Girard law director’s legacy
Girard
After 16 years of working part time as the city’s law director, Atty. Mark Standohar is leaving after not seeking re-election in November.
Mayor James Melfi gives most of the credit for the city’s potential release from fiscal emergency in 2012 to the 46-year-old lifelong Girard resident.
If not for Standohar’s negotiating skills, he said, the city would be in worse financial shape today. Melfi estimates Standohar saved the city $3 million in liability over zoning issues alone.
“Being a part-time law director and having no staff and no assistants and a lack of a budget, it was very challenging over these years,” Standohar said.
But he’s not willing to take all the credit, adding that city employees such as secretary Kathleen O’Leary who worked for his department without extra pay played important roles.
“We, as a team, got together on these matters and got it done,” he said.
Recently sitting in the mayor’s office, Melfi and Standohar spoke of the several “David versus Goliath” litigations they fought.
There was the six-year battle against Total Waste Logistics wanting to place a construction-debris landfill on the north side of Girard that ended in 2011 with TWL withdrawing its application.
“That would have changed the landscape of Girard,” Melfi said of the dump.
But Standohar’s greatest battle came in 2009 and sounded like a military operation: Operation Tomahawk. It would be the driving force behind the city’s emergence from fiscal emergency, he said.
On Aug, 8, 2001, a date Melfi can recall on memory alone, the city fell into fiscal emergency.
In the first five years, the city cut spending 25 percent across the board. By 2006, the city was in the black by $700,000 and ready to emerge from fiscal emergency.
The auditor and I were sitting down saying this is looking really good here,” Melfi said. “We planned to petition to come from under fiscal emergency.”
Then the bottom fell out again.
Indalex Aluminum Solutions closed its factory in Girard and laid off 300 workers. Combined with the economic collapse in 2008, the city lost income tax and property taxes and dipped back into the red.
“We were falling,” Melfi said. “There were too many blows.”
In the summer of 2009, tYoungstown approached Girard about cutting a deal between the cities that would help V&M Star to expand operations. Because the negotiations were so secret, the two sides code-named them Operation Tomahawk.
For Girard, it was the city’s way out of fiscal emergency, but what followed was four months of negotiations where, Melfi and Standohar said, the world seemed against them.
“That is four months we’ll never get back,” Standohar said about him and Melfi. “I remember on the morning of the final signing ceremony, my wife said, ‘So, do I get my husband back and the kids their father back now?’”
On Oct. 14, 2009, the city signed a deal with Youngstown that ensured Girard would receive 55 percent of the 2.75-percent income tax levied on V&M during construction up to a $3 million threshold, which would then drop to an even split between the two cities. The city would also receive one-half of the income tax received over a $1 million threshold during normal operations.
It’s a deal over which Melfi and Standohar are willing to raise a victory flag. In 2011, Melfi said the city made $477,000 from the project.
“He was a bulldog in those negotiations,” Mayor James Melfi said of Standohar during the talks between Youngstown and Girard. “We were being pushed around a lot.”
Jerome Lambert, the city’s safety and service director, said it would be the witty humor from the soft-spoken attorney that he would miss.
Standohar referred to himself as “the adviser to the unadvisable,” in reference to Melfi. And during a two-year legal ordeal over the city’s speed cameras with now the chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party David Betras, Standohar’s wit was on public display.
“We have finally managed to find a camera Dave Betras doesn’t like,” Standohar told the press in 2005.
When former Girard councilman Brian Kren takes over as law director in January, Standohar said he will focus on his private practice.
“It will likely take me a few months to realize I don’t have to worry about any legal problems or controversies involving the city anymore.” he said. “That will be a nice change.”
But Standohar said the several sleepless nights were worth it simply because of the pride he has in the city.
Standohar remembered a phone call from Melfi after one night of V&M negotiations that today still chokes him up.
“He said ‘You’ve done the city of Girard a lot of good,’” Standohar said.
And to someone who grew up in the city, that was all that mattered.