THE FULL STORY: ‘It’d be devastating’: Dozens of local villages face dissolution vote under new Ohio law
House Bill 331 is a fairly straightforward measure that won’t have a tangible effect until the early 2030s. At that point, the law states, Ohio’s villages will be audited to determine if they meet new state standards. They must offer at least five public services and, from one census to the next, must have fielded at least one candidate for every village opening for mayor, council, clerk or associated boards.
Failure on either of those counts, under the new law, automatically gives village voters the power to dissolve that village’s government by majority consent in an early 2030s election.
I reported on H.B. 331 a few times throughout its legislative process, and each time it garnered a surprising amount of attention from our readers. The response, added to a personal fascination with local government and my own hunch that this bill would impact many more villages across Ohio than was being advertised, cemented my belief that there was a larger story there.
So, I set out to perform my own audits (which the bill entrusts to elected county auditors), of sorts.
Our ‘audit’
It turns out that, under the law, villages only need to pass the public services portion of the audit at the time the review actually occurs, which gives villages until at least 2031 to become compliant. So it’s too early to say what kind of impact that part of the bill will have.
But through interviews with joint sponsor Rep. Adam Mathews, R-Lebanon, I began to understand just how strict the political candidate portion of H.B. 331 is: A single uncontested village seat throughout an entire decade is enough to put a village on the chopping block.
I turned to records from our area boards of elections to see which local villages failed that requirement, starting in 2021, then moving to 2023, and then checking for 2025. I found that the vast majority of the 37 local villages in Montgomery, Butler, Clark, Greene, Miami and Warren counties had already failed the state’s test. Others still could fail that test in the remainder of the decade, or could still fail the public services aspect of the audit.
Their failure doesn’t guarantee that these villages will dissolve, but it does guarantee a vote in the early 2030s. And that vote sets the stage for what I presume will be dynamic conversations between governments and their constituents, wherein village voters will have a great deal of power.
Hitting the road
I traveled to various villages in our area, with a focus on the smaller villages, to talk with local residents about the bill. My interactions repeatedly found that local officials weren’t fully aware of the extent of the law.
My interviews suggested two things: Village leaders often aren’t kept in the loop on the state’s decisions, and that villages seem to have an insular view of politics — their interest is inherently on what’s happening down the street, not in Columbus.
Some other interesting things I found during my reporting:
- There are plenty of people who want to be a village candidate but end up getting their petitions denied, most often due to clerical errors.
- Ohio law states that, if someone misses a candidacy filing deadline, they still have a few weeks to become a write-in candidate. But, Ohio law also bars anyone whose initial candidacy petition was invalidated from running as a write-in, at least for that particular office in that election. This ends up barring a significant portion of folks, particularly at the village level, who have an interest in serving in elected office.
- Some village officials might think they’re providing enough public services to pass an audit because they’re unaware of H.B. 331’s caveats. For example, a village may think it offers fire protection because it’s home to a township fire station, but the bill specifies that the village cannot rely on another government’s services. This applies to police, fire, EMS, water, and sewer services.
- Ohio’s definition of a village is any municipal corporation with a population under 5,000 at the time of the U.S. Census. The village of West Milton, which had a 2020 population of 4,697 and failed the candidacy requirement in 2021, could theoretically avoid a dissolution vote altogether if the 2030 Census finds that the village clips above 5,000 residents. All other villages I examined are at least 700 residents away from breaching that benchmark.
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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