Live Where You Govern

Twenty years ago Ohio told its cities they couldn't ask the people running them to live there. The excuses that made sense in 2006 don't hold up anymore.

By Richthrax  ·  Oct. 25, 2026

I grew up in Brookville, a town small enough that the people who ran it lived down the road from the people it served. If the plows were late, the folks responsible were stuck in the same snow. I live in Dayton now, and I've come to think that's not just small-town charm. It's cause and effect. If you make the decisions, you should have to live with what they do.

Ohio law doesn't see it that way. Since 2006, cities here have been barred from requiring the people they hire to live in town, and that reaches all the way up to the city manager. I think that should change, and I think the case for changing it is stronger now than the day the law passed.

What the law says

Ohio Revised Code 9.481 says no city, village or county can make where you live a condition of keeping your job. Volunteers are exempt. The only carve-out lets a city require emergency responders to live in the county or an adjacent one, and only by ordinance or a vote of the people.

The statute never defines "employee," and it's been read to cover appointed executives. So Dayton can hire a city manager who lives in Cincinnati, Columbus or another state entirely, and our charter can't say a word about it.

Here's the part that gets me. Council members and the mayor still have to live in the city. The person who actually writes the budget, runs police and public works, and signs the contracts doesn't.

How we got here

The General Assembly passed 9.481 in 2006, and it took effect May 1 that year. Police and fire unions pushed for it, and back then plenty of Ohio cities required workers to live in town. Lawmakers sold it as a worker's right to live where they want.

Cities sued. In Lima v. State (2009), the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the law, leaning on Article II, Section 34 of the state constitution, which lets the state pass laws for "the comfort, health, safety and general welfare of all employees." That beat home rule.

The Ohio Attorney General has since weighed in on how the statute reaches local officials (Opinion 2017-033). And on Feb. 25, 2026, the Ohio House voted 91–0 for House Bill 428, which would strip the last state residency rules for village safety and service directors. Everything's moving one direction: fewer places where the people running a town have to live in it.

When the boss lives somewhere else

This isn't hypothetical. Look at Cincinnati.

In 2014, FOX19 found four Cincinnati department leaders who appeared to live outside the city despite a city rule that directors live in town. One was Tony Parrott, who ran the Metropolitan Sewer District, one of the biggest budgets at City Hall. The Cincinnati address he gave turned out to be a vacant lot. He lived in Butler County. The parks director paid his property taxes to Colerain Township. Another director's listed address was a relative's house, where neighbors said that family had lived for 30 years.

Two years later, a 2016 city audit of the sewer district blamed Parrott and a former city manager for "mismanagement, lack of accountability, and lack of oversight" over budgets and contracts. It found support for claims that he broke the residency rule and falsified his financial disclosure statements, and it recommended an outside look at possible criminal conduct. In 2018, State Auditor Dave Yost found $779,000 in improper payments at the district and held Parrott jointly liable for $461,594 of it. By then he was running the sewer district in Louisville, Kentucky.

I'm not going to tell you that living in Butler County made anyone mismanage a sewer district. But there's a reason it's worth asking where the people spending your money go home at night. When the address on file is a vacant lot, that tells you something about how seriously they take the rest of the paperwork, too. It's also exactly why any residency rule needs real proof behind it.

What I'd change

Not much, honestly. I'm not trying to refight 2006 over rank-and-file workers. I'm talking about a narrow amendment to 9.481 that hands one decision back to the people who live here:

• Who it covers. "Covered officials" only: the city or village manager, administrator, safety and service directors, and the department heads who report straight to them. Classified civil service and union workers keep the protection they won in 2006.
• Who decides. Each city, by charter, ordinance or a vote of residents. No state mandate. Just local choice.
• Time to move. Six months after appointment to establish residence.
• A safety valve. Council can grant a waiver by a two-thirds vote, on the record, for a set term.
• Proof. Residence means your main home, where you're registered to vote and where you pay city income tax.

