Home rule is part of the Ohio state constitution. In theory, it gives cities and villages the authority to govern and pass laws, as long as they don’t conflict with state law.
In practice, the state legislature has moved to block cities' attempts to enact local laws on a variety of topics — and in many cases, cities have responded with lawsuits. That means the courts have been tasked with interpreting whether the municipality or the state should have authority in a particular case.
In most recent cases where home rule is at issue, the courts have sided with state lawmakers.
To get a better understanding of this complicated issue, I spoke with Rod Davisson. He’s the city administrator for the city of Obetz (just south of Columbus) and the second vice president for the Ohio Municipal League, a nonprofit association that advocates for cities and villages.
Why does Ohio have home rule powers?
Davisson says when Ohio first became a state, we followed “Dillon’s Rule,” which means local governments only had powers explicitly granted to them by the state.
“Every time a city or a village wanted to do something, they had to go to the Ohio legislature,” Davisson says. “If they wanted a stop sign on Main Street, they had to go to the legislature, and the legislature passed an Ohio law that said this city has a stop sign on Main Street. You can imagine how insane that would be.”
A constitutional convention in 1912 took up the issue and wrote an amendment to the state constitution giving cities and villages some powers of their own. At the same time, early prohibition fights were happening across the country, and the state didn’t want cities and villages to be able to decide on whether alcohol could be sold in their municipality.
“As a consequence, we got a little bit of a watered-down version of home rule power, which is still the most powerful home rule power out of all the states in the United States,” Davisson says.
Fast forward to today, and Davisson says it’s clear there are some issues that should be regulated at the state level.
“We shouldn't be able to make murder legal in X suburb,” he says. “Obviously, there are things we could all say, 'Look, this needs some state intervention.’ But it's always going to be a challenge to find where that line is.”
What is home rule power?
Article XVIII of the Ohio Constitution first defines what a “municipal corporation” is:
- A city has a population of at least 5,000 people
- A village has a population of less than 5,000 people
Davisson says some townships in Ohio have their own version of limited home rule, but for this conversation, we’re just talking about municipalities — cities and villages.
Section 3 grants municipalities the authority “to exercise all powers of local self-government and to adopt and enforce within their limits such local police, sanitary and other similar regulations, as are not in conflict with general laws.”
This essentially creates two buckets of authority: police powers and self-government.
Police powers refer to regulations that protect public health, safety and general welfare. Self-government is not further defined in the constitution, which Davisson says is the crux of all the conflict.
“As it relates to matters of local self-government, we can do anything we want,” Davisson says. “[But] when we're legislating out of the police powers bucket, we can't do anything that would conflict with a state law that is a law generally applicable to the state.”
It’s not always clear which bucket a local regulation should be in, thus creating the tug-of-war between municipalities and the state.
“Quite frankly, the case law is all over the place on a number of issues, and it’s really hard to predict, for the most part, how the courts will answer that question when it's presented to them,” Davisson said.
Home rule conflicts
Cincinnati and other municipalities in Ohio have tried to regulate on a variety of issues only to be blocked by the state legislature.
You’ll often hear Cincinnati officials criticize the state’s preemption law banning cities from regulating guns. The court upheld that law in 2010 but lawsuits continue.
Other examples include banning single-use plastic bags, enacting ranked-choice voting, and banning flavored tobacco products.
That last example is pending a decision by the Ohio Supreme Court, as of June 2026.
In 2022, Republican lawmakers passed House Bill 513, banning municipalities from banning flavored tobacco and vapes. Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it. Then lawmakers put that provision into the state budget a year later, and DeWine vetoed it again. In 2024, lawmakers overrode him. That statewide ban on local bans sparked a lawsuit by 21 cities against the state.
This is somewhat new territory, Davisson says.
“The state did not actually write a law to control flavored tobacco, the state just boldly wrote a law that said cities can't legislate in this area,” he said. “That law has lost at the trial court level, and at the appellate court level, and is now at the [state] Supreme Court level.”
The outcome will likely affect future conflicts over home rule; if the court sides with the state, Davisson says that would be “catastrophic” for police power home rule. A decision in favor of municipalities, on the other hand, would “bolster” home rule.
“It won't stop the legislature from making challenges in the future, and it shouldn't, to be fair,” Davisson says. “But it will make them at least be a little bit more careful and more thoughtful about trying to take away a municipal power that was constitutionally imbued.”
State power outside of home rule
Even when a municipality wins a court battle over local legislation, there are still ways for state lawmakers to assert authority on the topic.
That’s what happened after the city of Dayton successfully challenged a state law that banned municipalities from using red-light and speed cameras. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state law in 2017, saying it violated the constitution’s home rule amendment.
The state legislature responded by passing a new law in 2019 saying any revenue a municipality generates with red-light or speed cameras is deducted from that municipality’s share of local government funding from the state. In other words, it’s a financial disincentive.
The village of Newburgh Heights and the city of East Cleveland filed a new lawsuit, but in 2022, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state legislature can legally reduce funding in this way.
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