Roger Reynolds (Photo: WCPO.com) In September 2021, the sheriff in Butler County, Ohio, opened an investigation into whether County Auditor Roger Reynolds had acted improperly in trying to secure $1 million in public funds for road improvements that would make it easier for his father to sell 25 acres for eventual use as a senior-living development. Butler County is a suburb of Cincinnati.
Despite their name, county auditors in Ohio don’t actually provide audits. They produce financial reports, help ensure that tax revenue goes to the proper agencies, and also assess property.
The Ohio Attorney General’s Office later joined the investigation, assigned as a special prosecutor.
On February 9, 2022, Reynolds, then 52 years old, was indicted on five counts related to this land project: bribery, two counts of unlawful interest in a public contract, misdemeanor unlawful use of authority, and misdemeanor conflict of interest.
Reynolds later said the indictments were retaliation for his efforts to challenge state-mandated property reassessments.
On July 13, 2022, the grand jury added an additional charge of unlawful interest in a public contract. This indictment was unrelated to the previous charges and alleged that Reynolds asked the treasurer of the Lakota School District if part of the district’s annual refund of unallocated tax revenue could be used to build a golf academy at the Four Bridges Country Club. Reynolds’s house backed up to Four Bridges, where he was a member. His daughter was on the golf team at Lakota High School, and the school’s golf coach, Gene Powell, was the pro at the country club.
Reynolds’s trial in the Butler County Court of Common Pleas began on December 12, 2022. Because the seven judges from Butler County had recused themselves, Judge Daniel Hogan, who had retired from the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, was appointed to hear the case. Although most of the trial focused on the land deal, prosecutors presented evidence and testimony regarding Reynolds’s effort to build the golf academy at Four Bridges.
Jennifer Logan, who had been the Lakota district’s treasurer, testified that Reynolds first broached the idea in December 2016. “He brought up the refund money,” she said. “He spoke about the money. He said ‘I have never given the district my thoughts on how the district should spend the money, but I have thoughts now’,” Logan testified, according to the Journal-News.
Logan said Reynolds proposed spending $250,000 for three consecutive years, or $750,000 in total.
Logan, who now worked for the Butler County Educational Service Center, said the proposal concerned her and she thought it was a conflict of interest.
“I knew Mr. Reynolds lived at Four Bridge and his daughter was on the golf team there,” she said.
Logan testified that she told Reynolds she wanted an opinion from the school’s legal counsel on the propriety of using public funds to build a facility on private property.
Logan testified that at a second meeting, in January 2017, she told Reynolds that the district could not build on private property. She said that Reynolds suggested an alternative approach, where Four Bridges would build the facility and then charge the school district an access fee.
Logan testified that she questioned Reynolds about his apparent conflict of interest. She said he told her he wasn’t worried because he had done nothing wrong. Logan said she again asked the district’s legal counsel to review the proposal. The attorney said the fees seemed excessive and also could be viewed as a way to funnel money to a private entity.
After that meeting, Logan testified, she never heard back from Reynolds, and the whole thing “kind of went away.”
During cross-examination, Reynolds’s attorney asked Logan:
“So over the course of all these interactions, Mr. Reynolds never threatened to withhold funding from the school district over this?”
Logan said, “No.”
“He never said he wasn’t going to hold back those tax advances you talked about?”
Logan again answered, “No.”
Reynolds did not testify. During closing arguments, Reynolds’s attorney, Chad Ziepfel, said Reynolds had done nothing wrong with his plan on the golf academy. “It’s not a crime to come up with a bad idea,” Ziepel said. “It was an idea that never happened.”
On December 21, 2022, the jury acquitted Reynolds of the charges related to the land development but convicted him of the single count tied to the golf academy. At the time, Reynolds had just been re-elected in November to a fourth four-year term as auditor, but the conviction made him ineligible to serve.
Ziepfel quickly moved for a judgment of acquittal based on insufficient evidence because no contract was ever signed between the country club and the school district. Judge Hogan denied the motion on January 27, 2023. His ruling said the law didn’t require a signed contract.
Separately, on February 8, 2023, Reynolds moved for a new trial, claiming that the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.
According to the motion, Doug Herald, a former owner of the country club, had contacted Reynolds after the verdict and said the state had issued two subpoenas to the club. The club responded by turning over thousands of pages of documents and emails to the state.
One of those emails, dated April 27, 2017, was from Gene Powell, the golf pro at Four Bridges and the golf coach at Lakota High. Powell’s email, sent to Herald and Graham Parlin, another owner of the club, appeared to suggest that numerous school officials appeared supportive of the proposal and that the cost was far less than Logan had testified.
The motion said the state had not turned over this email nor any of the other documents Four Bridges gave to the state in response to the subpoenas.
“The Powell email directly contradicts key points from Jenni Logan's testimony,” the motion said. “It refutes Ms. Logan's numerous assertions that ‘the district’ was opposed to the training facility idea, since Mr. Powell clearly reports that he ‘met with the District COO [Chief Operating Officer], Treasurer [Jenni Logan], attorney and one of the high school Athletic Directors’ and they ‘are on board conceptually and are ready for us to submit a proposal to staff.’ It shows that the training facility idea had multiple supporters at Lakota, thus undermining Ms. Logan’s testimony that she was merely having meetings on the topic to appease Mr. Reynolds. And it shows that the project could cost as little as $300,000, not the $750,000 claimed by Ms. Logan.”
The motion said that Reynolds would have used this email to impeach Logan, and “there is a strong probability that the jury would have questioned her credibility, and returned a not guilty verdict.”
Judge Hogan denied the motion for a new trial on March 16, 2023. He said most of the information in the email had been disclosed in a separate audio recording. In addition, he said the evidence wasn’t exculpatory. It was just one person’s opinion and was written several months after Logan and Reynolds discussed the project.
Two weeks later, on March 31, 2023, Hogan sentenced Reynolds to 30 days in jail, placed Reynolds on probation for five years, and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine. The jail sentence was stayed, pending Reynolds’ appeal, which included his claims of insufficient evidence and the state’s disclosure violation.
On May 13, 2024, the Court of Appeals of Ohio’s 12th Appellate District vacated Reynolds’s conviction based on insufficient evidence and ordered the trial court to dismiss his case. (The appellate judges who ruled on the motion were from the 10th Appellate District, assigned to the case after judges in the 12th Appellate District recused themselves to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest.)
The ruling said that Judge Hogan and the state had misread the statute. Without a signed contract or any indication of bribery, Reynolds had not committed any crime, the ruling said. “If the statute operated as the state suggests, it would sweep all manner of legitimate discussions by public officials into its ambit,” the court said. It did not rule on Reynolds’s claim that the state withheld exculpatory evidence.
Judge Hogan dismissed the charge on June 3, 2024.
– Ken Otterbourg
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