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County officials must work smarter, auditor says
YOUNGSTOWN
Projections for a gradual decline in Mahoning County population mean that county officials will have to collaborate to be better stewards of tax dollars, Auditor Ralph Meacham said on the eve of his first anniversary in office.
A declining population means fewer sales and real-estate taxpayers to financially support county government, he noted.
The county’s current population of 229,484 is projected to drop to 201,097 in 2030, according to the Scripps Gerontology Center, which says the percentage of people in the county over age 60 will go from the current 27 percent to 34 percent in 2030.
“We have to make county government as efficient as possible by utilizing our technology,” and by cooperation among county departments and local communities to maximize cost efficiency, Meacham said.
“If you work cooperatively, you might accomplish something. If you just sit in your own silo, you’re not going to get much done,” he said.
He was referring to the decentralized system of county government, which has separately elected officials and independent boards overseeing many of its departments.
“We have to work together. We owe it to the taxpayers to do that. You have to put your ego aside and work together,” Meacham said.
Meacham was to have taken office March 9, 2015, after unseating Michael V. Sciortino in the November 2014 election.
However, he was sworn in March 2 because a three-judge panel had suspended Sciortino from office Feb. 23 based on the allegations against Sciortino in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-conspiracy case.
Meacham said he has no regrets about firing his chief deputy auditor, Carol McFall, two days after he took office, after he said she failed to meet his standards of transparency in responding to a Vindicator public-records request.
McFall went on to become chief deputy auditor in Clinton County.
Turnover has been low on Meacham’s 40-member staff, with only three other departures – two by resignation and one by retirement.
One of Meacham’s initiatives is getting rid of paper county employee payroll checks, which are costly to produce, must be hand-delivered and may get lost.
Only about 75 of 1,800 county employees still get paper paychecks, and Meacham said he wants to have all employee pay directly deposited into bank accounts within the next 60 days.
Employee mileage reimbursements were converted to direct deposit in recent months, and his office plans to convert from paper checks to electronic transfers of vendor payments beginning within the next few weeks, he said.
The county commissioners’ scanning initiative that began last year has reduced the amount of paper documents and thereby achieved cost savings, he said, adding that more cost savings will be achieved through changes the commissioners made in employee health care plans, effective April 1.
Among the achievements of his information technology office are the board of elections smartphone app, the open-checkbook initiative to make government more transparent and a redesigned county website that will be launched in the next two months, Meacham said.
The ongoing, once-every-six-years real-estate revaluation is using ground vehicles that can take photos of buildings without stopping and much-higher-resolution aerial photography than in the past, he said.
The docket of the board of revision, which hears property value disputes, is up to date for the first time in the memory of the current staff, he noted.
To make his office run more efficiently, with all staff present every business day, Meacham eliminated the option for his employees to work four 10-hour days a week.
Meacham said he’d like to explore bringing payroll processing clerks working in other county departments into the auditor’s payroll department.
With the county’s largest costs contained in payroll and benefits, standardization of county pay scales for similar jobs across county departments could help the county save money and “more fairly compensate all the employees we have and future employees,” Meacham said.
Also needed are short, intermediate and long-term plans for the future of the Oakhill Renaissance Place county office complex, which will require “coordination of all the wisdom of county government,” he said.
Other county officials speak favorably of Meacham, who, in 2014, became the first Republican elected to a nonjudicial Mahoning County government office in 30 years.
“He’s doing a great job. I think he works very well with all the other officeholders, including the Mahoning County commissioners,” said Commissioner Carol Rimedio-Righetti, a Democrat, who is chairwoman of the commissioners.
“We have a great working relationship with his staff and with him. Basically, he has an open-door policy,” said Audrey Tillis, the commissioners’ executive director.