The village of Barnhill has no mayor. It has no acting Council. It apparently has no public officials to speak of. And it appears increasingly likely that it has no future as a self-governing municipality.
At a town hall meeting Wednesday at Midvale Elementary School, Tuscarawas County officials, including Auditor Larry Lindberg, told a crowd of around 60 Barnhill residents that their last official interaction with Barnhill government was in early 2025.
“Reports were filed for the end of 2024, and village council actually passed some temporary appropriations to start ’25,” Lindberg said. “Those are only good for three months, but nothing has happened since then. So we’ve had no budgetary information filed with us since the beginning of 2025. Nothing at all has been filed for 2026.”
Lindberg says it appears anyone still associated with Barnhill government resigned around that time.
Meanwhile, the village’s 400 or so residents continued to pay Barnhill property taxes. Lindberg says the county has written $60,000 in checks to the village for those payments, but nobody is there to cash them. And the city has about $130,000 in a bank account, but nobody is authorized to access that.
Bills and debts have gone unpaid. Insurance has expired.
Residents, including Ken Milburn, say the roads are falling apart because construction work was abandoned mid-project when village hall went dark.
“They got all of our roads prepared to be blacktopped,” Milburn said. “The blacktopping never came through. The roads started to dissolve from the rain and whatnot. The next thing you know, our driveways are being washed out. All the work they did is being demolished. The potholes are resurfacing overtop of all the work they did. Then the winter came. No plow trucks came through, so we’re all scratching our heads, ‘What is going on?’”
County Prosecutor Scott Deedrick said it is a bad situation with no quick fix.
“This is territory we’ve never been in before,” he said. “I’ve been around forever and I have never had this situation occur. We’re digging deep into the law, and I haven’t seen anything for any kind of temporary or interim solution.”
He says Barnhill residents must decide their next step.
That could be dissolving the village with a public vote in this November’s election and becoming part of Goshen Township.
They could also wait until 2027 to elect a new slate of officials who wouldn’t take office until 2028.
Some residents said they can’t wait that long to fix the roads that have potholes as big as a person or go another winter without snow and ice removal.
“Several people were sliding off into other people’s yards,” Milburn said. “We saw mailboxes getting taken out around specific sharp bends through town.
“It got to the point where we joked around and said that we ought to hammer in a sign at the Midvale Corporation line that said there are dangerous roads ahead because people were traveling through at the speed limit unaware that across the line there was six inches of ice waiting for them because they quit maintaining the road from there.”
Residents on Wednesday began gathering signatures for a petition to put the disillusionment on the November ballot. They have until Aug. 5 to get more than 23 registered Barnhill voters to sign on with the proposed ballot issue to dissolve the village.
Meanwhile, the county sheriff’s office will continue to provide police services as it always has. And the Uhrichsville Fire Department will continue to provide fire and EMS support despite not receiving payments from the village.
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