GIRARD Mayor: Official has held up plan

Councilman Joseph Lambert told the commission that council will probably approve the fiscal plan in two weeks.
By TIM YOVICH
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
GIRARD -- Mayor James J. Melfi has accused the chairman of city council's finance committee of delaying approval of his fiscal recovery plan.
Melfi made the accusation about Councilwoman Kathleen O'Connell Sauline, D-2nd, during a Tuesday meeting of the city's fiscal planning and supervision commission.
Monday, council voted not to suspend council's rules and approve the plan as an emergency.
The five-year plan is required because the city is under a state-imposed fiscal emergency.
Questions: Sauline told council that she and members of her committee want to question Melfi about the plan before they vote to approve it.
Sauline sent a memo to the oversight committee Tuesday detailing the questions. She said the plan does not include benchmarks for estimated revenue and expenses, does not name a person who will be responsible for implementing each step of the plan and doesn't name who will seek government grants and other revenue sources.
Sauline also said in the memo that the plan does not imply future savings that are realistic.
Melfi said the only question he has received from Sauline concerned the plan format. He termed Sauline's actions "at best, a delay."
Councilman Joseph Lambert, D-at-large, a member of the oversight commission and the finance committee, said he was unaware of some of the questions until he read Sauline's memo.
"I don't understand it, quite frankly," Melfi asserted. "These questions have never been posed to me. I'm reading them for the first time," said Melfi, who is also a commission member.
Spoke of concerns: Contacted after the commission meeting, Sauline said she informed the mayor of most of her and other council members' concerns at a finance committee meeting.
"I know he wasn't responding to them. He didn't write them down. He was just blowing them off," Sauline said.
Lambert told the commission that the mayor's plan will probably be approved by council at the next meeting in two weeks.
Commission chairman Joe Gray explained that though the deadline was Monday for the mayor to submit the council-approved plan to the commission, he was pleased to see a draft copy.
Lambert said he wasn't critical of council for not approving the plan because of the fiscal turmoil the city has been experiencing.
After the meeting, Councilman Charles Doran, D-4th, a finance committee member, asserted that council has to have all its questions answered because lawmakers have to be comfortable with the plan.
The city has a general fund deficit of $1.7 million.
Gray said it will be June or July after the bulk of income tax receipts are collected to determine if there will be more employee layoffs or steps taken to increase revenue through an income tax increase or levy.
yovich@vindy.com