Ohio’s Tenth District Court of Appeals recently addressed whether a trial court abused its discretion by refusing to admit additional evidence in an appeal of a chief’s order from the Oil and Gas Commission setting a maximum allowable injection pressure for a Class II injection well in Omni Energy Grp., LLC v. Vendel.[1] The court of appeals held, among other things, that “admitting additional evidence at an evidentiary hearing in the trial court pursuant to (former) R.C. 119.12(K) [was] not only permissible but [was] mandated by due process and its basic requirement of a full and fair hearing, including consideration of all the evidence sufficient to justify the resulting decision.” Its rationale: “Here,…no hearing was held in the administrative proceedings below. Instead, as noted previously, after dismissing its initial appeal to the Commission, Omni filed its appeal from the Chief's Orders directly to the common pleas court pursuant to R.C. 1509.36 and 119.12 of the Revised Code. Omni, then, has been given no opportunity to present any evidence in opposition to the Chief's Orders beyond that which is contained in the certified record—a record that is indisputably truncated and which, at the very least, does not even include the depositions of the key witnesses taken while the appeal to the Commission was still pending.”
[1] 2024-Ohio-2439.