Environmental police uncover violations

Officers are expected to write tickets for littering.

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

WARREN — In a downtown warehouse, police officers discover thousands of tires with the potential to cause an environmental disaster if they caught fire.

In a rural area of Howland Township, an inspection uncovers thousands of tires piled up in a scrap yard.

On parts of Atlantic and Washington streets and elsewhere in Warren, houses have been left without human tenants but lots of rodents, living among piles of garbage.

In rural areas of northern Trumbull County, along natural-gas well roads, people have dumped big piles of trash.

And everywhere, beer packaging and the bags and wrappers from fast food are carelessly tossed alongside the road.

These are just a few examples of illegal activities that have been uncovered since July, when the city of Warren and the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Department began to employ environmental police officers.

Detective Pat Marsico, a former Warren patrolman for 16 years, and Deputy Harold Firster, a retired physician, were hired this summer to enforce environmental laws in a way that officials hope will create a new attitude about trash.

Robert Villers, Geauga-Trumbull Solid Waste District executive director, says zoning, police and health officials have attempted to enforce dumping and littering laws here in a variety of ways over the years.

He hopes that having two officers here devoting all of their time to the problems will have a greater impact.

Frank Migliozzi, Trumbull County Health Department director of environmental health, said the work Firster has done so far with the department’s solid-waste inspector Kevin Francis has been very productive.

Firster and Francis recently addressed problems with a house in Brookfield Township that was filled with water, trash and rats. The
homeowner was issued a warning, and the problem was cleaned up in two weeks.

Without Firster’s help, the health department would have followed its procedures for having the home declared unfit for habitation. Such a process can take months to resolve, Migliozzi said.

The money to pay for Marsico’s and Firster’s salaries — $67,000 each, including salary and benefits — came from an increase in the fees collected by the Geauga-Trumbull Solid Waste District from trash haulers when they dump their trash in a landfill.

The fee increased from $3.50 per ton to $5.50 when a new 15-year plan was approved late last year by cities, townships and other government bodies throughout the county.

Marsico said one of the biggest cases he’s handled was a warehouse on Buckeye Street where a young businessman was storing tires, some of which he was shipping out for resale.

When Marsico looked into it, he realized that storing more than 100 tires was a felony.

Though the Ohio attorney general’s office has generally handled felony prosecutions of this type in the past, Marsico said he is working with the Trumbull County prosecutor’s office on this case and hopes it will provide the training for him, the prosecutor’s office and the county common pleas court so that a system for prosecuting such crimes can be established.

Marsico, who works in plain clothes and uses an unmarked car, said he has written some citations for misdemeanor offenses — mostly for nuisance properties containing garbage.

But he has also written about a dozen warning letters and gotten positive responses to most of them.

Marsico said he believes a police officer who carries a gun and a badge who gives out warning letters to a property owner is going to get results most of the time.

“Do I arrest the homeowner? No. I’m going to give you 10 days to clean it up,” he said. “If it’s not clean, I will cite.”

Firster says his job is made a little more complicated than Marsico’s in that he has to know the zoning codes for 24 townships and the village of Lordstown in order to assist the townships with problems such as junk cars.

In Vienna, for instance, having two or more junk cars qualifies as a salvage yard, and salvage yards are not permitted in the township, he explained.

The junk-car issue will be easier to enforce when a junk-car law now before the Ohio Legislature is approved, he said.

An easier job so far has been the licensing of auto junk yards.

Most owners of the businesses simply don’t know that they need the $10 annual permit, so he’s educating them.

In locating them and inspecting them, he has found some problems that will require fixing, he said, such as too many tires.

Opening burning is another big part of his job, Firster said.

People need to know that most large fires are illegal, especially when people are using them to burn garbage.

Firster said he makes it a practice to check on open fires or investigate fire complaints from fire departments to see whether property owners are violating open burning laws.

Likewise, he will be watching for trucks carrying trash improperly and will pull over someone he catches littering.

“I’m not a health or environmental nut,” said Firster, a retired podiatric surgeon and former Warren health commissioner.

“But we’re beating this thing [our community] pretty hard. A cigarette butt seems like a small thing, but the cumulative effect of burning tires and garbage is huge.”

Firster said he has written citations, estimating it to be around 10 so far.

Villers said a committee of the waste district will be keeping track of Marsico’s and Firster’s work over the months to see that the district’s primary concern — littering — will be the officers’ primary concern, too.

“I see people littering every day,” Villers said. “I don’t want to set quotas, but when [the officers] see people doing it, I want them to write a citation,” he said.

To reach Firster, call (330) 675-4043 or Marsico at (330) 841-2638.

runyan@vindy.com