Court orders further review of challenge to Nelsonville City Council membership.

Court orders further review of challenge to Nelsonville City Council membership.

The Ohio Supreme Court today directed an appeals court to decide again who the rightful members of Nelsonville City Council are.

In a unanimous per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court found the Fourth District Court of Appeals used the wrong standard to dismiss a case calling for the ousting of two Nelsonville council members. The case was brought by the council’s former president and a woman appointed to council.

Two events prompted the lawsuit. In February 2024, Council President Margarita Nguyen resigned and then rescinded her resignation the next morning. Then, when another council member resigned, Nguyen appointed Carol Powell to the vacancy. Others on the seven-member council refused to recognize Nguyen and Powell as council members. In April 2024, Nguyen and Powell filed a lawsuit in the Fourth District to place them on council.

In July 2024, the Fourth District dismissed the case, finding the women waited too long to file the lawsuit. Nguyen and Powell appealed to the Supreme Court, which disagreed with the Fourth District and remanded the case to the appeals court for further proceedings.

Council President Replaced, Barred From Meetings
Nelsonville is in Athens County. In November 2023, Nguyen was elected to a four-year term on city council. In January 2024, the council members elected her council president. On Feb. 17, 2024, she emailed other council members tendering her resignation “as council president and as council member altogether.”

“I will not be attending any other meetings. I am done!!!” she wrote.

The next morning, she emailed the other council members again, rescinding her resignation. No one responded to the resignation email, and it was more than a week later when three council members separately replied to the rescission email. The three generally stated that they accepted her resignation and would not accept the recission.

However, Nguyen presided over the council meeting the day after the three members insisted she had resigned. She then presided over the three council meetings on March 11, March 18, and March 25. Two of those meetings took place after three council members appointed council member Gregg Clement as council president to replace Nguyen. The four council members also considered Nguyen’s post vacant and appointed Opha Lawson to fill her seat.

Nguyen was out of town and missed the council’s April 8 meeting. When she attempted to attend the April 22 meeting, Nelsonville police officers physically prevented her from attending and presiding as president.

Appointment of Replacement Members Contested
Greg Smith was also elected in November 2023 to a four-year council term. Shortly before Nguyen purportedly resigned, Smith resigned. According to the city charter, council had until March 11 to name a replacement. If no replacement was selected by council by that date, the council president would name the new member.

On March 11, the council considered Powell and Tony Dunfee for the vacancy. Dunfee received three votes and Powell two. The council immediately began to argue over whether the city charter required three or four votes to appoint a new council member. On March 13, the city attorney advised that four votes were needed and stated that Dunfee was not a council member.

Because 30 days had passed, Nguyen appointed Powell on March 14 to be the new council member. Powell attended the March 18 and 25 meetings. Clement, who had been named the new council president, asked Powell and Nguyen to leave the March 25 meeting. At the April 8 meeting, Powell was physically blocked by police officers from sitting on council. The council has recognized Dunfee, not Powell, as the replacement member.

Women Seek To Oust Replacements
On April 26, four days after Nguyen was blocked from attending council, she and Powell filed for a writ of quo warranto. They requested that the Fourth District return Nguyen to council, reinstate her as council president, and name Powell as a council member.

The request also asked that Lawson, who was named to replace Nguyen, and Dunfee be ousted from the council.

Lawson, Dunfee, and Clement asked the appeals court to dismiss the case, arguing it should be “barred by laches,” a legal theory claiming the parties waited too long to bring their case. The appeals court agreed and dismissed it. The women appealed to the Supreme Court, which must consider this type of appeal.

Supreme Court Analyzed Dismissal Caused by Delay
In today’s opinion the Court noted that because the appeal challenges the Fourth District’s decision to dismiss the case, the Court must assume that the factual allegations in the complaint are true.

The Court explained that to grant Nguyen and Powell a writ of quo warranto, they must prove that the other council members are unlawfully holding office, that they are entitled to the office, and that they have no other remedy but to seek the court order. The Court stated that it did not consider whether Nguyen and Powell were entitled to the council seats but only ruled on whether the Fourth District should have dismissed their case based on the alleged delayed filing.

The Court further explained that for Lawson and the others to claim the case was filed too late, they must prove there was an unreasonable delay between the time Nguyen and Powell were harmed by the council’s decisions and when they filed the case. They must also show there was no excuse for the delay and that it was harmful to the three council members.

The Fourth District found the delay was unreasonable because the matter was an election-related issue, the Supreme Court stated. Election-related matters must be addressed with the “utmost diligence,” the Court explained, because there are usually very short timelines between when election disputes arise and election deadlines.

“This case, however, is not an election case, and we do not treat it as such, because there is no election to which the case applies,” the Court stated.

Without any pending election deadlines to address, Nguyen and Powell were not required to “affirmatively show that they acted with utmost diligence in asserting their claims,” the opinion stated.

The appeals court noted that Nguyen knew as early as Feb. 25, the date the three members emailed her, that they would not accept her recission. She should have known then she would not be recognized as a city council member, the appeals court ruled. And the appeals court found Powell should have known on March 14, when Nguyen appointed her, that she would not be recognized as a council member by the others who appointed Dunfee.

However, the Court explained that Nguyen would not be aware of her dismissal because council allowed her to preside over meetings until March 25 and that she was not barred from attending council meetings until April 22. Similarly, Powell would not be aware of her council status until she was barred from the April 8 meeting, the opinion stated.

The Supreme Court noted that Nguyen’s resignation and recission “threw the operation of Nelsonville’s government into confusion in February and March 2024,” but it was not clear until the April meetings that Lawson and Clement were usurping her positions.

The Court also noted that a quo warranto request must show another person is unlawfully holding the position. Clement was not appointed to council president until March 13, and Lawson was not appointed to fill Nguyen’s seat until March 21. Nguyen could not file her case until after those appointments took place, the Court explained.

Nguyen and Powell asked the Supreme Court to rule on the merits of the case and find that  Nguyen’s emails did not constitute a formal resignation. The Court declined to consider the merits and remanded the case to the Fourth District to consider the claims of the opposing council faction.

2024-0960. State ex rel. Nguyen v. Lawson, Slip Opinion No. 2025-Ohio-507.

Please note: Opinion summaries are prepared by the Office of Public Information for the general public and news media. Opinion summaries are not prepared for every opinion, but only for noteworthy cases. Opinion summaries are not to be considered as official headnotes or syllabi of court opinions. The full text of this and other court opinions are available online.

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