Longtime Warren auditor to put aside his calculator

Staff report

WARREN

When David Griffing completes his current term as Warren auditor, his last, he will have spent 20 years in charge of Warren’s finances.

Before that, he spent 12 years as deputy auditor under Tony Iannucci, and he worked in private accounting for eight years just after college.

And if all that number-crunching weren’t enough, it’s also common for him to be asked when he joins a social organization if he’d mind being financial secretary.

When 2015 ends, he’s looking forward to getting away from numbers.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’d like to do something different,” he said Thursday. “I’m hoping to enjoy my life and do some traveling.”

Griffing, 60, owns a home in Florida, but has children and a grandchild here, so he’ll still be around, he said.

Griffing said he had planned to retire at the end of his last term three years ago, but then-candidate-for-mayor Doug Franklin asked him to stay on to “to make sure things go smoothly” during Franklin’s first term, Griffing said.

When asked to name significant events during his time in the finance department, Griffing named one from recent history: The layoffs of scores of city workers in 2008 during the Great Recession.

He remembers when Delphi Packard Electric employed 16,000 people on Dana Street in Warren and Larchmont Avenue just north of Warren. The company has 600 here now.

The city took in $21 million in income taxes in 2008 but received less than $17 million in 2014. Copperweld Steel once employed 1,600 people, RG Steel more than 1,000. Both mills are gone.

“Those are hard to replace,” he said.

Two men have filed petitions with the Trumbull County Board of Elections seeking to replace Griffing, Democrats Andy Barkley, a former Warren council member, and Anthony Natale.