43
2001 fiscal emergency in Girard coming to end
Girard fell into fiscal emergency in 2001
By robert Guttersohn
GIRARD
The state will remove the city from fiscal emergency, said fiscal commission Chairwoman Sharon Hanrahan on Wednesday, a move to be made official at the commission’s last meeting scheduled for the end of May.
It will end a more-than-10-year run under fiscal emergency for the city.
Girard Mayor James Melfi called it a “very proud moment” and a “sentimental accomplishment” but acknowledged that nothing can change as far as watching the city’s spending.
He thanked the two Girard citizens on the commission, John Masternick and Bob Delisio, who were part of the board since Day One.
“They’re the ones who have to take time out of their day,” Melfi said.
Publicly, a spokesman from the state auditor’s office would not confirm the status removal, saying the request was still under review.
The city fell into fiscal emergency Aug. 8, 2001, a date Melfi can say without thinking partly because it is also his mother’s birthday.
By the time the removal is official, it will be the third-longest tenure under the fiscal status in the state’s history, Hanrahan said.
Only East Cleveland, 17 years, and Manchester, 14 years, were under fiscal emergency for longer, Hanrahan said.
In 2001, the city had a deficit of $2.5 million. In 2011, it was $1.8 million in the black and expected to be so for the next five years, according to state auditors.
Hanrahan said on average it takes four-and-a-half years for a city to emerge from fiscal emergency, but the closing of the Indalex plant in 2008 and the economic recession prolonged Girard’s time under the state’s strict oversight.
Within months, the city endured draconian cuts, slashing its work force by 25 percent through attrition and layoffs.
It laid off six policemen in December 2001, a “nightmare” scenario to the mayor.
“It was three months after 9/11, and I’m laying police off,” Melfi said. “It was so serious, we couldn’t even make payroll.”
Midway through the decade, there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel for the city.
By the end of 2006, the city had a $700,000 surplus, leaving the members of the fiscal commission ready then to petition the state to remove Girard from fiscal emergency. But Indalex’s closing ended all of that.
When its door closed, 300 jobs were lost. Then the housing crisis hit, dipping property-tax revenues to the city. But the V&M Star expansion into Girard’s side of the Youngstown/Girard border infused Girard’s budget with enough money that the city was $50,000 in the black for 2010 and $600,000 in 2011.
“That really was a defining moment for Girard,” Hanrahan said of the V&M expansion.
Melfi said the city is making long-ignored structural improvements to several of its buildings and replacing all six of its 16-year-old police cruisers.
“This particular part of our job is over,” he said of the monthly fiscal commission meetings. “But we still need to make sure to adjust our spending to the amount of revenue coming in.”