(Bowling Green Daily News)—After a regional board found Simpson County Judge-Executive Mason Barnes committed an ethics violation regarding his vote in favor of a rezoning ordinance, a member of a citizens group who filed the original ethics complaint is suing Barnes.
Joel Peyton alleges in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S District Court that Barnes violated Peyton’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech by blocking Peyton from accessing the judge’s Facebook page.
According to the suit, Barnes blocked Peyton from the Facebook page around Feb. 10, after the results of the ethics hearing against Barnes were released.
A post on the Facebook page that day named Peyton and others who had signed the ethics complaint against Barnes and said that “one of the members of the small citizen group started filing copious amounts of open records requests,” the suit said.
Another post on Feb. 14 addressed the findings of the ethics board, stating that “the group of complainants were purely politically motivated by my stance on industrial expansion,” according to the lawsuit.
“Barnes’s official Facebook page was intended for public announcements related to his public office,” the 11-page complaint said. “Barnes regularly uses the page to communicate with the public about executive and administrative announcements related to his official position. Therefore, Barnes was authorized and did purport to speak on behalf of the county government when he posted on his official Facebook page. His blocking of Peyton is therefore state action.”
Peyton’s suit, brought by the Liberty Justice Center, an Austin, Texas-based legal firm that describes itself as a “non-profit, non-partisan, public-interest litigation firm that seeks to protect economic liberty, private property rights, free speech and other fundamental rights”, seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction against Barnes that would order him to refrain from blocking Peyton or others from accessing the judge-executive’s Facebook page.
“Mason Barnes tried to discredit me and suppress my speech to cover up his own wrongdoing,” Peyton said in a news release from the Liberty Justice Center. “But censoring me doesn’t erase anything he did – it just adds another ethics violation to his record. I am grateful to the Liberty Justice Center for taking on this fight.”
Barnes declined to comment when reached by the Daily News, saying he had not had an opportunity to consult with an attorney about the suit and was made aware of the litigation by reporters.
The lawsuit comes in the wake of a finding from the Barren River Area Development District Regional Ethics Board that Barnes committed an ethics violation when he voted to approve a rezoning ordinance to allow for construction of a house being built by a company owned by Barnes.
The land for the house had previously been owned by the Franklin-Simpson Industrial Authority before it was sold.
According to records, construction on the house was started by the Mason Barnes Construction Company last year, even though the land was still zoned as an interstate interchange business district.
Peyton had signed an ethics complaint against Barnes alleging that the judge-executive used his elected position to “receive preferential treatment” when his company was permitted to start building the house, neither disclosing his personal business affiliation nor recusing himself from the vote in fiscal court to rezone the land.
The regional ethics board found last month that Barnes violated two parts of Simpson County’s ethics ordinance that prohibits elected officials from discussing or taking action on any matter that may result in personal financial gain for them.
The board determined, though, that while Barnes committed the violation, he did not do so intentionally, and found no evidence that he leveraged his position to influence fiscal court members or Franklin-Simpson’s industrial authority or planning and zoning commission to act in any particular way with regard to the rezoning.
Barnes testified at the hearing that, while he voted to approve the rezoning, he did not make a motion for the vote or second the motion, and he was not advised by Simpson County Attorney Sam Phillips to abstain from voting.
According to the lawsuit, Peyton and his neighbors organized a group in 2023 to oppose plans by the industrial authority to buy farmland near his neighborhood to expand Henderson Industrial Park by about 180 acres.
Opponents of the proposed expansion expressed concerns about encroachment on their residences and the industrial authority’s debt load.
Peyton filed various open records requests and discovered credit card charges by then-industrial authority director Dennis Griffin that appeared personal the lawsuit said.
Griffin resigned from the board in February 2024 and took a position as marketing director for an industrial park in Barren County, and the proposed land purchases were abandoned.
“Peyton also concluded from his open records requests that Mason Barnes…who is a non-voting member of the industrial authority, encouraged the land purchases,” the lawsuit said.
The complaint with the ethics board was brought by the group of residents that included Peyton along with Franklin Mayor Larry Dixon, Franklin City Manager Kenton Powell and Franklin City Commissioner Wendell Stewart in June.