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Youngstown will verify workers’ college degrees
The city paid about $83,000 last year in education bonuses.
YOUNGSTOWN — The city will check the legitimacy of college degrees earned by all but one of the 193 employees to whom it paid education bonuses last year.
The decision by Mayor Jay Williams to examine the authenticity of the degrees came after it was discovered last month through an anonymous tip that a fake bachelor’s degree from Youngstown State University was in a personnel file of Carmen S. Conglose Jr.
Conglose, who retired last year as deputy director of the public works department, has acknowledged the degree is bogus but insists he didn’t put the fake document in the personnel file and contends he earned the education bonuses.
The city finance department submitted paperwork Wednesday to the mayor listing those who received the education bonuses last year as well as the type of degree, the college or university from which it came, and the date it was received.
The city’s civil service and law departments will verify the authenticity of the educational credentials. City officials don’t know how long that process will take.
Including Conglose, the city, facing a general-fund deficit of more than $3 million by the end of this year, paid $82,928.56 in 2007 to 193 employees.
Thirty-six workers each received $366.03 for having associate degrees; 117 each received $422.84 for bachelor’s degrees; and the city paid $506.98 for 40 employees with postgraduate degrees. An overwhelming majority of the degrees came from YSU.
The police department has 79 employees on the list, the most of any department. Of those 79, 51 are listed as having bachelor’s degrees.
Among those who received education bonuses last year were Council President Charles Sammarone for a master’s degree from Westminster College, and Rufus Hudson, whose term as 2nd-Ward councilman ended Dec. 31, 2007, for a bachelor’s degree from YSU.
Council approved an amended ordinance March 22, 2006, regarding education bonuses to those not in an employee union.
The amendment calls for the education bonuses to be given to “any officer or employee in the various departments of the city of Youngstown, Ohio, not included in any bargaining unit and, therefore, designated as ‘management,’ including the Youngstown Municipal Court and the Youngstown Clerk of Courts.”
The ordinance, however, doesn’t address council members, considered the city’s legislative branch.
When asked why Sammarone and Hudson received the bonuses, Kyle Miasek, deputy finance director, said that was a decision made by the law department. Law Director Iris Torres Guglucello couldn’t be reached Wednesday to comment.
Sammarone said he never asked for the bonus and got it for the first time last year. When Sammarone received the money, he said he didn’t know what it was for until he asked Guglucello.
Until Conglose’s phony degree was discovered, Williams said the city paid education bonuses on the “honor system” and accepted “the degrees from the employees at face value.”
On March 19, Williams instructed the finance department to compile a list by March 31 going back five years of city workers who received education bonuses to determine if the degrees were legitimate.
The request turned out to be challenging because the city’s payroll system doesn’t list employees’ degrees and their colleges and universities, Miasek said.
The work had to be done by hand with finance department employees reviewing the personnel records of each city worker who received the education bonus, he said.
Along with the list it finished compiling, the finance department submitted documents about two inches thick of supplemental information, including copies of diplomas from personnel files.
For the four years before 2007, the finance department gave Williams a list of names of city workers who received education bonuses and the dollar amounts. The degrees and the colleges and universities aren’t on those lists.
City employees who earn degrees in the future and those hired who have degrees and are eligible for education bonuses must first have their higher education credentials verified, Williams said.
Conglose received the education benefit, about $3,000 since 1999, when the city first enacted it, until his retirement.
The Ohio auditor’s office is conducting an investigation into Conglose’s receiving the bonuses. The investigation could lead to criminal charges, city officials say.
Conglose has said he’s entitled to keep the money. He’s pointed to his 1990 surveyor’s license saying the state views it as equivalent to a four-year college degree. The head of the state agency that gives the licenses disputes Conglose’s claim, however.
Conglose gave Matthew Blair, one of his attorneys, about $3,000 last month that would be given to the city if the investigation determines he shouldn’t have received the bonuses.
When Williams asked Conglose on Feb. 14 about the fake degree in one of his personnel files, Conglose said he knew nothing about it. But he resigned on the spot from his $42,577-a-year part-time city job as traffic coordinator he had started two weeks earlier.
skolnick@vindy.com