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Avalon Holdings boss likely to be named to port authority board
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County commissioners are planning Friday to approve Ron Klingle of Howland, chairman and controlling shareholder of Avalon Holdings Corp., as the county’s representative on the Western Reserve Port Authority.
Klingle would replace Cort- land insurance executive Rich Musick, whose four-year term expired last month.
Commissioner Frank Fuda said Klingle “sounds like he’ll be an energetic person who will be an asset to the port authority.”
Fuda referred questions about Klingle’s background to Commissioner Dan Polivka, who could not be reached to comment.
Klingle, a Hermitage, Pa., native who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Youngstown State University in 1970, has worked in the environmental-services business his whole career.
He owns Avalon Golf and Country Club, which comprises the Avalon Lakes course in Howland, Avalon at Buhl in Hermitage and Squaw Creek Country Club in Vienna.
Klingle worked for BFI in Youngstown early in his career, then owned Industrial Waste Mill Service in Pittsburgh until 1981, then started American Waste Services in Liberty, involved in all aspects of waste treatment and disposal, he said.
He bought the Avalon Lakes golf course in 1988 and founded Avalon Holdings Corp. in 1999 after Waste Management bought most of American Waste Services.
Avalon Holdings is involved primarily in the waste-disposal industry and serves the gas and oil industry in the eastern United States. It is in the testing phase for a brine injection well it plans to run on state Route 169 in Weathersfield Township, just north of Niles.
The Avalon Golf and Country Club is one of the largest country clubs in the United States, with nearly 4,000 members, Klingle said.
The port authority, which runs the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport and carries out economic development activities in Mahoning and Trumbull counties, is the best organization to capitalize on the growing gas and oil industry in the Mahoning Valley, Klingle said.
The gas and oil industry can “really change everyone’s life” if the right steps are taken to attract companies here to make use of gas and oil to make products such as fertilizers and pharmaceuticals.
“If it’s used here instead of trucked to Houston or Europe or wherever, we have an opportunity to become the energy capital of the whole country,” he said.
He’d like to create incentives for companies such as Ohio Edison to use natural gas to create electricity and to encourage companies to use compressed natural gas instead of diesel or gasoline.
As a businessman, “I know what they need to entice them to do something like this,” Klingle said. “It absolutely can happen.”
The Mahoning County commissioners late last month appointed Martin Loney, training director for the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 396 in Boardman, to a position on the port board formerly held by Andres Visnapuu.
The Trumbull commissioners also reappointed Scott Lynn, port authority chairman, to another four-year term last month.