DOWNTOWN YOUNGSTOWN CSB faces deadline on decision to move to building addition

The proposal would bring 200 jobs downtown.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- The Mahoning County Children Services Board will be scrambling to decide in the next three weeks if it wants to move into a four-story, $7.5 million addition to the George V. Voinovich Government Center with the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation.
The board will conduct a special meeting on the issue at 4 p.m. June 18 in St. Dominic Parish Center (former St. Dominic School), 3403 Southern Blvd.
The board must decide by July 1 whether it wants to join the Warren BWC office in moving to the Voinovich addition.
"We need to have a signed agreement by the end of this month," said Edwin Romero, attorney for the Youngstown Central Area Community Improvement Corp., the downtown's redevelopment agency, which would manage the new building.
If not, "We will then go to our alternative and find space for BWC without CSB,'' he added, noting BWC wants to occupy its new space by Oct. 1, 2004. "Use it to your advantage because the opportunity is now. The opportunity may not be there on July 1," he told the CSB on Tuesday.
Mayor George McKelvey, city council and the county commissioners want BWC to be in downtown Youngstown, Romero said.
Beneficial to both
"We saw a marriage that seemed to benefit both," in designing a building to house both BWC and CSB, said Reid Dulberger, executive vice president of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber, which staffs CIC.
The addition would bring about 200 jobs to downtown Youngstown and include enclosed ground-level parking. BWC would be on the second floor, connected by a bridge to bureau offices on the same floor in the Voinovich Center.
CSB would occupy the third and fourth floors.
The county agency, which serves abused and neglected children, has been looking to move out of the county's South Side Annex ever since a 1995 proposal to relocate it to the basement of the Higbee complex, which was later demolished.
In 2001, the CIC proposed putting children services in its own new building on the site of the former Master's Tuxedo block, but the idea has languished in uncertainty.
If children services is to have its own building, CIC would accommodate BWC first, Dulberger said.
Dust exposure
The Rev. Joseph Allen, pastor of St. Dominic Church and CSB chairman, said workers are suffering from exposure to dust during renovations in the county annex. "We're concerned about our workers, and we do need to move," he said.
CSB has $3.4 million set aside for a new building, said Daniel Thomas, the agency's fiscal officer.
After the move into the new Voinovich addition, Dulberger said CSB and BWC would have to pay maintenance costs estimated at $4.40 per square foot per year in the 80,000-square-foot building and there might be a reserve fund for major expenses, such as carpet or roof replacement.