Oakhill Renaissance Place

County investigation records turned over to The Vindicator indicated a lack of planing but no criminal activity.

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — When Forum Health Southside Medical Center abandoned the Oakhill Renaissance Place in 2007, it left behind tons of old hospital furnishings — from beds to stretchers to sinks.

But the new Oakhill tenant, Mahoning County government, didn’t have a plan to deal with the old hospital items. So, officials failed to reap any rewards from metal furnishings that were removed to make way for county offices.

One resourceful day-reporting inmate, however, managed to collect thousands of dollars.

Joseph T. Yaksich Sr., then 60, of Lowellville, was on the work detail assigned to remove these items from the former hospital as a punishment for a misdemeanor crime. On days he wasn’t assigned to the sheriff’s day-

reporting work program, he peddled the hospital wares to two local scrapyards for at least $2,600 when stainless-steel scrap metal prices were near their peak.

“That’s not really a punishment — to be able to remove what I consider to be, at that point in time, county property, and then substantially benefit yourself. That’s not the purpose of the day-reporting program,” said Commissioner John A. McNally IV, the only commissioner who opposed the county’s Oakhill purchase.

No criminal activity has been alleged, according to county investigation records turned over to The Vindicator.

But county Prosecutor Paul Gains said Yaksich, who died a year ago, should not have been allowed to profit from inmate work detail.

And McNally wonders why the county did not consider a state law that such items be subject to a public auction.

Two years later, a seemingly low-end

detail in the county’s complicated acquisition of Southside still prompts some regret.

“If an inmate who’s on a day-reporting program can supposedly get $2,600 from a scrap metal company, why isn’t the county trying to sell that property to make some money?” McNally asked.

Investigation

On April 19, 2007, Commander Leonard Sliwinski, who heads the sheriff’s detective and patrol divisions, took six pictures of stainless-steel stretchers, sinks and cabinets at U.S. Trading, which matched the description of the items removed from Oakhill — the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.

According Sliwinski’s report, Yaksich said he removed the items from Oakhill in a friend’s pickup truck. Yaksich told the officer that he sold the items to United States Trading Inc., 1315 Poland Ave., and Diver-Steel City Auto Crusher Inc., 590 Himrod Ave., with the permission of Deputy John DeMart, who supervised the work detail, and Kurt Bucheit, the county’s project manager at Oakhill.

Steve Vivo, owner of U.S. Trading, told

Sliwinski that Yaksich sold 3,980 pounds of stainless steel to the company for $2,606.50 between April 3 and April 10, 2007, when stainless steel scrap metal prices were near their peak. Vivo told Sliwinski that Yaksich said he was working for the county, which was clearing the furnishings out of Oakhill.

Yaksich, who died on March 14, 2008, said he shared the proceeds from the scrap sales with a fellow day-reporting inmate in the work detail, but not with any county employees. In his written statement, he said he “was not aware we were doing anything wrong.”

Sliwinski’s report did not include an accounting of the scrap metal sales at Diver.

Sliwinski’s report says Bucheit told him he (Bucheit) was present the whole time the work detail was at Oakhill, and that members of the inmate crew did not remove stainless-steel cabinets, or he would have stopped them.

However, Sliwinski said Bucheit and DeMart told him they permitted “Dumpster-diving, which means letting individuals remove items from the Dumpster after they were removed from the building to be thrown away.”

Nobody was charged with any crime linked to the disposal of the metal furnishings, said Sheriff Randall A. Wellington, because the investigation concluded there was no criminal act.

“It was in the Dumpster. It was rubbish,” the sheriff said. “It was abandoned property.”

In a written statement he gave during the probe, DeMart said all items removed from Oakhill were removed at the direction of Bucheit and his staff and placed in the Dumpster.

Bucheit told him anything removed from Oakhill that was placed in the Dumpster could be taken away and sold as scrap by anyone, DeMart said.

Rules violation

Allowing the inmates to cash in, however, “was a violation of the rules” governing the day-reporting program, said Gains.

“It’s wrong, but it doesn’t amount to a crime,” he said.

Neither DeMart, who retired from the sheriff’s department on disability later in 2007, nor Bucheit, who resigned last month, responded to requests to comment. Neither had any administrative disciplinary notices concerning the metal furnishings disposal placed in their personnel files.

George J. Tablack, county administrator, said he did not know who authorized Bucheit to declare the metal furnishings trash and have them placed in the Dumpster.

“The authorization did not come from me,” said county Commissioner David N. Ludt.

Inmates assigned to the day-reporting program report daily for the work program, but they are not housed in the county jail.

Agent Peter Proach of the FBI’s Youngstown office reviewed the sheriff’s records of the incident in July 2008, but no federal or state criminal charges stemmed from his probe, Wellington said.