Ohio already draws this line for elected officials. This just extends it to the handful of appointed people who hold that same kind of power.

Why it's easier now than in 2006

The best argument against residency rules back then was practical. Moving meant uprooting a family: a spouse's job tied to an office across the county line, a commute that only worked from one suburb. Twenty years of technology have knocked most of that down.

Remote work freed the whole household. Before the pandemic, about 5% of U.S. workers worked fully from home, according to Census data compiled by the St. Louis Fed. By 2023 it was about 14%, and other surveys put it higher. In Ohio, 18.7% of workers teleworked at least part of the time in 2023, and 9.3% worked from home entirely, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A manager's spouse today is a lot more likely to have a job that works just as well from Dayton.

Government went digital. Permits, council packets, public records, budgets and meetings are online and usually streamed. You don't need to live near some regional office to stay plugged in. The connections travel with the laptop.

Moving is easier. House hunting, closings, school enrollment and getting the utilities turned on can mostly be done online. Six months is plenty.

That's the irony. The same tools that let someone run a city from 60 miles away also let their family move into that city without giving anything up. The obstacle the 2006 law was answering has shrunk. The principle it set aside hasn't.

The same logic, on the street

It doesn't stop at the manager's office. You could argue the 2006 law also let officers who live far away enforce the law in neighborhoods they don't know: who runs the corner store, which streets flood, which families have been there for generations.

Dayton loosened up fast. Five years after the Supreme Court ruling, 37% of city employees, 718 of about 1,956, lived outside city limits, the Dayton Daily News reported. Before the ruling, the head of Dayton's Fraternal Order of Police had predicted about a third of officers and other workers would move out. (To be fair, state law still lets a city require emergency responders to live in its county or the next one over, so "far away" has limits.)

The big Ohio cities show where that leads:

• Columbus, 2020. After Casey Goodson Jr. and Andre Hill were killed in separate shootings less than three weeks apart in December, one by a Franklin County sheriff's deputy and one by a Columbus officer, NPR reported that at least 40% of Columbus officers lived outside city limits. Just under 10% of the force was Black in a city about 30% Black. Then-Chief Tom Quinlan said the city couldn't require residency because of the state ruling, and floated incentives like take-home cars for officers who live in town instead.
• Cleveland. Roughly two-thirds of Cleveland's patrol officers live outside the city they police, Cleveland Scene reported in 2024. Cleveland's charter used to require residency until the state law and the Lima ruling took that away.
• Dayton. Our own number, 37% of city workers living outside the city within five years, followed that same ruling.

I want to be straight about what the evidence shows. Nobody has shown that where an officer lived caused any of those shootings. The biggest study I found, by political scientists Julia Payson and Srinivas Parinandi in the Journal of Politics, followed nearly 800 cities over 30 years, Ohio after 2006 included. Forces got whiter after residency rules ended. But the study didn't find that residency rules cut deaths in police encounters. So I'm not selling this as a cure for police violence. I'm making the case on accountability and shared stakes.

The other side

There are real arguments against this, and you should hear them:

• A smaller talent pool. Small cities already have a hard time hiring experienced managers. A residency rule could scare some off.
• Housing. In a tight market, a new hire might not find a decent place fast, and a forced move costs money.
• Sham addresses. People can rent a token apartment and keep living somewhere else. Without real proof rules, it gets gamed.
• Freedom to choose. The 2006 lawmakers said people should be free to live where they want. Supporters of the current law say that freedom shouldn't depend on your job title.
• Remote work cuts both ways. If a manager can do the job from anywhere, why does it matter where they sleep? My answer: the job isn't just the work. It's living under the results. But that's a call voters get to make, not technology.

What happens next

Any fix has to come from the General Assembly. Cities can't override 9.481 on their own. If this matters to you, call your state representative and state senator, and keep an eye on HB 428 in the Senate, since it touches the same section of law.

Where I come from, you didn't get to make the call and then drive home to somewhere else. I don't think that's too much to ask of the people running Dayton either.