The Valley had its ups and downs in 2007. Here’s a look back at many of the big news stories

The Valley had its ups and downs in 2007. Here’s a look back at many of the big news stories of the year:

A nationwide strike at General Motors Corp. ended with good news for the company’s Lordstown complex. The United Auto Workers announced that GM had committed to bringing two new models to Lordstown. The announcement ended speculation that GM could shut down the complex when production of the Chevrolet Cobalt stops in 2009.

Production of a new small car is to start in 2009, with work on a new midsize model to start the next year.

The September strike at GM ended after one day. The union agreed to some groundbreaking changes in plant operations, such as paying new hires who work in support roles half as much as assembly-line workers.

Downtown Youngstown

Downtown Youngstown continued to enjoy a resurgence in 2007 with the $5.75 million Taft Technology Center under construction on West Federal Street, just west of the Youngstown Business Incubator. The center will house high-tech companies and is on schedule to be done by March 15, 2008.

Also, the Youngstown Central Area Community Improvement Corp., which is overseeing the Taft project, is moving ahead with another high-tech plan. Preliminary work began in 2007 on turning the Semple Building, just west of the Taft center, into a high-tech facility.

The spotlight shone brightly on the Butler Institute of American Art in February when it put on display Norman Rockwell’s spectacular, life-size 1965 painting, “Lincoln the Railsplitter’’ — the first Rockwell in its collection. The museum bought the painting, previously owned by billionaire Ross Perot, for $1.6 million at Christie’s Auction House in New York.

In the performing arts, Randall Craig Fleischer began his new job as the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra’s music director and conductor, succeeding Isaiah Jackson, who served in that position for 10 years.

Kelly the Champ

A boxing champ put some heart back into the Valley in what was undoubtedly the knockout story of 2007.

Youngstown middleweight Kelly Pavlik knocked out Jermain Taylor in the seventh round of a 12-round bout to win the WBC and WBO titles Sept. 29 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, N.J.

The victory was the culmination of a seven-year journey for Pavlik (32-0, 29 KOs), who had methodically worked his way up the middleweight ranks since turning pro in 2000.

Pavlik defeated Taylor before an audience of thousands of Youngstown-area fans, who made the six-hour drive to Atlantic City.

Pavlik solidified Youngstown’s reputation as a boxing hotbed. Former champions from Youngstown include Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, Jeff Lampkin and Greg Richardson.

Pavlik will fight Taylor in a nontitle rematch Feb. 16 in Las Vegas.

New schools

The new $33 million East High School opened for 1,170 students on Parker Street in Youngstown on Sept. 4. The 220,000-square-foot building enrolls most of the former Rayen School students and about half of the former Woodrow Wilson High School students. Rayen and Wilson high schools closed in the spring. The new East High School and an expanded Chaney High School are part of an ongoing $192 million city schools rebuilding program.

In Austintown, the new $24.5 million Austintown Middle School opened for 1,180 pupils in grades six through eight on Raccoon Road. The school district underwent a reconfiguration that saw Frank Ohl Middle School become Frank Ohl Intermediate. Each of the five elementary schools now house kindergarten through third grade while Frank Ohl houses fourth and fifth grades. The old Austintown Middle School on Mahoning Avenue was rejected by developers who’d agreed to buy it in 2005, and went back on the block.

The school district was left hanging as the only one of 10 school districts in Mahoning County to not settle on a teachers contract. Teachers and the school board stumbled over the issue of who should decide how much planning time teachers should have. Contract talks are to resume this month.

Murder rate

The city began a campaign of zero-tolerance saturation police patrols after an unsolved quadruple homicide Jan. 29 in a crack house on West Evergreen Avenue on the city’s South Side.

Big heist

Roger Lee Dillon, 22, and his girlfriend Nicole D. Boyd, 25, were found in his mother’s double-wide trailer home in Pipestem, W.Va., after becoming suspects in the theft of $7.4 million from AT Systems, an armored-car company on Tibbetts-Wick Road in Liberty.

Oakhill Renaissance Place

Mahoning County’s acquisition of Oakhill Renaissance Place was validated in July when a judge ruled against the Ohio Valley Mall Co., a division of the Cafaro Co., which had sued to rescind the county’s purchase of Oakhill.

