A Franklin County judge ruled that provisions stripping away citizens’ ability to enforce clean air violations included in last year’s Ohio budget bill were unconstitutional.
The Oct. 14 ruling should preserve the 50-year-old rule Ohioans have used to hold air polluters accountable, called the air nuisance rule. The ruling also upholds the right to use community air monitoring data in regulatory actions.
The case was filed last year by Sierra Club, the Ohio Environmental Council and other environmental advocates. They made a successful complaint that adding the provisions to last year’s budget bill violated the state's single subject rule.
“What that means and what that does and requires is that all of us as residents of the state of Ohio know what is in a piece of legislation,” said Miranda Leppla, the attorney who represented the environmental groups in the case.
“Each piece of legislation is only allowed to be about one topic. And it also has to explain what that might be, that topic, in the title of the legislation.”
The ruling was made outside of trial, by looking at the facts of the case.
In its final order, the court wrote: “The Court finds that the challenged provisions are in complete disunity with the rest of the appropriations bill, which is the exact problem the one-subject rule was designed to prevent.”
The order continued: “The Air Pollution Amendment is an environmental law change that bears no connection to the appropriations provisions in H.B. 96.”
The court also orders the Ohio EPA to retract its request to remove the air nuisance rule from Ohio’s state implementation plan of the Clean Air Act and it can’t take any further action to try removing it. The agency requested the U.S. EPA remove the rule on behalf of the state legislature last November.
The Ohio General Assembly has often viewed the single subject rule as advisory rather than law, said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council.
“I think it's really important that cases like this hold them accountable for the constitutional requirements they have when crafting legislation,” they said.
This isn’t the first attempt at removing the air nuisance rule. The rule was deleted in 2020, until the U.S. EPA under the Biden administration reversed that decision in 2024.
“We are hopeful that this will be one step closer to ensuring the air nuisance rule is kept in Ohio's state implementation plan,” Tavenor said.
Middletown resident Donna Ballinger was also involved in the complaint. She hoped to use the air nuisance rule and air monitoring data to document air violations from nearby steel industry, according to last year’s complaint.
The order is appealable. The Ohio Attorney General’s office, which is representing the state in the case, didn’t respond to WYSO’s requests for comment. The Ohio EPA didn’t respond by deadline.
