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Oakhill grand jury on job until June 3
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
YOUNGSTOWN
The grand jury hearing matters pertaining to Mahoning County’s purchase of Oakhill Renaissance Place will be extended for five weeks until June 3, and its focus will be limited to Oakhill, the county’s eight common pleas judges ruled.
The Monday ruling signed by all the judges also said Judge James C. Evans, who was the grand jury judge for the first four months of this year, will preside over the extended grand jury.
Monday’s entry amends an April 21 entry in which Judge Evans had granted an indefinite extension of that grand jury, which was to have terminated its four months of weekly sessions last Thursday.
Judge Maureen A. Sweeney, whose four-month term as grand jury judge began Monday, will preside over the new grand jury, which will begin its four-month term of weekly sessions concerning routine local criminal cases Thursday.
Special prosecutors Dennis P. Will and Paul M. Nick asked for the extension “to allow for continuity in the presentation of evidence to one grand jury.” In their motion for the extension, they estimated they needed no longer than six additional weeks to present their evidence.
Will is the Lorain County prosecutor, and Nick is chief investigative counsel for the Ohio Ethics Commission.
To date, Will and Nick have made six known presentations of evidence to the grand jury — Feb. 11 and 25, March 18, April 8 and 15 and last Thursday.
The grand jury is probing potential conflicts of interest concerning the dispute over the county’s purchase of Oakhill, which is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.
The county bought Oak- hill in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 2006 and moved its Department of Job and Family Services there the next year.
Central to the Oak- hill matter is opposition to the purchase expressed by county Commissioner John A. McNally IV, the sole dissenting commissioner; county Auditor Michael V. Sciortino and then-county Treasurer John B. Reardon.
Reardon has resigned his $100,984-a-year job as state superintendent of financial institutions, effective this coming Friday. Nick has declined to comment on Reardon’s resignation and whether it’s linked to the grand jury probe concerning Oakhill.
McNally, Sciortino and Reardon said they opposed the purchase because of uncertain costs of buying, operating and maintaining the former hospital complex, which was built in stages between 1910 and 1972.
The three met with Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., then president of the Cafaro Co., in Cafaro’s office the day the county bought Oakhill.
Cafaro, who was the landlord for JFS in Garland Plaza on the city’s East Side, unsuccessfully sued the county in an attempt to rescind the Oakhill purchase.