Welcome back to the Public Records Briefing! We hope you’re enjoying the fall as much as we enjoy public records law. And we all know what scary thing happens this week! Only the brave will venture out into that frightening encounter!
Exceptions (a) through (yy): R.C. 149.43(A)(1)(yy)
We continue our way through the 149.43(A)(1) exceptions this week with (yy). Exception (yy) is a new one and covers a topic that we used to get a lot of questions about at trainings. When law enforcement agencies started using License Plate Readers (LPRs), people would ask us if the data the LPRs captured could be withheld using CLEIR or a different public records exception. We said no, due to the always-recording nature of LPRs and the lack of any other suitable exception. Remember, the rule for CLEIR is the record must have been created because police had a specific suspicion of misconduct and – of course – LPRs capture all sorts of license plates not involved in misconduct.
So, after answering that question for years, someone finally talked to their elected representatives about changing it! So we now have R.C. 149.43(A)(1)(yy) which protects records captured by an LPR system maintained in a law enforcement database. The exception covers the actual images captured by these cameras as well as any other data. This exception keeps someone’s stalker from requesting LPR data to track down the date and time that a particular person was at a certain intersection.
Remember, license plate numbers themselves don’t have an easy exception that covers them. They’re not personal information because people can’t look up who they belong to! But given the potential issues with LPR data being public, this exception makes sense.
Court Case(s) Review: Kidd v. City of Wilmington, 2025-00644PQ
This week we have another decision from the Court of Claims. And this one is a win for the good guys (aka government agencies).