YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County commissioners adopted a resolution to approve the appointment of County Administrator Audrey Tillis at their meeting Thursday.

The appointment comes as part of a retire / rehire for Tillis.

Tillis said her annual compensation of $128,569 will not change. She said she will be paid out her vacation time and she will be rolling her sick time over into the new contract.

“The commissioners asked me to stay on,” Tillis said. “I was going to retire, or go to one of their other programs that they had, but they asked that I stay on and then help with any transition or anything. We agreed to that and we agreed to keep my compensation the way that it is right now.”

Tillis said her rehire will be effective April 1.

Board President Anthony Traficanti said Tillis “has been talking about this for about the last four or five months.” He said she will continue to be county administrator under her rehire. “She’s going to stay on a little while longer,” Traficanti said.

“We did what we’ve done for any other employee in the past, we did a retire / rehire,” Traficanti said. “Audrey agreed to stay on as county administrator which we’re very fortunate that she did.”

Traficanti called the county administrator position “probably one of the most powerful offices in Mahoning County.” He said the resolution is good for the commissioners as they have had a great relationship with Tillis.

According to the county commissioners personnel manual, “if the retiring employee is subject to hire through a board, then 60 days prior to rehire, in the same job from which the employee retired, the hiring board must give public notice of the employee’s intent to rehire.”

The hiring board must also hold a public hearing on the issue between 15 and 30 days prior to the retired employee’s rehire date.

At the time of the retirement, the employee must be paid all accrued vacation time and compensatory time, if applicable. When rehired, the employee will begin accruing vacation as a new employee. The employee will not receive credit for prior years of service in determining the vacation accrual rate.

In other business, commissioners approved a memorandum of understanding to allow deputies at the sheriff’s office to purchase back their firearms which have reached “end of use,” from the county.

“What it does is allow the deputy sheriffs who were assigned a firearm to purchase their firearm, which was assigned to them, back from Mahoning County,” Chief Deputy William Cappabianca said.

Cappabianca said the sheriff’s department purchases firearms for its deputies from Vance Outdoors in Columbus. Normally, the guns are traded back to the outdoors store at their “end of use.” Now, they can stay in the hands of law enforcement officers.

“The sheriff’s idea of the benefit of that is it keeps those guns off of the streets, being sold,” Cappabianca said.

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