Controversy dogs Dem candidates for auditor
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
YOUNGSTOWN
Andrew D’Apolito, a candidate for Mahoning County auditor, was suspended for three days and stripped of his personnel management responsibilities toward the end of his 36-year career with the county sanitary engineering department.
In June 2007, D’Apolito also was reassigned from the sanitary engineering headquarters on Industrial Road to a sewage treatment plant office, where he was based for his final two years before he retired last year from the $94,000-a-year job, according to his personnel file.
In the May 4 Democratic primary, D’Apolito is challenging the incumbent county auditor, Michael V. Sciortino, who was a key figure in the dispute over the county’s purchase of Oakhill Renaissance Place that a county grand jury now is investigating.
In a June 4, 2007, letter, Joseph V. Warino, who was then the sanitary engineer, told D’Apolito he would keep his title as superintendent of water and wastewater operations, but day-to-day employee supervision would be handled by Warino, through his field supervisors, and that D’Apolito’s office location would move to the department’s Meander Water Pollution Control Facility.
The following day, Warino informed D’Apolito in writing that he was being suspended without pay June 6, 7 and 8 for failing to document absences, willful disregard of county policies and “threatening, intimidating, coercing or interfering with” another employee.
The county commissioners unanimously and retroactively approved that suspension in a June 12, 2007, resolution.
In a candidate interview with The Vindicator’s editorial board, D’Apolito said he wasn’t permitted to question the woman he was accused of interfering with during a pre-disciplinary hearing conducted by Warino and Susan Quimby, then county human resources director.
“I don’t know that he wasn’t permitted.... I don’t recall that ever being brought up,” said Warino, who retired from the department last year and is now Canfield’s city manager.
“I asked her: ‘When did I threaten?’” D’Apolito recalled. “She said: ‘I never said you threatened me,’” D’Apolito said of a conversation he had outside of the hearing with the woman he was accused of interfering with.
“The manner in which he approached her made her uncomfortable, and that’s when she brought it to our attention,” Warino said, adding that he doesn’t remember all details from the events that occurred almost three years ago.
The woman did not file a formal charge against D’Apolito, and D’Apolito had no other discipline lodged against him during his career, Warino said.
D’Apolito said the charge of failure to document absences pertained to his having used his lunch hour to go to Boardman court, but he said he was gone from work for only one hour between 1 and 2 p.m.
Warino recalled that D’Apolito went to Boardman court at a time other than a standard midday lunch hour and did not report off for that hour.
“My last couple of years was pretty rough. You know, it was rough. They used that excuse about threatening an employee,” D’Apolito said.
Although his title didn’t officially change, D’Apolito said: “I was not only pushed out of my job as superintendent, but pushed out in the negotiations about this consent order” that settled a water-pollution lawsuit by the state. George J. Tablack, county administrator, handled those negotiations, D’Apolito said.
Two years after his suspension and reassignment, D’Apolito gave Warino two weeks’ notice that he would be retiring, effective July 1, 2009, in a one-sentence letter that offered no explanation of his decision to retire.
In the editorial-board interview, D’Apolito lashed out at Sciortino for calling the editorial board’s attention to his troubles at the sanitary engineering department.
“For this guy to bring up stuff like this in this campaign, I just think it’s just low, and it shows the workings of someone that’s desperate,” D’Apolito said of his opponent.
Sciortino, who has been county auditor since September 2005, is working under the cloud of a grand jury investigating potential conflicts of interest concerning the dispute over the county’s purchase of Oakhill.
On the day the county bought Oakhill in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 2006, Sciortino was one of three county officials who met with Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., then president of the Cafaro Co., which was the landlord for the county’s Department of Job and Family Services at Garland Plaza on the city’s East Side.
Cafaro unsuccessfully sued to rescind the county’s purchase of Oakhill, to which the county moved JFS in 2007. Oakhill is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.
Sciortino, County Commisioner John A. McNally IV, and then-county treasurer John B. Reardon, who had met with Cafaro in Cafaro’s office, said publicly that they opposed the Oakhill purchase because of uncertain costs of buying, operating and maintaining the former hospital complex. Sciortino refused to issue the $75,000 check for the purchase of Oakhill until a judge ordered him to do so.
Sciortino said he has done nothing wrong and doesn’t expect to be indicted, but, if he is indicted, he won’t resign.