By Mary Smith

news@vindy.com

MINERAL RIDGE

Weathersfield Township trustees accepted the retirement of police Capt. Michael Naples Jr., effective March 31, and promptly rehired him into the same position starting April 1.

Effective June 1, Naples will be paid 80 percent of his old salary of $52,250 a year. His new yearly salary will now be $41,800.

He was named captain in 2002. He started as a police officer in 1984 in Warren Township and worked in Weathersfield from 1986 to 1995 in the warrants division and then as juvenile officer. He went to the Girard Police Department in 1995 and was in the traffic division before becoming a detective. He was school-resource officer for three years.

All other terms and conditions of his employment as captain will remain the same. The trustees made the move to retain Naples’ experience while saving some money in salary.

In other business this week, trustees requested that Rex Fee, executive director of the Trumbull County Sanitary Engineer’s office, submit a Community Development Block Grant application for the township’s proposed Heaton-Chute Sanitary Sewer Project.

The point of securing CDBG funds would be to see if the county office can leverage additional grant funding to be able to complete the project, trustees said.

The Heaton-Chute neighborhood, which includes 107 homes, was targeted by trustees in 2013 with the “Heaton Chute Initiative,” with trustees trying to obtain sanitary-sewers for the homes and businesses there that now have septic systems.

Sanitary sewers, zoning and planning are all part of the initiative, township Administrator David Rouan explained.

The area is located at the north end of Weathersfield, north of the city of NiIes, and south of the Bolindale area in Howland.

During a zoning hearing, trustees denied a request to amend zoning on two tracts totaling 70.531 acres at Austintown-Warren Road and South Main Street from agricultural-suburban estate residential to industrial A. Elvira Massacci filed the request.

Priority Excavating LLC wanted to lease the property to permit installation and use of a portable air-curtain burner for disposal of clean, vegetative material and clean wood waste.

The Trumbull County Zoning Commission denied the zone-change request “due to the physical characteristics and environmental factors of the existence of wetlands and floodplains in the proposed land.” The commission added the zone change “does not meet the future land-use plan for the township.”