DeCicco sees revival for Valley

By Jeanne Starmack

STRUTHERS — It’s going to be hard, Bill DeCicco acknowledged, to walk away from the last 30 years.

But DeCicco, who has served as executive director of CASTLO Community Improvement Corp. since January 1980, says he’s ready to retire.

Today is his last day at the small office building in CASTLO’s industrial park off Bridge Street in Struthers.

When he walked in to the park 30 years ago, it was a brownfield after 80 years of steelmaking.

“It was like Baghdad after bombings,” he said.

When he walks out today, he’ll leave a thriving park dotted with green space. There is no word yet on his replacement.

The story of DeCicco’s career is also the story of the nonprofit economic development organization CASTLO CIC and its efforts to give new life to industrial brownfields.

He saw CASTLO’s industrial park through its evolution over the decades.

He was there, too, when CASTLO began to look beyond the boundaries of the park, becoming one of the founding members of the Mahoning River Corridor of Opportunity in the early 1990s. The MRCO aims to promote development of the 1,500 acres of brownfields still left along the river in a five-mile stretch from the eastern boundary of Youngstown to Struthers.

Named for Campbell, Struthers and Lowellville, CASTLO incorporated in 1978 with an all-volunteer board.

The organization’s mission then and to this day, DeCicco said, is to promote industrial, economic, commercial and civic development in the three municipalities and Coitsville and Poland townships.

A big part of that mission was the 120-acre industrial park, developed on the grounds of the old Struthers Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube.

With $2.5 million in assistance from the Ohio Department of Development, CASTLO bought the property in 1979. Nearly $3 million for improvements would also come from a federal economic development program.

DeCicco remembers the day the federal grant was awarded — Sept. 30, 1980. The date sticks in his mind because, “on Oct. 1, [President Ronald] Reagan did away with the program.”

CASTLO spent the next four years fixing up the park.

Utilities were decrepit and had to be replaced.

The large parking lots on the perimeter of the old mill were now impractical.

“Guys would walk with their lunch buckets to the mill — so there was no road system,” DeCicco said.

CASTLO built 3,800 feet of roads, putting in sewer, gas and electric lines as it did so.

Those state and federal grants used to rehab the property have been paid back, and then some, DeCicco said. The park’s 20 tenants are responsible for 140 to 150 jobs that average $5 million in income for the area, he said. That income means $100,000 a year to Struthers. CASTLO also pays real- estate taxes to the city.

DeCicco said he doesn’t take credit for CASTLO’s successes, citing the organization’s board of 23 trustees who wanted to see their communities improve. They had cooperation from utilities, railroads and other development organizations, he said.

The last 30 years have laid a foundation, he said, for industrial and retail development along the river.

“We’ll never get back to the level we were in the 1970s,” he said. Twenty-thousand jobs were lost then with the steel mills, he pointed out.

He believes, though, that with all the positive features the Youngstown area has to offer — it’s close to highways, it’s midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and its cost of living is low — there will be a revival.

It will be hard for DeCicco to walk away — “for the first minute,” he joked.

He’ll travel now with his wife, Carole, and spend time with their four grandchildren.

But as he looked back on his career, he also looked forward to that revival.

“I hope to see it in my lifetime.”