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Howland, Warren might need to repay tax revenue to WCI Steel owners
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
After years of litigation that reached the Ohio Supreme Court in 2011, Trumbull County officials hired an attorney Wednesday to advise them as to whether Howland and Warren need to repay $3 million in tax revenue to the current owners of WCI Steel.
WCI in 2003 challenged the amount of tangible property taxes it paid from 2001 to 2003 to Howland Township, Howland schools, Warren, Warren city schools and Warren Township.
The Ohio Board of Tax Appeals ruled against WCI at the time, but the matter was appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, which sided with WCI. That led to the Board of Tax Appeals reversing its decision last year.
The state now is telling the Howland and Warren entities it’s “time to pay,” Trumbull County Auditor Adrian Biviano said. The ruling means the schools and governments must repay $3,022,499 to the now-closed mill’s current owners.
Atty. Michael Gallo is retained at a cost not expected to exceed $12,500 to analyze the decisions and advise the county of its options, including further legal action, Biviano said.
The situation is “not fair” because “the school districts are broke, basically,” and WCI is “long gone,” as a result of the mill being sold several times since the dispute began, Biviano said. The mill closed in May 2012. Its current owner, BDM Warren Steel Operations, indicated last year it will demolish the entire mill starting later this year.
Biviano said he doesn’t have a specific breakdown of the amount each of the government bodies and schools is asked to repay, only that the schools would be responsible for a larger share than the city and townships.
Also at Wednesday’s commissioners meeting, at the Trumbull Career and Technical Center, commissioners awarded a contract of $1,393,000 to Burton Scot Contractors LLC of Newbury to build the third phase of the Western Reserve Greenway.
The third phase of the bicycling and hiking trail will be 2.19 miles long and 10 feet wide running south from Champion Avenue in Champion to North River Road near the county engineer’s office in Warren. All of the funding comes from state and federal grants.
Zachary Svette, operations director for Trumbull County MetroParks, estimated that construction will begin in early summer with completion in late fall.
Commissioners also agreed to advertise for bids for a consultant to conduct a study to determine whether it is feasible to convert certain county vehicles to compressed natural gas and whether it’s feasible to construct a CNG filling station at the county engineer’s office.
The Ohio Development Services Agency’s Local Government Innovation Fund granted the engineer’s office a $100,000 grant to pay for the study.
Commissioners also authorized the county prosecutor’s office to file a civil complaint to collect unpaid bed taxes from Aswin Ganapathy Hospitality Associates LLC, owner of the former MetroPlex hotel in Liberty.
The amount of bed taxes owed is undetermined, but the hotel didn’t pay them most of 2013 and part of 2014, officials say.