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Contractor guilty of not following Youngstown’s demolition procedures
YOUNGSTOWN
A judge found a contractor guilty of failing to follow the city’s demolition and removal procedures for failing to haul away the remains of the former Woodside Receiving Hospital.
Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Elizabeth A. Kobly will sentence William A. McKinley, owner of McKinley Industries on Idora Avenue, the demolition contractor, at 10:45 a.m. March 26. She found him guilty of the misdemeanor Thursday.
“The city is looking for contractors working in the city limits to abide by our ordinances and conduct work in a timely manner,” said Abigail Brubaker, the city’s code enforcement and blight remediation superintendent.
McKinley declined Thursday to comment to The Vindicator. But after his Oct. 27, 2014, arraignment, McKinley told the newspaper: “You had 14 federal marshals and seven cars pick me up at the worksite for a misdemeanor. What are our tax dollars doing? All the crime going on in Youngstown, and you’re messing with me over this. I was taken to the county jail, and they let me out on [an own-recognizance] bond. If that’s a crime, what’s a real crime like? It doesn’t make sense. I got arrested on the job at Woodside.”
The building was demolished last spring, Brubaker said. In August, the city told Carl Vaccar, the head of ACV Realty of Canfield, the property owner, that the work had to be finished in 30 days.
Only some work was done since that time, Brubaker said.
“It kind of looks like a landfill over there,” she said. “Some of the debris was removed, but a vast majority is still there just piled up.”
The city filed the same charge of failing to file demolition and removal procedures against ACV and Vaccar last September.
On Monday, the city withdrew the charges — because those charges can’t be filed against a property owner for work not completed by a contractor — and instead filed charges of failing to follow the city’s property maintenance code, Brubaker said.
ACV and Vaccar were arraigned Monday with a pretrial hearing scheduled by Judge Kobly for 10:45 a.m. March 16.
Woodside, a state mental hospital, opened in 1940 and closed in 1996 when the state reduced funding for those facilities. The location became Lincoln Behavioral Health Care, a privately owned residential facility for counseling juveniles. It went out of business in 2008.