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Fired deputy auditor McFall gets $8,465 payout
YOUNGSTOWN
Salary payments to Carol McFall stopped March 4 when she was fired from her job as Mahoning County’s chief deputy auditor, but today, she will receive a payout of $8,465.
That consists of 139 hours of unused vacation time totaling $6,088; 16 hours of unused personal time totaling $701; nearly 27 hours of compensatory time totaling $1,176; and a $500 bonus for completing continuing professional education.
Those calculations are based on an hourly pay rate of $43.79, which applied when she earned $91,084 annually, just before former county Auditor Michael V. Sciortino raised her pay, effective Jan. 1, to her final salary of $92,500.
McFall, 55, of New Castle, Pa., is a certified public accountant who had been with the county since August 2005.
Ralph T. Meacham, who began work as interim county auditor March 3, said he fired McFall because she didn’t meet his standards of transparency in responding to a Vindicator public-records request concerning pay raises in the auditor’s office when she redacted bonus information from a personnel action request supplied to the newspaper.
Meacham, also a certified public accountant, began his full four-year term as auditor March 9 after unseating Sciortino in the November election.
The county commissioners had appointed Meacham as interim auditor after a three-judge panel suspended Sciortino on Feb. 23 based on allegations against Sciortino in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-conspiracy case.
On Monday, Meacham canceled all future payments of $21,703 in raises Sciortino had approved for 13 auditor’s office employees.
County Prosecutor Paul J. Gains has said he doesn’t believe any of the $1,576 in raise money already paid to McFall and three current employees can be recovered.
Raises that would have gone to nine other employees were never processed by the county’s payroll department.
Had the raises and associated benefits been left intact, the auditor’s budget would have suffered a shortfall of about $31,000, Meacham said.
Gains said he also doubts the county has the legal authority to recover the $28,110 in one-time bonuses Sciortino bestowed Feb. 20 on 14 nonunion office employees, including McFall.
Unlike the raises, the bonuses had been budgeted for, and they will not cause a deficit, Meacham said.
The auditor’s 2015 general-fund budget is $1,009,346, plus $1,240,374 for data processing.
The auditor’s real-estate division budget this year is $2,250,000 from real-estate taxes.
The chief deputy auditor’s job has been posted, and Wednesday is the application deadline.
Any finalist applicants for that job will undergo a thorough background check, including verification of academic credentials, Meacham said. “You better believe it, yes, absolutely,” he said. “I’ll talk to former employers.”
“This is a very important position. Fast is good, but being correct is more important, and I’ll take my time with it” to hire the right chief deputy auditor, Meacham said.
In addition to the raises and bonuses for selected employees, 22 members of the auditor’s office staff, who belong to American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2533, ratified a three-year union contract Jan. 9.
That contract, retroactive to July 2, 2014, provided for $1,200 cost-of-living supplements in January 2015 and January 2016 for full-time workers, followed by a 2.5 percent raise for all union workers in January 2017.
Union members earn between $33,858 and $64,749 a year. Meacham said that contract is paid for within his budget.
The labor contract took effect automatically because the commissioners didn’t vote on it during the 30 days after Jan. 12, when it was submitted to them.
In departments headed by elected officeholders, the commissioners have jurisdiction over union contracts, but not over the salaries of the nonunion workers, Anthony Traficanti, chairman of the commissioners, has said.
“We had nothing to do with what Mike Sciortino did” with regard to selective raises for his staff, Traficanti said this week. “He did it on the way out the door, which to me was wrong,” he said.
“We gave everybody their budget, and we said no increases to any base salary whatsoever,” Traficanti said of the 2015 budgeting process. “All we can do is set the tone.”
“Certainly, we would have spoken up and tried to stop it” had the commissioners known the selective raises were forthcoming in the auditor’s office, Traficanti said. “How, I don’t know.”
Past practice has been for the commissioners to allow union contracts to take effect without voting on them in cases where not much caught their attention, or they didn’t see anything they disagreed with, Traficanti said.
When the raises and bonuses for selected employees became public knowledge this month, Traficanti characterized them as “disturbing,” because Sciortino didn’t announce in his budget hearing last fall he planned to give them.
When he first took office, Meacham said Sciortino’s generosity “was a breach” of the position county officials had expressed during budget hearings that the county doesn’t have money for pay increases.
Raises to the base pay tend to be permanent, observed Audrey Tillis, county budget director. “We were trying to avoid that until we know where our revenue is,” Tillis said.
“It has been the standard policy of the office that Mike [Sciortino] has always honored a ‘me-too clause’ with the union contract, so whatever was in the union contract was always extended to the nonunion members of the staff,” McFall said in a news conference after she was fired.
The bonuses were cost-of-living adjustments, she said.