Presley Re-elected Chairman of Columbiana Authority
EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio -- Charles Presley was re-elected chairman of the Columbiana County Port Authority Monday and attorney Nick Amato of Wellsville was seated as the newest member of the five-person board.
Presley is a principal in Group Leaders of America Inc., Salem, a consulting firm.
Keith Chamberlin, former city manager of the city of Columbiana and today a surveyor, was re-elected vice chairman. Penny Traina, former Columbiana County commissioner, was re-elected fiscal officer; and Don Crane, president of the Western Reserve Building and Construction Trades Council, was retained as secretary.
Presley appointed Chamberlin head of the executive committee, Traina chairwoman of the finance/audit committee, Crane chairman of the real estate committee and Amato chairman of the marketing/education/technology committee.
Amato, a graduate of The Ohio State University and Ohio Northern Law School (1988), is in practice with his brother at the Amato Law Firm in Wellsville where their father, Pete Amato, is a former chief of police. Nick Amato also serves as an acting judge in East Liverpool Municipal Court and runs the Pete Amato Charitable Foundation.
The board granted the staff with whom it doesn’t have employment contracts a 2% cost-of-living raise including Glena Schafer to whom it also awarded an 8% merit increase for the additional duties and job responsibilities she has assumed since the retirement of the previous chief administrative officer. The raises, retroactive to Jan. 1, will cost the port authority $4,940 this year.
Because of the retirement of the office administrator and not replacing a secretary who left, this year’s expense for wages and benefits is $51,684 lower, Traina said
The state auditor’s office gave the port authority a clean bill of health for the year ended Dec. 31, 2012, Traina reported, with the one exception that has been cited the last 19 years. She remedied that deficiency by proposing, and the board approved, to have the port authority issue purchase orders that certify funds are available before it commits to the expenditure of those funds.
She also announced that with new software installed in the computers of the port authority that will aid the entity is keeping track of expenses more easily and possibly save money. One immediate change will be a new format, beginning next month, of the financial statements the board receives for review.
With the sale complete of the former Youngstown & Southern Railroad to Mule Sidetracks LLC, an affiliate of MarkWest Energy Partners, Denver, the board reminisced about the determination of their predecessors to save the 36-mile short line that runs from Youngstown to Darlington, Pa.
No one on the board today was serving in 2002 when that board began the fight to keep the line from being abandoned, Presley noted. “It was a monumental effort for the port authority,” he began, and the foresight and wisdom of that fight has been realized with the widespread drilling in the Utica shale and the hope that MarkWest will build a plant along the line to process oil and natural gas.
“I want to tip my hat to [former chairman] Rusty Albright,” Presley said, who counseled the board to “ ‘Stay the course.’ Rusty always said it [the Y&S] was a good thing. … We wish MarkWest success.”
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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