County Auditor Michael Sciortino was ordered to write the $75,000 check to pay for the county’s acquisition of Oakhill in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, and Sciortino immediately complied. OVM agreed to forgo an appeal of its loss in exchange for a $913,590 settlement of a separate breach of lease lawsuit OVM had filed against the county.

The county moved its Department of Job and Family Services from Cafaro-owned rented quarters on the city’s East Side to Oakhill in July. Oakhill is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.

Health care changes

A significant portion of health care in the Mahoning Valley “went south” this year, to Boardman.

On Aug. 1, Humility of Mary Health Partners opened its new $83 million St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center, the first new full-service hospital to open in the Valley in half a century.

The 128-bed, 300,000-square-foot facility is also the first full-service hospital ever to open outside the Valley’s urban centers of Youngstown and Warren.

HMHP is also involved with Akron Children’s Hospital in the movement of pediatric care to Boardman.

Akron Children’s bought Beeghly Medical Park from Forum Health for $26 million, and plans to spend $7 million to $10 million on renovations and $5 million for equipment in converting the facility to a full-service children’s hospital by the end of 2008, said William Considine, Akron Children’s president and chief executive officer.

HMHP, which has had an affiliation agreement since 2005 with Akron Children’s to provide pediatric care in the Mahoning Valley, will contribute money to purchase the real estate at Beeghly, and will share in the profit and losses of the pediatric service line there.

Pediatric care will stay in Youngstown in the form of a pediatric care unit at St. Elizabeth Health Care Center operated by Akron Children’s.

However, as part of its effort to right it financial ship, Forum Health closed Tod Children’s Hospital on June 30, leaving the city without a pediatric hospital, and leaving Forum employees, city leaders and residents wondering what would be next to go.

They didn’t have long to wait to find out.

On Nov. 16, Forum finalized the sale of Beeghly Oaks, a long-term care facility, to Vrable Healthcare of Columbus. Then, in November, the deal to sell Beeghly Medical Park to Akron Children’s was approved by Ohio Atty. Gen. Marc Dann.

During the year, Forum’s Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren became affiliated with University Hospital’s Ireland Cancer Center in Cleveland, resulting in expanded cancer treatment at TMH.

Trumbull Memorial, one of Forum’s few profitable facilities in recent years, was also the object of two potential buyers in 2007. One dropped out during the due diligence phase of negotiations, however; and the other, in which Forum’s Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland was also involved, was possibly cut short by an announcement in December by Forum that it was suspending its attempt to sell its hospitals and rehabilitation center.

Instead, Forum said it plans to invest in TMH and Hillside as ongoing operations, crediting the success of a financial turnaround for making the change of plans possible. Forum reported a $16.6 million operating profit through the first 10 months of the year.

Despite suspending the sale effort, Forum said it is still open to partnerships or affiliations that would bring investments to its facilities.

As part of the Boardman movement in 2007, Select Specialty, a long-term acute care facility, has agreed to expand into the St. Elizabeth Boardman hospital. A year ago, Select Specialty bought property on Youngstown’s North Side near Stambaugh Auditorium, where officials said it planned to build a multimillion-dollar free-standing facility.

Delphi contract

Delphi Packard Electric workers received a new labor contract in June. Workers at Packard’s Trumbull County operations had been on edge since the parent company, Delphi Corp., filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and said it needed to cut pay. The hourly pay for production workers fell from $27 to $16.50 but gave them a “buydown” payment of $105,000. Skilled trades workers saw their hourly pay cut from more than $30 to $26, with a $75,000 payment.

The contract allowed about 300 temporary workers to become full-time workers at about $11 an hour, although not all receive benefits.

The reorganization of Michigan-based Delphi still is being hammered out in a New York court.

New diocesan bishop

Bishop George V. Murry became the fifth bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown during an installation liturgy March 28 in St. Columba Cathedral in Youngstown. The bishop leads a diocese that covers Ashtabula, Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage and Trumbull counties with 216,151 registered Catholics.

When the bishop was introduced Jan. 30, he promised to “listen and understand the faithful” of the diocese. Since being installed, he has made numerous visits to churches, schools and other facilities of the diocese.

Ohio politics

The Mahoning Valley started off the year well-represented in state government. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who spent four years representing Columbiana County and most of Mahoning County in the U.S. House, was sworn in as governor in January.

Also, Marc Dann, a Liberty Democrat, began serving as the state’s attorney general. Dann’s inaugural celebration was held in Liberty with more than 1,000 people attending.

