A Franklin County judge has ruled that Ohio's Republican-controlled legislature acted unconstitutionally when it tried to strip residents of their power to sue polluting industries under the state's Air Nuisance Rule. The decision, issued last week, also preserves Ohioans' right to use inexpensive community air monitors as evidence against companies accused of violating the federal Clean Air Act.
Judge Julie M. Lynch found that lawmakers violated Ohio's one-subject rule, a constitutional requirement that legislation be limited to a single subject matter, when they tucked the air-pollution provisions into the 2025 state budget bill, according to cleveland.com. The Air Nuisance Rule gives Ohioans the right to file suit against a polluter they believe is violating federal clean air law, and it has allowed residents for decades to challenge pollution near industrial facilities, according to the Case Western Reserve University Environmental Law Clinic.
Lawmakers had inserted an amendment eliminating the rule into the 2025 budget bill, prompting environmental groups to sue the state that same year over the provisions. A separate measure in the same bill restricted community members' ability to collect evidence through their own air-monitoring efforts, cleveland.com reported.
Why the Budget Bill Failed a Basic Constitutional Test
Lynch wrote that appropriations bills need a common purpose and a rational reason for including provisions like these, and she found the air-pollution riders had no such connection to the budget's core purpose. The court ruled the provisions were not rationally related to appropriations or agency operations, according to the environmental law clinic. As a result, the court severed the challenged provisions, barred Ohio EPA from taking further action to remove the Air Nuisance Rule, and ordered the agency to withdraw its pending request to the U.S. EPA.
The ruling comes against a backdrop in which Ohio courts have historically been lax in enforcing the one-subject rule, though the same cleveland.com report notes they have tried to apply it more faithfully in recent years. With the provisions now invalidated, Ohioans retain the ability to enforce the Air Nuisance Rule and to use community-monitoring data to document pollution and pursue enforcement, the clinic said.
Cheap Monitors Versus a $50,000 Price Tag
At the heart of the fight was money, and the gap between what government-grade air monitoring costs and what communities can actually afford. The invalidated provisions would have barred the use of data gathered from community-operated air monitors, the kind that can help residents spot pollution in places where government monitoring is thin, per the environmental law clinic. Plaintiffs argued that the only monitors Ohio would have accepted cost tens of thousands of dollars and require significant infrastructure and trained personnel to operate, cleveland.com reported.
That disparity played out concretely in Granville, where sixteen community air monitors were installed for a combined $7,000, while plaintiffs said a single EPA-grade monitor would run $50,000, according to The Statehouse News Bureau. The Air Nuisance Rule is part of Ohio EPA's broader plan to demonstrate it is complying with the federal Clean Air Act, cleveland.com noted.
A Modest Savings That Didn't Convince the Judge
Ohio EPA had defended the elimination on financial grounds. Jennifer Van Vlerah, assistant chief of the agency's Division of Air Pollution Control, submitted affidavits stating that removing the rule could save the agency several thousand dollars in staffing costs, per cleveland.com. Lynch was unpersuaded, writing that saving thousands of dollars would have little to no impact on Ohio EPA's budget.
Miranda Leppla, director of the environmental law clinic and an attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council and Sierra Club, said that if lawmakers still want to eliminate the rule, they will need to do so constitutionally, “which was not this route,” she told cleveland.com. The rule's history has been anything but settled. In 2020, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. EPA directed Ohio to remove the Air Nuisance Rule from its state implementation plan, but a lawsuit led to its reinstatement in February 2025, the outlet reported.
