Mahoning County mulls moving offices to Oakhill

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

milliken@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

An exodus of Mahoning County government offices from downtown Youngstown to Oakhill Rennaisance Place is being considered by the county commissioners.

They seek to fill the 52 percent of Oakhill that remains vacant 10 years after the county bought the former hospital in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

“We’re just looking at every option available because it’s an asset for the county and we have to utilize it,” Commissioner David Ditzler said of Oakhill, which is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.

An option being considered, which Ditzler said he favors, would relocate all offices in the administration building, including that of the commissioners, to Oakhill, with the exception that the prosecutor’s office would move next door to the courthouse.

Under that option, the courthouse would be reserved for the courts and the prosecutor’s office; and the auditor’s, treasurer’s and recorder’s offices would move from the courthouse to Oakhill.

“It consolidates the county government,” Ditzler said, explaining why he favors that option.

The prosecutor’s office needs to be near the courts, where it prosecutes cases, he added.

“We’re looking right now at plugging into empty space – what will fit where” at Oakhill, Ditzler said.

His colleague, Commissioner Anthony Traficanti, said there’s room at Oakhill to accommodate all of the county departments that would move from downtown to Oakhill under the proposal Ditzler said he favors.

However, Traficanti said he thinks the proposed moves and their impacts need to be carefully studied.

“You have to sit down and plan this,” Traficanti said of any proposal to move the county offices. “It’s nothing I’m going to rush into.”

Any such plan would have to be discussed in consultation with judges and elected county officeholders, including the prosecutor, auditor, treasurer, recorder and clerk of courts, he said.

Carol Rimedio-Righetti, chairwoman of the commissioners, said she suggested in a commissioners staff meeting two months ago that the board consider relocating offices from the administration building to Oakhill if it’s financially feasible. She said, however, that no architect has yet been commissioned to do any detailed study as to where particular county offices would fit into Oakhill.

Rimedio-Righetti estimated the renovation costs, if the noncourt downtown county offices were to move there, at between $5 million and $8 million, “maybe more.”

The county would have to borrow that money, she said.

“We all have opinions on what we’d like to see happening, but we, as a collective group [of commissioners], have not sat down at the table to come up with what would fit for every office that we want to move there,” she said.

The commissioners expect to have a public staff meeting with officeholders who would be affected by any proposed moves to Oakhill in late July or in August to discuss creation of a plan for the former hospital’s future, she added.

JUDGE’S VIEW

Judge Maureen A. Sweeney, presiding and administrative judge of the county common pleas court, said she favors relocating the auditor, treasurer and recorder and reserving the courthouse for the courts and the prosecutor.

“Trumbull County has done it already,” she said, referring to the relocation of that county’s auditor’s, treasurer’s and recorder’s offices to a building across the street from the Trumbull County Courthouse.

Judge Sweeney also observed that many of the rooms in the Mahoning County Courthouse were designed originally as courtrooms before the building opened in 1911.

“We might be able to get a visiting judge more often with a bigger courtroom, or maybe even a sixth judge eventually,” she said, referring to the possibility of having a sixth regular general-division common pleas judge.

Judge Sweeney also said the prosecutor’s office could use more space; and the proposal would allow for more-secure court record storage space and eliminate court record storage in boxes and file cabinets outside the court clerk’s office.

COURT CLERK’S VIEW

Tony Vivo, clerk of courts, agreed that relocation would increase court record storage space, but he said he favors keeping the recorder’s office in the courthouse.

“Title searchers do a lot of work in our office, and they go downstairs and work in the recorder’s office, so that would be a little inconvenient for them” if the recorder’s office went to Oakhill, Vivo said.

RECORDER’S VIEW

“I would prefer to stay in the courthouse,” said Recorder Noralynn Palermo.

“It’s more convenient” for researchers and the public, she said.

Because of their working relationship, a move would be feasible only if the auditor’s, treasurer’s, recorder’s and tax-map offices went together to the same building, Palermo said.

The tax-map office is in the administration building.

“To transfer a deed, sometimes you have to have it approved by tax map, then it has to be transferred at the auditor’s [office], and then it has to be recorded in the recorder’s office,” Palermo said.

“When you get a certificate of transfer from probate court, you have to take it to the auditor’s [office] and have it transferred, then bring it to our office to record,” she added.

AUDITOR’S ViEW

“It’s very convenient for the taxpayer,” Auditor Ralph Meacham said of the courthouse location.

“We have a lot of foot traffic. I’m not sure if we’d get the same amount of foot traffic” at Oakhill, he added.

Meacham said he wants his office to be “wherever the taxpayers can best and most efficiently be served.”

He said, however, that the auditor’s, treasurer’s and recorder’s offices should be located together – whether they stay at the courthouse or go to Oakhill.

“A lot of people move between those offices,” he observed.

