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Mahoning officials called “leaders in transparency”
YOUNGSTOWN
Mahoning County Auditor Ralph Meacham and Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel appeared together Wednesday to announce that Mahoning County’s payroll information has been added to the county’s OhioCheckbook website.
They appeared in the same Mahoning County Courthouse basement commissioners’ meeting room where they jointly had announced in April 2015 that Mahoning was the first county in the state to join Mandel’s OhioCheckbook.com government-transparency system.
Calling county officials “leaders in transparency,” Mandel said Wednesday: “You’ve got two Republicans and two Democrats working together to advance the cause of transparency.”
He was referring to himself and Meacham as Republicans and county Commissioners Carol Rimedio-Righetti and Anthony Traficanti, who are Democrats, and attended the news conference.
“Shining sunlight on spending and empowering taxpayers to hold politicians accountable has nothing to do with partisan politics. It’s all about power to the people,” Mandel said.
Mahoning now becomes the fourth Ohio county to post salaries on the Checkbook site. The other counties with posted salaries are Cuyahoga, Clermont and Lorain, Mandel said.
Initially, Mahoning County’s Checkbook reporting included disclosures of five years of payments to vendors of goods and services to the county, with some exceptions, such as exclusion of stipends to children services’ foster parents.
The county’s five-year checkbook displays more than 329,000 transactions totaling more than $978 million in spending.
The new addition contains the names, job titles, departments and 2015 annual salaries of some 1,996 county employees, which total $73 million, Meacham said.
“The public has a right to know. Taxpayers have a right to know,” he said, explaining why he added that information to the county’s checkbook site.
“What you’re seeing now is teamwork. It’s not Democrat or Republican. It is a team of Mahoning County officials that represent all the people in Mahoning County,” Rimedio-Righetti said.
“Mahoning County was the first county in the state to heed the call of transparency, and that’s what we’re here for,” Traficanti said.
The delay in adding the payroll information stems from a change in county payroll directors and the top-priority need to ensure the county’s compliance with the demands and deadlines of the Affordable Care Act as they pertain to payroll and benefits, Meacham explained.
“The penalties were quite onerous on a per-employee basis,” for noncompliance with the ACA, he added.
Meacham said the online payroll information has been edited to show only the initials of deputy sheriffs and prosecutors because of the sensitive nature of their work.
“It’s public information, but I’d rather people specifically ask for that so we could vet those people, rather than having it available online,” Meacham said of the deputies’ and prosecutors’ names.
There have been more than 578,000 searches on OhioCheckbook.com since December 2015.
Of 3,962 local jurisdictions in Ohio, 761 are participating in Ohio Checkbook.
Mandel said during his news conference that Vindicator columnist Bertram de Souza was “the strongest advocate for putting the salary information online anywhere in the State of Ohio.”
He added: “Bertram has been a strong advocate for the public’s right to know. ... Bertram deserves some credit for moving the ball forward on this.”