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Mahoning County officials air ideas to keep hearings by video
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McNally
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Wellington
RELATED: Mahoning Co. sheriff candidates outline views on maintaining video arraignments
YOUNGSTOWN
The chairman of Mahoning County commissioners said he and the county sheriff are working on potential ways to maintain video arraignments in Mahoning County jail for Youngstown Municipal Court.
Options include billing Youngstown for $350,000 worth of inmate stays for those charged solely under city ordinances, and possibly transferring some deputy sheriffs from county courthouse security duty to the county jail, said Commissioners Chairman John A. McNally IV.
The billing, at $80 a day per inmate, is designed to help pay for jail staffing and will be retroactive to early 2010, McNally said.
The talks come in the wake of Sheriff Randall A. Wellington’s announcement last week that he would have to terminate video arraignments from the county jail, effective Feb. 6. He blamed insufficient staffing and inadequate funding for the move.
That meant that city police would have to start escorting inmates to the municipal-court building for arraignments.
“Video arraignments is one of several nonmandated services that will cease in order to assure the safety of our deputy family,” Sgt. William Cappabianca of the sheriff’s office told the commissioners Thursday.
“The sheriff’s obligation of public safety to the taxpayers also applies to his employees,” Cappabianca said, adding that he was speaking for the sheriff’s office administration.
“Please do not mistake the steps being taken by the sheriff as political stunts,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, Youngstown Police Chief Rod Foley said he is preparing for the possibility of his officers having to transport inmates to the municipal court and back to jail. That contingency plan calls for video arraignment from the fifth floor of the municipal court building, which was formerly the city jail, with an audio and video link to a courtroom.
That would still keep inmates physically out of the crowded courtroom for security reasons, but would require video arraignments to be rescheduled from 10:30 a.m. daily to 1:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Foley said.
To accommodate that, Foley said he may have to remove one or two police cars from neighborhood patrols so officers can help with the arraignments, especially on days when large numbers of inmates are being video-arraigned.
“It’s going to lessen our response times during those hours and our police visibility out there,” Foley said. “I might have to adjust start times for some of our officers working afternoon shift to come out a little bit earlier to accommodate this transportation of prisoners,” he added.
In other business, Larry Long, executive director of the County Commissioners’ Association of Ohio, told commissioners he wants the Ohio Legislature to renew the 28-cent-per-month subscriber cellular phone fee that helps support 911 emergency dispatching centers statewide.
That fee will expire at the end of this year unless the Legislature re-enacts it.
“We’re saving lives, and that’s costly, and we need to invest in that,” Long said.
Long was also here to discuss with commissioners the possibility of their joining a natural gas purchasing collaborative with other counties to lower heating costs for Mahoning County buildings.