Three years ago, Hamilton County’s Clerk of Courts Pavan Parikh announced a plan to remove inactive eviction records from the municipal website after they were three years old.
But, local municipal court judges ordered him to stop. Parikh refused, suing the court and defending his decision in an interview with WVXU in Cincinnati.
“This is something that can make a meaningful difference in people seeking housing. It is on our website that we control. It was on our website that we pay for. We are separately, independently elected office… We think we have the authority to do this,” he said.
After years of legal debate, the Ohio Supreme Court has issued a final say on the matter: The eviction records must remain online in Hamilton County.
However, the ruling won’t prevent other counties, such as Franklin and Montgomery, which use similar systems, from removing or sealing old eviction records. The ruling gives municipal court judges in each county the authority to decide.
WVXU local government reporter Becca Costello sat down with The Ohio Newsroom to share her reporting on what the recent ruling means for Ohioans across the state.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On why Parikh wanted the records removed
"The goal was to remove a barrier for renters. If you have an eviction on your record, it's hard to get a new lease because a landlord might see that and think, “This is a tenant I don't want to work with.’ An eviction will stay on the record, even if it's been dismissed. And online, it is not easy to tell why an eviction was dismissed. So it might be because my rent was late, I paid it to the landlord eventually, so they dismissed the eviction they had filed. Or it might be that they filed an eviction against the wrong tenant in a large apartment building. There's no way to know online why that was the case.”
“This policy only applied to inactive eviction records. That means they were either dismissed or they were fully paid. So maybe I owed back rent, but all of that's been paid now. And those records are still public records, and they were still available in person at the courthouse, just not online.”
On the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling
“The court battle really started with the fact that the municipal court judges didn't agree with the policy that the clerk had put into place. And they ordered Parikh to restore those records online. There was some back and forth over several months. He ultimately refused to restore the records and he sued the judges. The case made it up to the Ohio Supreme Court and they ended up agreeing with the judges saying that Parikh did have to follow their order.”
“Importantly, though, the decision is not about whether or not eviction records should be online. It's about who has the authority to make the decision in this policy. So the Supreme Court pointed out in their unanimous ruling, there's no state law that requires online access to eviction records, and not every county in Ohio even has that. But they did say that the Clerk of Courts did not have the authority to make that policy decision and said that he had to follow what the municipal court judges ordered him to do.”
On what it means for other counties
“Clerk of Courts Parikh here in Hamilton County based his policy on Ohio counties that have had [a similar system] in place for a few years. And it seems like these other Ohio counties really won't be impacted by the court's decision because again, the issue at hand is who has the authority to make the policy. So in Franklin and Montgomery County, for example, those judges seem to be in agreement with these policies. So if there's no power struggle, there should be no change in policy.”
On why it’s important
“It matters in terms of state policy because there's really no guidance in state law about dealing with eviction records. And that's part of the reason why Clerk of Courts Parikh in Hamilton County felt he did have the authority to make this decision. It was on the Clerk of Court's website that they control. But because there is no guidance and state law, we have this patchwork of policies throughout the state, depending on where you live.”
“It also matters for renters, because if you have an eviction on your record, that can haunt you forever. And there are very few options to getting that eviction off of your record. Depending on where you live in the state, that [dismissed eviction] can keep you from getting housing.”
