Trustees at YSU question contracts

By Harold Gwin

Details on faculty and classified employee contracts may not have been presented to the officials.

YOUNGSTOWN — Did the Youngstown State University Board of Trustees get all of the information it should have received before ratifying a new three-year contract for the university’s Association of Classified Employees?

“That’s unclear at this time,” Scott Schulick, board chairman, said Wednesday. The board is continuing to review that issue, he said.

“We’ll try to get to the bottom of that,” added Trustee Harry Meshel, the only member of the board to oppose the ACE contract when it came up for a vote July 29, calling it “overly generous.”

Wednesday’s comments came more than a week after the university’s chief human resources officer was put on leave — and follows claims that the ACE union president “substantially benefited” from the August pact.

“The board believed it voted in good faith,” Schulick said, when asked if the board had done sufficient due diligence in examining the contract before voting on it.

It acted on information it received from the management team, he said, adding that the board was told it had all the relevant information.

“We acted on what they told us,” Meshel added.

Documents sent to the trustees anonymously this week, however, indicate that some contract details weren’t presented for their review before the ratification vote.

Those documents, including a letter written by someone purporting to be a 29-year employee of YSU, included a letter written to Eric Fingerhut, Ohio’s chancellor of higher education. The letter asks the chancellor to initiate an investigation into the university administration’s communications and actions regarding both the ACE and faculty contracts negotiated this year.

The writer claims that the trustees weren’t given the necessary information on the ACE contract. The writer provided as evidence a copy of an e-mail purportedly written by Craig Bickley to YSU President David Sweet and other top administrators five days before the contract vote.

In that e-mail, Bickley, who was the university’s chief negotiator on the ACE contract and chief human resources officer, said there was a consensus of the president’s cabinet to limit the level of detail to be presented to the board, although that detail would be available if requested by the trustees.

Sweet, who said he was unaware of the letter written to the chancellor, said he was not party to any decision to limit financial details of the ACE contract to be presented to the board.

The letter writer said those details included a new job classification schedule for ACE employees that the trustees thought was to mirror a state job classification schedule.

It turns out that there were changes made in the new YSU schedule by the ACE union before it was approved by university negotiators and made a part of the contract.

Among other things, it elevated pay grades for some positions.

Those changes weren’t an issue until Ivan Maldonado, ACE president and chief negotiators, secured a job reclassification in his payroll department post that boosted his pay by $21,000 a year to more than $81,000. His new classification was one of those with a pay grade elevated above that found in the state system.

The university has said it feels Maldonado “incorrectly received” the increase and that steps would be taken to reduce his pay grade to a level matching the state classification system and to recover any of the $21,000 already paid to him so far.

The union has promised a legal fight if that happens.

YSU has kept the chancellor’s office briefed on the issue, including a probe it requested through the state attorney general’s office which detailed what happened with the job classification plan.

Bickley has been placed on administrative leave as a result of the investigation and has declined to comment.

Maldonado remains on the job and, on the advice of legal counsel, has declined to comment.

gwin@vindy.com