Staff photo / Ed Runyan
Tracy Bonilla, an employee of the Youngstown Police Department, speaks with members of the Youngstown City Council’s Safety Committee on Thursday about the condition of the building that houses the Youngstown Police Department. At left is Youngstown Police Chief Carl Davis.
YOUNGSTOWN — Karen Humphries, president of AFSCME Local 2312, the union that represents Youngstown police officers and auto mechanics, painted a grim picture of operations at the department now that the building’s main elevator is out of service.
Humphries, who works in the city’s finance department, told members of the Youngstown City Council’s safety committee on Thursday that when the decision was made to take the elevator out of service about eight weeks ago, police officers were left with only one option for bringing witnesses and others to the fourth floor for questioning after hours: the stairs.
She said there is an elevator in the patrol car repair shop on the ground floor that was used for prisoners when the building was a jail, but it has to be operated manually by the auto mechanics, so it can only be used during the day and does not stop on the second floor, where much of the department’s work takes place.
She said that when incidents occur at night or on weekends that require citizens to go to the fourth floor accompanied by police officers, some citizens are unable to go to the fourth floor to speak with detectives.
“Many of them didn’t even make it past the second floor because it was extremely hot and difficult to get up there. There was no other way to get there,” she said.
The building no longer complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, she said.
She said she spoke to the city’s building and grounds manager, who told her that the last time an elevator repair technician came to work, something caught fire.
“He immediately stopped it and said, ‘I already told you, you need a new elevator. I don’t want another incident like the one at the Realty Building to happen here,'” she said of the downtown Realty Tower, where a natural gas explosion occurred on May 28 that killed a bank employee and injured nine other people.
In addition, the fire escape at the rear of the police station needs to be replaced, just as the one at the rear of Youngstown City Hall, which is attached to the police station, is being replaced, she noted.
A police auto mechanic recently broke his ankle when he tripped over a hole in the basement beneath the patrol car repair shop, where mechanics sometimes have to go to get their equipment.
She recently looked at that basement for the first time and it had more asphalt patches than floor, she said. Pieces of cement had fallen onto the basement floor. “And when I looked up, I could see the rusted metal up there in the roof,” she said.
In response, Jimmy Hughes, chairman of the committee, told Humphries that it was fine for her to provide information about the condition of the building, but that the decision about whether to make changes to a building rests with the city government.
Humphries later said one goal of the talks was to advocate for police personnel on the fourth and sixth floors to be relocated to another building in the short term or for the entire police department to move out of the building. The elevator is to be replaced at a cost of $609,180, but that will take about 15 months, officials said. Humphries said the union plans to file a grievance about conditions in the building.
Lt. Mohammad Awad of the Criminal Investigation Division then told the committee how difficult it was to cope with the lack of an elevator after the numerous recent shootings. He said the victims of the shootings had to try to climb “five flights of stairs” to be interviewed by video.
“We had victims up there all the time, multiple injuries, severe assaults, and they couldn’t climb the stairs to the interview rooms,” he said. “That becomes a problem in our crime investigation.”
Tracy Bonilla, an employee who works on the fourth floor, said the water in the building is orange and “undrinkable,” so she has to have water delivered, but that’s a problem because the elevator is out of service.
When there was a water leak a few years ago, a plumber came to fix the wall next to her office, found a cockroach nest and “abandoned the job.” She said there were “brown stains all over our ceiling. You can only assume it’s sewage. It’s definitely not rainwater. It’s brown.”
She said the cockroach problems persist and that “the fourth floor smells terrible every day. It smells like sewage,” she said.
And investigators “are going up to the fourth floor 20 times a day,” she said. “They’re going in and out, taking video, bringing their witnesses down, 20 times a day. That’s not fit for duty. That’s excessive. Everyone is very discouraged.”
Hughes told union members that they have options through the contract to resolve such issues. “My advice … is that you absolutely need to take this up with the (city) administration. I can’t tell you what to do, but you have options.”
After the meeting, Humphries said the reason she wanted to speak to the committee was, “I was just hoping they hadn’t forgotten another building for the police department.”
She said police officers are “here to protect and serve, but no one is here to protect and serve them.”
