The latest ruling in a lawsuit about a proposed Athens retirement center has prompted city officials to file an objection to a related referendum scheduled for the November ballot.
Judge Michael Ward of the Athens County Common Pleas Court ruled March 22 that two city council ordinances passed in December were administrative actions ' not legislative ' and therefore could be appealed under his jurisdiction.
One ordinance approves a proposal by Columbus-based National Church Residences for construction of the center on property near Stimson Avenue that it plans to lease from Ohio University. The second ordinance gives OU a revocable license to use the city's Morris Avenue right-of-way. Only the second ordinance is addressed by the referendum, which was spurred by petitions submitted to the Athens County Board of Elections in mid-February.
Ten Athens residents opposed to the project filed two lawsuits in late January appealing the ordinances. Since then, one resident removed himself from the combined suit.
Ward's latest ruling cut the number of eligible plaintiffs to two of the remaining nine. He ruled that only residents Christine Fahl and Patricia Rae Stokes had standing to appeal because their affidavits showed that they would be directly affected by the development and that they had properly followed meetings about the project and stated plans to appeal the development.
In their filed arguments, the city and OU had compared the administrative revocable licensing to the legislative act of the city vacating a street. Ward wrote in the March 22 ruling that the analogy did not hold because the administrative act did not deal with the permanent surrender of land.
After Ward said the actions were administrative, Mayor Ric Abel and city Law Director Garry Hunter filed an objection last week with the board of elections, arguing that the referendum should be removed from the November ballot. The ruling implies that the actions are not subject to referendum in accordance with past precedents in Ohio law, they wrote in the objection.
The city will pursue a court order to remove the item from the ballot if the board does not respond by the end of this week, Abel and Hunter wrote in the objection. The board had offered no response as of Friday.
NCR spokesman Patrick Higgins has said he expects the lawsuit to have little immediate effect because NCR is in the process of planning construction and developing drawings and is doing little physical work at the site. NCR developers had hoped to break ground at the site in August.
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Kantele Franko
