Look Ahead Am. v. Stark Cty. Bd. of Elections, Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-2691.
On July 18, 2024, the Ohio Supreme Court determined that the Stark County Board of Elections misused executive sessions to discuss and plan the purchase of new property, specifically voting equipment. A company filed a complaint based on the Board’s decision to enter executive sessions on four separate occasions to discuss and plan for the purchasing of new voting systems. Both lower courts upheld the Board’s decisions after concluding that executive sessions were permitted for any purchase of property, but the Ohio Supreme Court disagreed. Reversing the decision, the Court clarified that executive sessions are permitted to discuss the purchase of property only to consider information “which would give an unfair competitive or bargaining advantage to a person whose personal, private interest is adverse to the general public interest.”
Ohio’s Open Meetings Act permits a public body to enter executive session for the following reasons:
To consider the purchase of property for public purposes, the sale of property at competitive bidding, or the sale or other disposition of unneeded, obsolete, or unfit-for-use property in accordance with R.C. 505.10, if premature disclosure of information would give an unfair competitive or bargaining advantage to a person whose personal, private interest is adverse to the general public interest.
The courts agreed that the statute had a plain meaning, but they disagreed over what, exactly, that plain meaning was. According to the Supreme Court, the difference is based on punctuation and the rules of grammar. The lower courts both relied on the “rule of the last antecedent,” which applies a limiting clause or phrase to the noun or phrase that it immediately follows. Using that rule, the courts argued that the premature-disclosure clause only applied to the sale of unneeded, obsolete, or unfit-for-use property.
However, the statute’s use of commas modifies the rule of the last antecedent. Relying on several leading treatises on statutory interpretation, the Ohio Supreme Court argued that separating the antecedents and the qualifying phrase by a comma is evidence that the qualifier is supposed to apply to all antecedents. Under this interpretation, the premature-disclosure clause applies to every listed reason to start an executive session involving property, including the purchase of property, and not just the last reason as the lower courts suggested.
What this means for your district? This is yet another reminder that Districts must review and understand the public meeting exceptions rather than rely on memory and past practice. While Districts often recess into executive session to discuss property purchases, Districts cannot call executive sessions to discuss such purchases unless they can show that the premature disclosure of information would give an unfair competitive or bargaining advantage to a person whose personal, private interest is adverse to the general public interest.