Youngstown is paying the price for losses in Columbus

Youngstown is paying the price for losses in Columbus

The city of Youngstown is on the verge of losing $70,000 that it can ill-afford to lose, and there will be plenty of people who will be eager to blame Mayor Jay Williams for the loss.

That’s because Williams chose to enforce a city charter provision that was overwhelmingly approved by city voters that required city employees to live in the city rather than bow to a new state law that sought to eliminate residency requirements.

Acting on his convictions — and on his duty to city residents — Williams fired a city patrolman who moved to Canal Fulton in Stark County, more than 60 miles and well over an hour’s drive from Youngstown. At the time, Williams put his faith in the Supreme Court of Ohio, which he had good reason to believe would find that the state’s legislators in Columbus overstepped their bounds by substituting their judgment for what was best for Ohio communities over that of the residents of those communities.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, which has seven Republican members and likes to characterize itself as conservative, stretched one sentence in the Ohio Constitution beyond recognition to put the narrow interests of public employees over the broader interests of the public that pays their salaries. A political cynic might suggest that some members of the court were looking forward to re-election and were less than eager to poke a stick in the eye of the state’s influential and free-spending public employee unions.

Payment proposal

So, Youngstown and the other cities who challenged the General Assembly’s ban on local residency laws lost. City council is expected to receive a proposal tonight to pay Patrolman Daniel Tickerhoof $70,000 in back pay and damages. The amount would have been more, except that for much of the time since Tickerhoff’s 2006 firing, he has had a job with the Canal Fulton Police Department. As part of the agreement, Tickerhoof will resign from the Youngstown department.

No agreement has been reached in the case of a city firefighter who was also fired for living outside the city.

Whatever the settlements in these two cases costs the city, it is a pittance beside what will be lost due to the irresponsible actions of Ohio’s General Assembly and Supreme Court.

Denying residents of a city the legal option of requiring their employees to also be their neighbors and members of their communities involved irresponsible power politics and was profoundly undemocratic.

The Supreme Court of the United States has held consistently that residency laws are constitutional, because while anyone has a right to live where they want, no one has a right to a city job. Every city employee knew when he or she took the job that the city had a residency requirement. Each had the option of not taking the job.

Unfortunately, a combination of union-beholden Democrats and libertarian Republicans in the General Assembly said it no longer mattered that city employees gave their word to remain city residents.

Williams acted responsibly in trying to protect a municipal asset: its employees. There are a lot of people to blame for what the loss of Youngstown’s residency law will cost the city, but Williams isn’t among them.