Waste district: Why so few citations?

Two of the officers have filed felony charges against violators.

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

WARREN — Six months into a new environmental enforcement initiative, members of the Geauga-Trumbull Solid Waste District paying two deputies and a Warren policeman to run the program are not happy.

Waste district members met Wednesday with the three officers and sheriffs Thomas Altiere and Dan McClelland of Trumbull and Geauga counties, respectively, to find out why so few citations have been written or charges been brought and why open-dumping problems seem to be just as bad as when the program started.

Kevin Francis, a sanitarian for the Trumbull County health board, said one intent of the program was to transfer some of the hundreds of open-dumping complaints the health department gets every year to the county’s environmental deputy, Dr. Harold Firster, to have him write citations for the offenses in hopes that he could clean up the problems quickly.

After referring two such complaints to Firster and seeing no action, Francis said he went back to handling them himself.

The waste district began paying $67,000 per year to the Trumbull and Geauga sheriff’s departments and Warren Police Department this summer to hire Firster, Warren Detective Pat Marsico and Geauga County Detective Mike Matsik. The money came from an increase in fees from $3.50 to $5.50 charged to trash haulers for every load they dump at a landfill.

Both Marsico and Matsik mentioned a felony-level case each brought to prosecutors — Marsico having one involving a western Pennsylvania man illegally transporting tires into a warehouse on Buckeye Street, and Matsik having one involving a salvage company illegally burning a trailer. Both cases are moving forward in common pleas court sometime next year.

But Firster said he has faced a multitude of obstacles in getting prosecutors to file charges in his cases.

For instance, he has written six citations in recent months that were thrown out in various municipal or area courts, he said. The reason was that the charges were “not legal,” he said.

Geauga officials said they have concluded that they will have trouble charging someone under the criminal statutes also and are instead using a civil fire-code statute for open-burning offenses. Such an offense carries a $1,000 fine but no jail time, McClelland said.

Altiere said his department will be attempting to find a new way to charge burning and dumping offenses and may have to follow Geauga County’s lead in determining how it’s done.

Firster admitted that he had to put his environmental work aside at several points to handle other matters for the sheriff’s department, but he has worked on environmental enforcement almost exclusively the past couple of months.

Because the officers were spending time on nonenvironmental matters, solid waste district members said they will require the three officers to keep daily logs of their hours.

runyan@vindy.com