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Road-salt deal won’t pave way for smoother drives
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The Mahoning County Board of Elections will have a free mobile app ready for Android, iPhones and iPads by August.
The app will allow people to see if they’re registered to vote, their polling location, how to request an absentee ballot and voter registration form as well as places where they can register, said Director Joyce Kale-Pesta.
The app also will have links for campaign-finance reports and past election results.
“It’s geared toward younger people, but plenty of others will use it as well,” Kale-Pesta said.
The board selected Purple Forge Corp. of Ottawa, Canada, to set up and maintain the app. The company is experienced with this type of work and had the lowest and best proposal, Kale-Pesta said. The fee is $20,000 to set up the app with a yearly contract of $3,500.
Two companies, Cargill Inc. and Morton Salt Inc., agreed to pay $11.5 million to Ohio to make a lawsuit accusing them of fixing road-salt prices go away without admitting any wrongdoing.
The lawsuit, filed in 2012 by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and settled Wednesday, claimed the scheme cost state and local governments more than $70 million.
For companies to pay $11.5 million to settle, chances are they did something wrong. Both companies insist the deal was to avoid additional legal costs and other expenses. The state agreed to take 16 cents on the dollar.
The settlement stems from the two companies’ supposedly conspiring to create a duopoly to sell salt to the state as well as counties, cities, and other government entities in Ohio between 2008 and 2010.
The companies, the only two to mine salt in Ohio, were accused of dividing up the state with one company selling salt to certain areas and the other to different government entities – with both agreeing not to compete.
As for the settlement, local governments across Ohio will get $6.8 million of it.
Mahoning County Engineer Patrick Ginnetti said that money divided among the state’s 88 counties is “not a lot of money.”
He’s right.
The Ohio Department of Transportation will receive $1.7 million and the Ohio Turnpike will get $174,000, with the rest going into the attorney general’s anti-trust fund.
Under state law, 10 percent of all money recovered by the AG’s office through a settlement or by court judgment goes to its anti-trust section. That section also gets “attorney’s fees, and reimbursements of investigative, litigation or expert witness costs” related to the matter, according to state law.
That money is used to fund the anti-trust section. If the section needs more money, it’s paid from the attorney general’s budget.
Before this past winter began, the price of rock salt jumped from an average of $35 in 2013 to as much as $150, depending on the government entity, last winter.
And with such lousy weather, governments bought a lot of salt.
It dropped to $105.25 a ton in October 2014 when the state got salt at that price through an out-of-state company.
The price now ranges from about $65 to $90 a ton.
The huge jump in salt costs is being monitored, but the allegation by the attorney general’s office is that the “alleged anti-competitive behavior” ended in 2010, said Dan Tierney, an attorney general spokesman.
Last year’s increase was because of “harsher winters, and supply and demand” he said.
Among the reasons roads in the Mahoning Valley were a mess this winter – and plenty of them are still bad such as Raccoon Road in Austintown – is government entities had to be stingy with road salt. That added expense ate into road budgets, which means less paving this year.
It also means that local communities are going to go to taxpayers for more money for road improvements.
Austintown will have two replacement road levies on the November general election ballot. Others will surely follow. David Skolnick is The Vindicator’s political reporter.