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The board of elections is asking the state elections commission to review a $4,000 cash contribution
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Kitchen
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County Board of Elections sent a letter Monday to the Ohio Elections Commission for the latter to review a $4,000 cash contribution former Youngstown Mayor Charles Sammarone gave to failed mayoral candidate DeMaine Kitchen.
State law doesn’t permit cash contributions of more than $100.
The board sent letters — one by certified mail and the other through regular mail — that Kitchen received March 10 giving him until Monday to rectify the situation.
Kitchen could have given the $1,127.07 he had left in his campaign account to Sammarone, now city council president, and kept the rest as debt, said board Director Joyce Kale-Pesta.
“Sammarone would have to accept it as debt,” she said.
But Kitchen and his attorney, Mark Hanni, didn’t come to the board Monday, leaving no other choice but to refer the matter to the elections commission, Kale-Pesta said.
“Hanni wanted to come before the board and ask them to help [Kitchen] out,” but that wouldn’t be appropriate, Kale-Pesta said.
Also in the board’s complaint is that Kitchen filed the report, with Sammarone’s cash contribution from Oct. 27 listed, nearly three months late.
Sammarone has said he should have known better than to give $4,000 in cash to Kitchen, and would do “whatever I need to do to rectify it.”
The commission could fine a candidate up to three times the amount that exceeds the maximum cash contribution limit, but that isn’t likely for a first-time offender, Philip C. Richter, the commission’s executive director, recently said. Also, the commission has no authority to compel a candidate to refund the money to the donor, he said.
Attempts by The Vindicator on Monday to reach Hanni and Kitchen to comment were unsuccessful.
Kitchen unsuccessfully ran for mayor as an independent in the November 2013 election, losing to Democrat John A. McNally.
Kitchen, Sammarone’s former chief of staff/secretary, resigned Dec. 2 from the job. A report, released four days after Kitchen’s resignation, conducted by a retired Summit County sheriff’s detective for the city, concluded Kitchen sexually harassed Lyndsey Hughes.
Hughes, the city’s downtown director of events, special events and marketing, filed a sexual-harassment charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just before the report was finalized. The EEOC dismissed the case Dec. 4 because of a jurisdictional issue, but gave Hughes a right-to-sue notice allowing her to take the city to federal court.
City Law Director Martin Hume and First Assistant Law Director Rebecca Gerson were in Cleveland on Monday for a mediation with Hughes’ attorneys, said Mayor John A. McNally. He didn’t know in what venue the case is being heard.
Hume declined to comment, and Andrew Margolius, an attorney for Hughes, could not be reached Monday to comment.