CCA Prepares to Hire New CEO, Do Mural
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Community Corrections Association should have a new CEO named by the end of this month, the agency’s founder and outgoing chief executive said Wednesday as he unveiled the design for a mural to be painted on a building at the gateway to downtown on Market Street.
Rick Billak said the list of 70-plus candidates who submitted applications has been narrowed down to two finalists who CCA’s board will interview March 27 and choose that day. Applicants from as far away as California sought the position. Billak, who has guided his agency to a leadership role in removing inner-city blight, announced plans last year to retire in December.
“It was a tough decision [to retire] but one that I think will be healthy for the agency. It’s time to pass the torch and have someone come in to energize the future of the agency,” he said. CCA was founded by Billak and a group of community leaders in 1974. It provides a variety of residential and nonresidential services to nonviolent offenders upon their release from incarceration.
Once the weather breaks, work is expected to begin on a mural to be painted on the southern wall of the former Gollan’s Honda building, 519 Market St., at the southern tip of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge.
Under Billak's direction, CCA has dedicated “considerable resources” -- about $800,000 -- on Market Street” to remove blight and landscape lots. “We thought doing a mural would be a good signature for that effort and a welcoming sign as people go into our downtown, which is being revitalized,” Billak said.
The artist for the project is Christian Mrosko, who did a mural last year near the Youngstown Playhouse. Billak said he contacted Mrosko after he was driving on Glenwood Avenue and saw the muralist at work on the Playhouse project. He suggested a “Bourbon Street kind of a theme” for the Market Street building.
“He’s captured it pretty well,” Billak said. The mural’s design features nightlife images including a trumpeter and a woman playing guitar, and a “Welcome to Downtown Youngstown” logo similar to the signs on Central Square.
“Nightlife downtown is significant, most especially for the YSU folks and some of the younger professionals,” Billak remarked. “It basically says to the city and people going to the downtown that the old days are over, the new days are here.”
Billak plants to go before the city’s design review committee next month with the proposal.
The building surface has been prepared with three or four layers of paint, and the job should take about a month or so. “Once his mural goes up it will remain there for years to come,” Billak said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.