COLUMBIANA COUNTY Salem plans fight to edge E. Liverpool as largest city

Two councilmen are urging the utilities commission to move forward with a construction project.
By NORMAN LEIGH
VINDICATOR SALEM BUREAU
SALEM -- City officials are preparing a possible challenge to U.S. census figures if they fail to determine that Salem is Columbiana County's largest city, a title now held by East Liverpool.
Auditor Jim Armeni told city council Tuesday that he and Law Director C. Brooke Zellers will meet next week with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's staff.
The purpose of the meeting will be to review the procedure for scrutinizing census results, Armeni said.
In the last completed census, taken in 1990, Salem's population count was 12,233 and East Liverpool's was 13,654.
Financial advantage: Being the county's largest city holds several financial advantages. Chief among them is that the county's most populous city is eligible for the second-largest portion of state tax dollars, known as local government funds, which are distributed annually to the county and local governments. The county government gets the largest share.
In 2001, East Liverpool's share is about 27 percent of the nearly $5.2 million total distributed in the county. Salem's is about 2.4 percent.
Although final figures for the 2000 census haven't been announced, "We're anticipating that the numbers are going to be extremely close," Zellers said.
The city wants to be prepared to challenge the results, if the figures warrant a second look, he added.
Storage buildings: In other matters, Councilmen Steve Andres, D-2nd, and Greg Oesch, R-3rd, urged the city's utilities commission to move forward with a project to build two equipment storage buildings.
Andres noted that plans to construct the buildings have been in place for months but have not been acted upon.
Utilities Superintendent Don Weingart explained that the utilities commission opened bids for the structures in July. But they came in about 25 percent over the cost estimate, so the work was not authorized.
Weingart couldn't remember the amount of the bids or cost estimates.
Andres suggested that perhaps the buildings need to be redesigned to make them less expensive.Another solution would be to build one of the structures one year and the second one the next year, Oesch said.