Former Youngstown mayoral candidate is scheduled for a Thursday state elections commission hearing

By David Skolnick | October 29, 2014 at 12:05a.m.

COLUMBUS

The Ohio Elections Commission is scheduled Thursday to have a hearing to consider sanctions against DeMaine Kitchen, a failed 2013 Youngstown mayoral candidate, for taking an improper $3,900 cash campaign contribution and not reporting it in a timely fashion.

Kitchen didn’t show up at a June 26 preliminary review of this issue by the commission in Columbus to respond to the complaint. That led the commission to schedule the upcoming full hearing.

Kitchen said Tuesday that he will be at the hearing and that the matter has been resolved.

Kitchen received a $4,000 cash contribution on Oct. 27, 2013, from then-Mayor Charles Sammarone, who is now city council president. At the time of the contribution, Kitchen was serving as Sammarone’s chief of staff/secretary.

State law doesn’t permit cash contributions of any amount more than $100.

Sammarone, a Democrat, has said Kitchen, who ran for mayor as an independent, refunded the $3,900 in two payments. Kitchen paid $2,500 in April and then $1,400 in May, Sammarone has said.

Sammarone said he then wrote two checks to Kitchen’s campaign fund for those same amounts.

However, an amended campaign finance report from Kitchen to the Mahoning County Board of Elections on April 1 lists only a $2,500 refund to Sammarone. Sammarone has said as a longtime officeholder he should know state election law better and shouldn’t have given cash to Kitchen.

Kitchen, who lost to Democrat John A. McNally in the November 2013 election, filed his required post-general-election campaign-finance report about three months past the deadline.

Mahoning County elections officials filed a complaint with the state panel in April, noting the improper contribution and delayed disclosure.

Sammarone is not subject to investigation by the commission because the complaint filed by the board of elections was specifically about problems with Kitchen's campaign finance report and not who gave him the improper contribution.