Will new mayor fare better with eyesore than foregoer?
2Those were the words we used in February when then Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams said the city still had the option of filing a lawsuit against the owner of the PNC Bank Building downtown because it hadn’t removed the scaffolding that had been up for several years.
Well, city government never filed a lawsuit, Williams is no longer the mayor, and the scaffolding remains in place in the heart of the central business district.
However, an official of Pan Brothers Associates, a New York City-based company that owns the building, said earlier this month work is expected to be completed by early September. “We expect to be completed in the next four weeks, with an emphasis on expect,” said David Rizzuto, director of operations and finance.
To which we say, “We’ll believe it when we see it.”
Williams’ successor, Charles Sammarone, is a veteran of city politics and has earned a reputation as a no-nonsense public official. He has now inherited the saga of the scaffolding. Whether Sammarone will take the step Williams’ was reluctant to and file a lawsuit against Pan Brothers if the unsightly steel braces aren’t gone in the near future remains to be seen.
It was in July 2010 that the idea of legal action was first broached — five years after two pieces of granite on the exterior of office building’s Wick Avenue side fell onto the roof of a lower part of the structure. Engineers, hired for insurance purposes, told the owner in late 2007 that other panels could also fall. In May 2008, Park South, a Pan subsidiary which manages the structure, contacted the city about the falling granite and put up the scaffolding as a safety precaution.
In September 2009, in the midst of Park South and Cincinnati Insurance Co. battling over responsibility for the cost of the improvement work, the building’s owner announced a $1 million improvement project for the exterior. Around that time, the building’s name changed from National City Bank to PNC Bank Building. Four PNC signs were to be placed on the nine-story structure.
PNC bought National City in December 2008, and had all the branches renamed PNC in November 2009.
For its part, the Williams administration decided that coddling Pan Brothers was good public policy. On Jan. 24, 2010, a permit the company had obtained from the city to finish the exterior improvements, including securing the granite, expired.
But rather than bringing down the legal hammer on the company, the Williams administration granted the owner another 12-month permit in July 2010.
That permit expired last month.
“We will monitor the progress carefully,” Mayor Williams said in February, after the building’s owner and a city committee that oversees exterior work on downtown structures reached an informal agreement. “If sufficient progress is not being made, we still have the option to litigate.”
No formal agreement
The Design Review Committee could not enter into a formal agreement because it did not have a quorum.
We repeat a question we posed in February: Why is city government so willing to accommodate Park South? We offer the same answer we put forth then: Park South has ties to Lou Frangos of Cleveland. The company co-owns about a dozen buildings in downtown Youngstown with companies owned by Frangos, who had established a close relationship with officials in the Williams’ administration.
Mayor Sammarone will find himself being sucked in by these players unless he makes it clear that time has run out for the owner of the PNC Bank Building.
In addition, he should conduct a postmortem of this project to determine why City Hall was so ho-hum about downtown’s appearance being marred by the scaffolding.