Saturday, May 31, 2014
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
The Cafaro Co.’s garnishment action against Robert E. Bush Jr., Mahoning County Job and Family Services director, to collect an old McGuffey Mall commercial rent debt has been settled, dismissed and can’t be re-filed.
Visiting Judge Thomas Pokorny of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court signed the dismissal entry this week, which doesn’t provide any further explanation.
Joe Bell, the Cafaro Co.’s director of corporate communications, said a confidentiality clause accompanies the settlement.
He said, however, his understanding is that Bush will forgo the $7,411 deducted from his county paycheck between May 31 and Oct. 4, 2013, and pay the Cafaro Co. an additional undisclosed sum.
Bush deferred comment to his lawyer, Ron Yarwood, who declined to comment.
At Bush’s request, Judge Maureen A. Sweeney halted the garnishment in October pending further court action.
The garnishment was being taken from Bush’s $111,738 annual salary to pay a retail beauty products supply-shop rent debt that had mushroomed to $70,758 through more than two decades of compounding interest before the garnishment began.
The debt stemmed from the shop’s occupancy of the space in the Cafaro-owned East Side shopping center between 1987 and 1991.