In an effort to boost the Youngstown economy, Dann opened an office at the city-owned 20 Federal Place building with 38 employees. The employees have a combined annual salary of $1.8 million.

Youngstown’s changes

Youngstown State University mourned the untimely death of its provost and vice president for academic affairs, Dr. Robert K. Herbert, who drowned in the Pacific Ocean while vacationing in Costa Rica in July. Dr. Ikram Khawaja, a retired YSU dean, was named as his interim replacement.

The city’s 2010 “planned shrinkage” program garnered national headlines in USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The plan’s main focus is to redevelop individual neighborhoods in the city as well as demolish dilapidated buildings, primarily residential houses, and replace them with green space. As it did in 2006, the city demolished about 400 structures in 2007 as part of the Youngstown 2010 plan.

While Youngstown enjoyed development and growth in portions of its downtown, the city-owned Chevrolet Centre continued to be a financial failure. The center lost $254,388 during its second fiscal year, from October 2006 to September 2007.

The financial problems led the city to cut ties with Global Entertainment Corp., a Phoenix-based company that managed the center during its first two years. Youngstown received three proposals from companies interested in managing the center. A decision is expected by March of 2008.

Canfield and Austintown

A fire devastated a wing of the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center on Palmyra Road on May 4.

No one was injured, and the school was able to finish the year at the closed Gordon D. James Career Center building in Lordstown.

Witnesses reported that a bucket of paint thinner in an art lab caught fire and that fire spread when a student threw the flaming bucket into a sink.

Two students were charged in the fire — a 17-year-old girl with criminal damaging and a 19-year-old man with obstruction of official business. Police said the girl, Pamela Schindler, lighted a cigarette lighter near the bucket. The man, Kyle Layne, did not provide accurate information during the investigation, police said. He pleaded no contest in September and was put on probation. Schindler’s case is set for trial in Mahoning County juvenile court Jan. 14.

The fire is estimated to have caused $8 million in damage.

In Canfield Township, residents inundated officials with protests after Wal-Mart made a play in October for land bounded by Raccoon Road, the Ohio Turnpike and U.S. Route 224.

The retailer has many residents in a defensive stance at the idea of a supercenter on land behind the Taco Bell. They’re citing concerns about traffic, crime and the effect of the store on nearby homes. Some residents, however, said they would welcome the convenience of having a Wal-Mart close by.

Canfield residents were also considering whether it would be a good or bad idea for the city and township to merge. Officials planned on meeting to decide if a study on a merger is warranted.

Tragedy struck in November when Austintown police officer Ross Linert was badly burned while doing rounds in his cruiser. A woman who was accused of driving drunk slammed into the back of the car, a Crown Victoria Interceptor. That car has a history of problems with exploding gas tanks. The tank in Linert’s car exploded. Though he was able to crawl from the burning car, he was severely injured.

Linert spent a month in a medically induced coma at Akron Children’s Hospital burn unit, where he underwent several surgeries. The Austintown police department bought fire suppression systems that fit over the gas tanks for the rest of the Crown Victorias in its fleet.

In May, Austintown officer Joe Wojciak was shot as he sat in his cruiser in the Kmart parking lot on Mahoning Avenue. He was wearing a protective vest and wasn’t seriously injured. He helped other officers chase his attacker and went on to be awarded a medal of valor from the police department. Carlton Sims, 22, of Boardman is awaiting trial in the shooting.

Cases with national interest

Mercer County resident Donna Moonda finally had her day in court. Her nearly four-week trial in Akron federal court ended with her being convicted on all charges in her husband’s May 13, 2005, shooting death. Dr. Gulam Moonda was killed on the side of the Ohio Turnpike during a family trip. She is now serving a life sentence in a federal women’s prison in Danbury, Conn. Donna Moonda’s ex-boyfriend, Damian Bradford, the shooter, is serving his 17-year prison sentence at a federal prison in Kentucky.

In December, Richard Kovach, a 13-year member of the Warren Police Department, was fired. The patrol officer was terminated for conducting an illegal search when he knew the man, Tim Brown II, was not a suspect in a murder investigation. Ironically, the illegal arrest did not receive the attention of Kovach’s August arrest of Heidi Gill with the use of a Taser. Kovach stunned Gill several times. The camera mounted on the dash of a police car captured part of the arrest. It made national news. Because of the Gill arrest, Kovach received a 60-day suspension.