TREASURER’S VIEW

Treasurer Dan Yemma said his first priority in evaluating any possible move is to ask whether the proposed new location is more or less convenient for the taxpayers.

Maintaining the security of the office also would be a priority, he said.

“It would be inconvenient if we were not located in close proximity to at least the auditor. We do a lot of work with the auditor’s office,” Yemma said.

Making bank deposits is convenient for the treasurer’s office in its current courthouse location because treasurer’s staff and deputy sheriffs need only walk across Boardman Street to Huntington Bank to make the frequent deposits, he said.

The downtown location also is convenient because the treasurer’s office works closely with county prosecutors next door in the filing of about 60 tax foreclosures a month in the court clerk’s office, he added.

Renovation costs to accommodate new offices at Oakhill and any renovation of the courthouse to make it a courts-and-prosecutor-only facility would have to be considered by the commissioners as they evaluate options before making decisions, he added.

TITLE SEARCHER’S VIEW

“It would take more time to do our work” if the noncourt offices were to leave the courthouse, said Beth Gillam of Youngstown, an independent title searcher.

That extra time would result in delays and additional closing costs being passed on to homebuyers, she said.

“Anything that makes us take longer for that process is going to affect the Realtors, the lenders and the public,” she observed.

“The title abstracting process is one where you move around quite a bit to all the different offices; and it is definitely most convenient if they’re all in one place,” Gillam explained.

If the proposal to relocate the auditor’s, treasurer’s, recorder’s and tax-map offices from downtown Youngstown to Oakhill becomes a reality, the situation in Mahoning County won’t be comparable to that of Trumbull County, she said.

In Warren, a title searcher parks in one place and walks across High Street from the courthouse, where court records are housed, to the administration building containing the auditor’s, treasurer’s, recorder’s and tax-map offices and their records.

The Mahoning County proposal would force title searchers to park near the courthouse to search court records, then drive to, and park at, Oakhill, which is half mile from the courthouse, to perform the rest of their work, she explained.

If the noncourt county offices must move, “You would definitely want to keep the cluster together because they’re departments that we use all day every day,” Gillam said.

EXTENT OF THE EXODUS

A complete exodus of administrative offices would mean the commissioners, office of management and budget, purchasing, facilities, tax map, human resources, workers’ compensation, convention and visitors’ bureau, payroll and information-technology offices would move from the county administration building to Oakhill.

The county’s emergency 911 dispatching center in the administration building is slated to close in the next 12 to 18 months as its functions are consolidated into the Austintown and Boardman dispatching centers.

If the administrative offices leave the administration building, Traficanti said the commissioners could make it available to the courts, if they can use it, or sell the building.

Rimedio-Righetti said yet another possibility is to demolish the administration building.

Traficanti said he’d like to see the county’s CVB move to Oakhill, but he said CVB members prefer a downtown storefront with more visibility.

Traficanti also said the commissioners have considered moving the county’s lead-hazard remediation office from Austintown to Oakhill.

Youngstown State and Kent State University affiliates and nonprofit organizations also could be considered as occupants of the 353,000-square-foot Oakhill complex, he added.

Another possibility is for Area Agency on Aging 11, which will administer Mahoning County’s newly approved senior citizen services levy, to have an Oakhill office, Ditzler said.

Ditzler said he’d like to keep Oakhill “as much government as possible” to maintain its real-estate tax-exempt status.

County offices now at Oakhill are the Department of Job and Family Services, Child Support Enforcement Agency, Veterans Service Commission, auto title department, coroner’s office, microfilm department, recycling division and board of elections.

Nonprofit agencies that work with JFS might be considered as Oakhill tenants, Audrey Tillis, the commissioners’ executive director, said.

Oakhill will, however, be losing a longtime 17,000-square-foot tenant.

The city of Youngstown recently announced that its health department, a 12-year second-floor Oakhill tenant, will be moving to the city hall annex downtown next year.

ARCHITECT’S VIEW

“The key there is the county taking a look at all their offices and seeing what they could relocate into the [Oakhill] building,” said architect Tracie Kaglic of Olsavsky-Jaminet Architects of Youngstown, which has designed renovations of Oakhill space for departments already there.

“If they are choosing to keep that building, it makes sense to make it 100 percent full, or as close to 100 percent full as we possibly can,” she said of the commissioners.

“They have offices in satellite locations all over,” Kaglic said of county officials.

The commissioners need to determine “what offices can and should move to Oakhill, and then I can investigate the square footage for them and see spatial relationships and where the tenants should be located,” Kaglic said.

The former hospital rooms in the vacant areas of Oakhill could be used, as is, as offices by new occupants, but former operating rooms would have to be modified for office or conference-room use, Kaglic said.

The city health department uses the unrenovated former hospital rooms in as-is condition, she noted.