During the public-comment portion of the Nov. 17 meeting, Tiffany Meath told the council she had obtained documents showing the city paid $1,339,154.72 to a towing vendor (identified in the materials as Hookers Recovery/All Ohio Towing) between 2012 and 2025 — an average of roughly $103,000 a year.

Meath said the city owns the towing lot where vehicles are stored and argued the payments raise questions about whether the city should instead staff its own towing operations. She said she sought guidance from the Ohio Attorney General’s office and cited two opinions discussed at the meeting: an opinion that defines professional services as requiring specialized knowledge (cited in the meeting as Attorney General Opinion 82-04047) and an opinion (cited as 92-062) and a 1992 Ohio case (State Smith v. Fremont, Ohio) clarifying that manual-labor or routine operations are generally not professional services and that municipalities cannot avoid competitive bidding by mislabeling contracts.

Meath urged the council to provide taxpayers a clear accounting of how much the city has paid, asked whether the contract has been treated as a personal-service agreement rather than a competitive bid and said she received 67 pages of itemized documents and another set of receipts that covered payments back to 2012. She asked the council and staff to investigate and respond.

Councilors followed Meath’s statement by seeking clarification of the statutory procurement threshold; staff noted the Ohio Revised Code threshold that triggers council review has been adjusted (discussed in the meeting as roughly $75,000 with a 3% annual increase in 2025) and the city’s procurement follows ORC thresholds. Council members and staff did not reach a formal decision during the meeting; Meath’s comments were recorded during the public-comment period and the council did not vote on towing-related action at that session.

Reporting note: dollar totals and cited attorney-general opinions come from public materials and Meath’s statement to council; the city’s procurement files or contracts should be reviewed for the vendor name, contract type, and the full payment history to verify the totals and whether the agreement complied with ORC bidding requirements.