Steve Baughn v. the City of Reynoldsburg

• Decision Date: 12 May 1992
• Docket Number: 92-LW-2670,91AP-1470.
• Parties: Steve Baughn, Plaintiff-Appellant v. The City of Reynoldsburg et al., Defendants-Appellees
• Court: Ohio Court of Appeals

Steve Baughn, Plaintiff-Appellant v. The City of Reynoldsburg et al Defendants-Appellees

No. 91AP-1470. (ACCELERATED CALENDAR)

92-LW-2670 (10th)

Court of Appeals of Ohio, Tenth District Franklin.

May 12, 1992

OPINION

Cloppert Portman, Sauter, Latanick & Foley, and William J. Steele, for appellant.

Matan &amp Smith, and James D. CoIner, for appellees.

APPEAL from the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.

TYACK J.

On May 1, 1991, Steve Baughn filed a complaint in the court of common pleas seeking a declaratory judgment, a writ of mandamus and compensatory damages because of alleged factual inaccuracies in what was to be a personal information system pursuant to R.C. 1347.01 et seq. Mr. Baughn, who is a police officer in Reynoldsburg, named the city of Reynoldsburg, its mayor, its safety director and its chief of police as defendants. Following service of process, an answer was filed by all the named defendants on June 21, 1991. The record does not indicate that any discovery was conducted prior to the filing of the motion for summary judgment.

Mr. Baughn filed a memorandum in response to the motion, asking that the motion be overruled or held in abeyance until limited discovery could be pursued. Appended to the memorandum was an unsigned affidavit and some documents which purported to be part of a "Reynoldsburg Investigation" by the "PICA Corporation." A signed copy of the affidavit was later allowed to be substituted for the unsigned one.

The trial court granted the motion for summary judgment, without specifically addressing the request in regard to pursuit of discovery.

Officer Baughn (hereinafter "appellant") has timely appealed, assigning a single error for our consideration:

"The court below erred in determining that the Ohio" Personal Information System statutes, Ohio Revised Code Section 1347.01 et seq., are not applicable to the `PICA Report' because said document was not a part of the record and thus not reviewed by the court below."

The essence of the assignment of error is that the trial court ruled the "PICA report" to fall outside R.C. 1347.01 et seq. without ever seeing or reviewing the report except for the three pages which were appended to appellant's affidavit. Instead, the trial court ruled the report fell outside the statutory definitions based upon affidavits filed by the mayor of Reynoldsburg and the police chief, which indicated that the PICA report was generated as part of an investigation into alleged improprieties in Reynoldsburg. The affidavits alleged that the PICA report was turned over to the office of the Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney but that no criminal charges were pursued.

R.C. 1347.01(E) defines "personal information" as follows:

"`Personal information' means any information that describes anything about a person, or indicates actions done by or to a person, or indicates that a person possesses certain personal characteristics, and that contains, and can be retrieved from a system by, a name, identifying number symbol, or other identifier assigned to a person."

R.C. 1347.01(F) defines "system" as follows:

"'System' means any collection or group of related records that are kept in an organized manner and are under the control of a state or local agency from which information is retrieved by the name of the person or by some identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the person. `System' includes both records that are

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