... (Mayor)
Cross said he intends to use his office to bring order to village affairs, including meetings of Village Council, over which he presides. Anyone who disrupts the meeting will be removed from the building by a police officer, he said.
"I don't think that anybody, be it a reporter, a citizen, a police chief, a whoever-it-might-be, has any business coming into a council meeting in any village creating disruptions in a council meeting," he said. "The village cannot get no kind of agenda done because of this Police Department thing."
Newspaper labeled as disruptive
He made reference to Times-Reporter coverage of the police issue when taking about activities he considers disruptive.
"I feel as though if the newspaper is going to keep putting big articles on the front page of the newspaper, I feel as though that maybe I need to get another reporter in there, or another newspaper in there," Cross said as he held the business card of the Times-Reporter staff writer who was interviewing him. "Because to me, it's disrupting my council meeting.
"If I can do anything about it legally, or whatever I have to do, if I can get some cooperation from The Times-Reporter, or whoever you work for or whatever, I'm going to try to do that.
"I don't know if I can keep the press out of my meetings. I don't want to do that. But for all this disruption that it's caused this town, with this part-time and full-time Police Department thing, I feel as though in my ... council meetings, it's a big disruption to me — from village people, from the newspaper, from everybody involved in it."
Ohio's Open Meetings Law, also known as the Sunshine Law, requires meetings of public bodies to be open to the public, including representatives of the news media, with only certain exceptions.