Forum Health

The county owned the fixtures attached to Oakhill’s walls, Gains said, but did not own the beds, tables, chairs, desks and unattached appliances. These items were the abandoned property of Forum Health, he said.

When Mahoning Valley Hospital moved out of Oakhill in May 2006, Forum officials issued a three-page list of hospital-owned items intentionally left behind. These items were also documented in a video.

Mahoning Valley Hospital “has no claim to the ownership or future use of the items” and “has no objection to the removal of such items by Forum’’ from Oakhill if “such removal is consistent with any requirements or rulings of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court,’’ where the county bought Oakhill in July 2006, Michael S. Senchak, Mahoning Valley Hospital president, wrote in an Aug. 15, 2006, letter.

In a later letter, Frederick S. Coombs III, a lawyer who then represented Forum Health, said Forum would entertain any reasonable offer if the county wanted to purchase any of the items.

But, in a March 2, 2007, letter to Coombs, Linette M. Stratford, chief of the civil division of the county prosecutor’s office, said the county wasn’t interested in buying them.

Stratford told Coombs that Forum had to remove its property immediately, or the county would dispose of it in April, because the county was preparing Oakhill space for occupancy by the county’s Department of Job and Family Services. JFS moved from rented quarters on the city’s East Side to Oakhill in July 2007.

In April 2007, the day-reporting inmates disposed of the property Forum did not remove, Gains said.

Was it trash?

The inmate work detail benefitted the county by providing free labor for the removal, McNally said. But he said he believes an auction would have been the preferred way to dispose of the surplus property.

McNally cited a state law requiring the commissioners to “sell the property at a public auction or by sealed bid to the highest bidder” if the property is worth more than $2,500.

“It probably should have been auctioned off and the county should have received the funding,” Ludt said.

“I don’t know how you can just say it’s trash and then say it’s a free-for-all for anybody who wants to climb into a Dumpster and take whatever they can find,” McNally said.

Gains, however, said the county didn’t assume ownership of Forum’s abandoned property, and the fact that Forum abandoned it indicated it was of no value to Forum.

Based on Yaksich’s having collected $2,606.50 at one of two scrapyards, Tablack observed: “What I don’t know is: Would it cost the county sizably more than that to net $2,600?”

Tablack said he believes Forum personnel came to Oakhill and removed some of Forum’s property after Stratford wrote the ultimatum letter.

“They would be in a much better position to determine whether anything that they left behind had some type of salvage value than we. We don’t operate hospitals,” Tablack said. “I think it’s ridiculous to suggest that they’d leave behind things of value.”

“Merely because it becomes abandoned on county property does not mean the county owns it,” Gains said of the property Forum left behind. Asked to estimate the value of the furnishings removed from Oakhill, Gains said: “I have no idea ... I’m not an appraiser.”

McNally and Ludt said they, too, could not provide a value estimate.

“It’s abandoned. It’s like trash you put at the curb,” Gains said of the property Forum left behind.

But McNally said: “People would have loved to have bought used stainless steel cabinetry [at an auction] or taken a look at any equipment that was left over in that building when we took ownership.”

Learned later

Tablack said he didn’t learn of the disposal and sale of the metal furnishings from Oakhill until “some time much later” than the time the metal was removed and sold.

McNally said he didn’t learn about the April 2007 events until county employees told him about them about a year later and that he didn’t see the sheriff’s office reports until late in 2008.

Citing attorney-client privilege, Coombs declined to comment on behalf of Forum Health.

Trish Hrina, communications and marketing specialist at Forum Health, did not respond to a Vindicator inquiry as to the estimated value of the abandoned property and why Forum abandoned it.

milliken@vindy.com

What happened

Metal furnishings were removed from Mahoning County’s newly acquired Oakhill Renaissance Place in April 2007.

An inmate work detail benefited the county by providing free labor for the removal and sold the items to United States Trading Inc. and Diver-Steel City Auto Crusher Inc.

Items were stainless-steel cabinets and fixtures, sinks and stretchers.

Mahoning County owned the fixtures attached to Oakhill’s walls, Prosecutor Paul Gains said.

The county did not own the beds, tables, chairs, desks and unattached appliances, Gains said, adding that these items were the abandoned property of Forum Health.

Frederick S. Coombs III, a lawyer who then represented Forum Health, said in a letter to the county that Forum would entertain any reasonable offer if the county wanted to purchase any of the items.

But, in a March 2, 2007, letter to Coombs, Linette M. Stratford, chief of the civil division of the county prosecutor’s office, said the county wasn’t interested in buying them.

In April 2007, the day-reporting inmates disposed of the property Forum did not remove, Gains said.