletcher; Jamestown; Laura; Ludlow Falls; Millville; New Miami; North Hampton; Phillipsburg; Pleasant Hill; Potsdam; Seven Mile; South Charleston; South Vienna; Spring Valley; Tremont City; Verona; and West Milton.
Mathews told the Dayton Daily News that this hard and fast rule will bring “a method of accountability to the villagers.”
He explained that, when an open position fields no candidates, it either remains unfilled or is filled by an appointee, leaving villagers in a state where they cannot “give a yes or no on the actual people that are running to represent them.”
In 2021 and 2023, Clifton only had one person for council running in each election. There were four open seats in 2021 and two in 2023. Sitting councilmembers appointed the remaining open seats. But village officials say they could pass the audit if it was just based on services they provide.
“I think it’s horribly unfair,” said Councilmember Paula Lazorski. “We’re very self-regulating. We have all the facilities, we have all the emergency (services), we’re functioning in the black, we function within our budget and it’s quite comfortable.”
People won’t run
The village of Donnelsville, population 255, is a few miles west of Springfield. It’s bisected by U.S. Route 40, which is the primary feeder for the village’s small police force and mayor’s traffic court combo that bring in a share of the village’s operating funds.
Its village office, which holds council on the first Monday of the month, is in the same building on South Hampton Road that hosts the town’s post office and police station.
Donnelsville Mayor Hobert Kendrick, a former council member who was appointed to lead the village in 2023 after no one else ran for the job, said in an interview that he recently encouraged villagers to run for office in the hopes that the village could dodge an automatic ballot question.
Credit: Avery Kreemer
Credit: Avery Kreemer
But Donnelsville’s potentially fateful ballot question had already been confirmed by failures to field requisite candidates both in 2021 (when two candidates ran for four council seats) and in 2023 (when no candidate ran for mayor or for two open council seats).
At the time of reporting, Donnelsville has three certified candidates for four open council positions in 2025.
“Believe it or not, it’s difficult to get people to serve in those positions,” Kendrick told this outlet. Today, the village has an appointed mayor, clerk and four council members. One council seat sits vacant, and one more is filled by the village’s sole elected official.
He said he wasn’t surprised that many villages have already failed the state’s requirement. He explained that “people don’t want to take responsibility and do this stuff anymore.”
“You ask 15 people, one of them says yes, you know what I’m saying?” said Kendrick, whose village had a population of 255 at the time of the 2020 Census.
Technical hurdles
Villages, under Ohio law, must have fewer than 5,000 residents — any more residents would turn that village into a city. But Clark County Board of Elections Director Jason Baker said a village’s size isn’t necessarily related to how difficult it is to field candidates.
“I don’t think the size of the village matters that much, I think it’s the interest in the village,” he told this outlet in an interview.
There’s more to becoming a candidate than just having an interest. To become certified, would-be candidates have to pick up the correct forms, collect a small number of signatures from their peers, fill out the forms correctly and turn them in to their board of elections on time.
Every election, a handful of these forms get invalidated for one reason or another, often a clerical reason. Earlier this month, the Clark County Board of Elections invalidated petitions for five residents who wanted to run for village offices, including three of the five candidates wanting to run for the four open seats in the village of Tremont City’s council.
And, while the deadline to become a write-in candidate is always after the deadline to get your name on the ballot, residents who get their petitions invalidated at the first stage can’t then switch to a write-in candidacy, Baker said.
“Once the board of elections acts upon your petitions, meaning when the board members vote, and they vote to either accept or deny your petitions, if they deny your petitions you cannot file to be a write in candidate for the same office,” he said.
Baker called this rule “unfortunate,” because he knows of villagers around Clark County who had their original petitions denied but would be willing to run as a write-in candidate.
Smallest village
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
Some villages pass the candidate requirement but are not guaranteed to pass a services audit.
The tiny village of Jacksonburg is barely more than a rural intersection. It houses Wayne Twp. offices, a church and a handful of buildings. With a population of 55 residents, it’s the smallest village in the region and fifth-smallest in Ohio.
Jacksonburg has so far managed to field enough candidates to comply with the state’s new test (the village has four certified write-in candidates for four council openings this November). But it’s unclear what services the village provides.
The Ohio Auditor of State on Tuesday released its routine audit of the village’s finances in 2023 and 2024. The five-page audit is a list of “significant compliance or accounting issues,” including general fund disbursement of $12,035 exceeding appropriations of $0 in 2024.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
No village official could be reached for this story. The state audit noted that the village didn’t have a way for people to know when and where their council meetings are held.
Harveysburg under gun, again
The Warren County village of Harveysburg already recently faced a threat to its existence. Its voters in 2023 voted against a proposal to dissolve the village that a group of residents put forward in response to new permit and inspection fees.
But voters rejected a pair of levies to fund village police and general village services.
This means Harveysburg, founded in 1829, will survive to see its bicentennial. But it’s not clear if it provides enough services to avoid another ballot measure under the new law.
Harveysburg Mayor Jonathan Funk told this outlet that the village supplies or contracts out police protection, garbage collection, road maintenance and parks services — accounting for four out of five services the village would need to pass. Things like firefighting services and EMS, along with water and sewer services, are provided to the villagers by Massie Twp. or the county and therefore don’t count towards the village.
Still, Funk said he doesn’t have much of a problem with the new law. He said villages should provide services, and noted that dissolving a village could theoretically cut down on governmental redundancy.
“But, you know, any time you dissolve, you’re taking away more representation from the local government, I feel,” Funk said. “Right now, people can call me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem with this,’ and they can get helped on a local level.”
Won’t ‘just roll over and die’
Clifton is a relatively compact community nestled along the Little Miami River with three roads running north-to-south and five perpendicular streets creating a grid peppered with historic homes, lodging options, and community staples, like the opera house and water-powered grain mill, that have been around since the late 1800s.
Satariano described the village as a “time capsule,” and implored state lawmakers to rethink the law, noting this November they have four candidates for three seats.
Credit: David Sherman
Credit: David Sherman
“What the bill is saying is we’re being held accountable retroactively for things in the past. That’s not fair, in my opinion. Because, if we had known that, we would have doubled our efforts to make sure we didn’t fail on that,” he said.
Even if a village does fail the state’s audit, it will still be up to the villagers themselves to decide if they want to dissolve their government.
“I can tell you, Clifton would not just roll over and die. Whatever resources we have at our disposal, we would fight this. We think it’s worth fighting for,” Satariano said. “You know, why should some bureaucrat somewhere just arbitrarily decide, ‘Well, I want to start crushing little towns’ like us?”
Mathews told this outlet that he thinks lawmakers should keep the bill as-is.
“We’ve worked with many, many interested parties and went though a very rigorous committee process and amendment process,” Mathews said. “If there are reasons to change, we can evaluate that, however, having clear rules between now and the census allows our villages to step up and provide the services that our villagers expect.”
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