Can citizens challenge the renaming of a public park? 'Columbus' lawsuit tests city's rights
Who must be consulted when a municipality considers whether to rename a public park? That appears to be at issue in a new lawsuit filed by an aggrieved citizen of Columbus, alleging that Ohio’s capital city failed to honor its policy on park-renaming when it refashioned Christopher Columbus Square as Warren Square in 2022.
Relying on Ohio’s declaratory judgment and injunction statutes, and invoking the pride many Italian-Americans hold for the controversial Genoese explorer, John Cardi alleges in his complaint that the renaming of the nearly 50-year-old park — a small, grassy median in the Italian Village neighborhood north of downtown — “demonstrat[es] hostility for and attempt[s] to distance [the City of Columbus] from its namesake.” This follows a pattern, the complaint says, of the city eschewing its ties to the explorer, including “the decision to no longer observe Columbus Day, the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue at City Hall, and the City's Mayor calling for a review of all public art, to include the City's seal and flag, which depict [one] of Columbus's ships, the Santa Maria.”
Cardi’s complaint alleges that while the city’s policy authorizes name changes by the parks director when a person after whom a park is named “comes into disrepute in relation to the community at large,” the city improperly excluded him and other Italian-Americans from the “community at large” when it made its determination to remove Columbus’ name. (The city instead relied on a request by the local neighborhood association, which had conducted a survey on the question, to strip Columbus from the park name.) “The City's … determination to change the park name,” the complaint alleges, “was made without any input from local Italian organizations.”
What remains to be seen in the case, which was filed on August 30, is whether a citizen obtains standing to sue his city merely because he or a fraternal society to which he belongs was not consulted on the name change — or whether he has any actionable interest in the original name to begin with. The Ohio Supreme Court has held for the past 70 years that private citizens may not restrain official acts when they fail to allege and prove damage to themselves different in character from that sustained by the general public. We assume that line of precedent will be tested here.
The city has not yet responded to the complaint in the case, which is styled John C. Cardi v. City of Columbus, pending in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. We’ll follow it and provide updates here. Meanwhile, contact any of us on the Public Law team for assistance with any thorny naming questions you may have
