Columbus has no legal process for Civilian Review Board appointments
City leaders moved forward with 11 appointments to a new Columbus Civilian Police Review Board last week, even though a process for picking members is not spelled out in the city charter or code book.
That leaves unclear whether Mayor Andrew J. Ginther is empowered to play any role in the appointments. Nevertheless, he did nominate the initial nine appointees to the board.
A legal question about the process became apparent after the council made a last-minute move at the April 26 meeting to add two appointees to the board who hadn’t first been nominated by the mayor. The council voted unanimously to seat both of them, enlarging the review board to 11 members instead of nine.
“The Mayor did not nominate the additional two people for the Civilian Police Review Board,” Ginther spokeswoman Robin Davis said in an email. “They were council’s additions,” adding that the mayor is grateful that all 11 members agreed to serve.
“Council did discuss and come to an agreement with the mayor’s office” on the additions, said Lee Cole, spokeswoman for the City Council. She said there was no disagreement on the appointments.
The additions also show that there is no legal limit on the total number of members to the panel, only language in the city charter — approved overwhelmingly by voters last November — that it must be an odd number.
Left unclear as well is how the board’s chair will be determined. The ordinances naming the new members don’t indicate that former City Attorney Janet Jackson is the chair, as officials have said.
Cole said the council plans to rectify these shortcomings through legislation in the near future after The Dispatch questioned the the use of two different methods for the appointment process.
“Any procedural issues will be addressed at the next council meeting jointly with the mayor’s office clearly as the appointing authority,” Cole said, confirming that there is nothing yet approved governing how appointments are to be made.
Last year, city officials couldn’t seem to agree on who should have the power to appoint the panel members when the council voted in July to put the review board measure before the voters in November.
Council member Rob Dorans said at the time that several key aspects were not yet addressed in the charter amendment that created the panel, including the “appointing authority,” because “we could not come to a consensus at this point.”
The issue still seemed unresolved in mid-December when Ginther announced that he would begin taking applications to serve on the commission, with a mid-January deadline to apply. Ginther said then that a working group that drafted recommendations for the review board’s creation and operation had proposed that board members “would be appointed by (the mayor) in consultation” with the City Council.
In fact, what Matthew Smydo, Ginther’s interim education director who had been on loan to assist the advisory work group, had told council members during a question-and-answer session was the work group recommended that both the mayor and council select the review board members.
Smydo didn’t elaborate on how that would be done, but the actual written recommendation from the advisory group was later determined to say that the mayor “should recommend” members, which would require council’s “approval.”
When asked by a reporter during the December announcement to clarify who would have the “final say,” Ginther turned to City Council President Shannon Hardin at the news conference announcing the application process and asked him whether the full council would need to vote on his picks.
“Yes,” Hardin responded, saying the council will handle the appointments like those made to the city Board of Health and numerous other panels.
“Obviously, it will force the administration and council to work together,” Ginther quickly added.
The city council approved 10 of the 11 review board nominees last week by unanimous 7-0 votes. They included: Janet Jackson, of Berwick; Chenelle Jones, of the Northeast Side; Mark Fluharty, of Reynoldsburg; Rich Nathan, of Westerville; Randall Sistrunk, of the Southeast Side; Charles Tatum, and William McIntosh, both of Berwick; Mary Younger, of German Village; and council appointees Aaron Thomas and Brooke Burns.
However, the appointment of Kyle Strickland, a Short North resident, a lawyer at Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and a member of the working group that helped develop the review board’s structure, was approved by a 5-2 vote.
Council members Mitchell Brown and Priscilla Tyson opposed Strickland’s nomination after he posted on his personal Facebook account on April 21 that there was no need to wait for the facts on the fatal shooting the day before of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant by Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon as bodycam video shows the teen was about to stab a young woman.
“Don’t let anyone tell you to ‘wait for all the facts’ while they simultaneously frame their own narrative of what occurred,” Strickland wrote. “We’ve seen this story before. Over and over again.
“Ma’Khia Bryant was a child. She was shot and killed by Columbus police. She should be alive today.”
The post had raised questions about Strickland’s ability to remain unbiased as a member of the Civilian Police Review Board.
Of the 11 members appointed to the review board, six have terms that expire in April 2023, and five in April 2024. All terms are to shift over to three years after 2023, Cole said.
In March, Ginther nominated his nine picks and announced that former City Attorney Janet Jackson would serve as the newly formed panel’s first chair, pending her approval by council. However, the ordinances passed Monday don’t indicate any of the members have been designated as chair.
Typically, chairs have greater oversight and input into the workings of the board’s operation, which will include a new inspector general — yet to be hired — who would be empowered to investigate claims of alleged police misconduct or uses of force for the board’s consideration.
The Columbus City Attorney’s office declined to weigh in on who currently has appointment power to the new police-oversight panel, directing questions to the council, which “interpreted” for itself how it should seat members.
Any legal advice provided by the city attorney’s office is confidential, said spokeswoman, Meredith Tucker. She declined to say if the office provided any such advice.
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