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Youngstown to pay Kolitsos severance after 27 years
YOUNGSTOWN
About 27 years after being fired as a city employee, Socrates Kolitsos will receive $5,460 in a severance package for unused sick time.
The city’s board of control is expected to approve the payment at its meeting today.
“He is entitled to it,” said city Law Director Anthony Farris, who serves on the three-member board. “He submitted a request, we evaluated it and determined it to be in the best interest of everyone to pay him. He has requested it in past years and wasn’t given the money. In the past, it appears it was ignored and [previous city officials] hoped it would go away. But we do things squarely.”
In March 1986, then-Mayor Patrick Ungaro fired Kolitsos from his job as special assistant to the Community Development Agency director, a job that paid about $12 an hour.
Kolitsos, who was hired to the job in 1981, violated state law by being a classified employee running in the partisan Mahoning County auditor race in 1986. Ungaro had warned Kolitsos that he had to get out of the race or be fired under law.
Kolitsos refused, was fired and lost the county auditor’s race. The 7th District Court of Appeals upheld the firing in a 1989 ruling.
Kolitsos couldn’t be reached Wednesday by The Vindicator to comment.
Kolitsos asked city officials in 1997 to pay him for not only his unused sick time, but for $1,377 in expenses for trips taken to Cleveland and Pittsburgh to gather information about land banking. Kolitsos couldn’t provide receipts for those two trips at the time and didn’t ask for that money in his most recent request.
The 1997 request, which came a few weeks before Kolitsos retired from the Youngstown school board, was not resolved.