STRUTHERS |Mayor Stocker’s actions

Since winning election last fall and taking office in January, Struthers Mayor Terry Stocker has taken several legal actions aimed at the administration of former Mayor Daniel Mamula and members of city council. They include:

November 2007: Stocker filed suit, along with Auditor Tina Morell, in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to stop council from cutting their salaries by 20 percent. Stocker and Morell said the salary reductions were politically motivated and done at the behest of Mamula. The defendants said it was done in the name of fiscal responsibility. The suit ended up in U.S. District Court’s Northern District of Ohio Eastern Division, where Judge Peter C. Economus dismissed the action, ruling that local legislators are immune from liability for legislative actions.

January 2008: Stocker asked the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to investigate alleged tampering with the computers by the previous city administration. BCI confiscated the hard drives of four computers from the city administration building for examination but has issued no report.

June 2008: Stocker filed a police report alleging unprofessional and unacceptable conduct as a reserve police officer on the part of council President Anthony Protopapa, who also is a reserve officer with the Struthers Police Department. The police report stems from an e-mail, discovered in Clerk of Council Toni Constantino’s former computer, in which she talks about finding Stocker’s briefcase that the then-mayor-elect had left on the council caucus room table at city hall. Protopapa said the clerk opened the briefcase in his presence to determine who it belonged to. There was no crime, Protopapa said.

Source: Vindicator files, court documents