YOUNGSTOWN — A Mahoning County judge will rule March 28 whether to uphold a magistrate’s $733,481 sanction against the owners of the stalled Chill-Can plant project after they failed to show up for a court hearing and hire an attorney in an ongoing breach-of-contract case filed by Youngstown.

Thursday’s hearing in front of Magistrate Dennis J. Sarisky of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court was supposed to address various matters including having M.J. Joseph Development Corp., which owns the project’s property on Youngstown’s lower East Side, retain legal counsel.

Judge Maureen Sweeney gave M.J. Joseph 30 days in a Feb. 8 order to get new lawyers after agreeing to let its former attorneys, Justin Markota and Brian Kopp, withdraw from the case.

Notice of that order was sent to M.J. Joseph and a sister company, Joseph Manufacturing Co. Inc., at its listed address in Irvine, California, and returned March 8 because the property is vacant, according to court documents.

Efforts by The Vindicator to reach Mitchell Joseph, who owns the companies, have been unsuccessful. The companies don’t seem to exist on anything but paper, but they still own 21 acres in Youngstown that the city and others are trying to obtain through legal action.

Joseph has failed to hire new legal counsel and has ignored court filings in a number of cases including this one.

After a brief hearing Thursday at which only attorneys for Youngstown attended, Sarisky said of M.J. Joseph: “I’m not going to continue everything. They’ve done everything to stretch out this case in my opinion. We’ll get this case done.”

Specifically talking about Joseph, a former Youngstown resident who claimed he was going to develop the city location into an $18.8 million operation, Sarisky said: “I think this guy’s uncollectable.”

The city filed a $2.8 million breach-of-contract lawsuit June 17, 2021, contending M.J. Joseph failed to live up to its promises to develop the site.

M.J.Joseph was required to construct four buildings and create 237 jobs by Aug. 31, 2021, according to an agreement it had with the city to produce the world’s only self-chilling beverage can at the Youngstown location.

Three unfinished buildings are at the fenced-in, undeveloped site.

Sweeney on Nov. 21, 2022, upheld Sarisky’s Sept. 28, 2022, ruling that M.J. Joseph breached agreements it had with the city and Youngstown was entitled to the repayment of $1.5 million in water and wastewater grants. The money hasn’t been repaid.

Sweeney will rule March 28 on Sarisky’s July 20 decision that M.J. Joseph should be sanctioned $733,481: $414,948 the city spent on acquiring 15 properties bought for the idled project, which included relocation expenses, and $318,533 in demolition and abatement costs.

Sweeney also will decide March 28 on a Sept. 11 request Markota and Kopp made before being permitted to withdraw as M.J. Joseph’s attorneys — likely over nonpayment of legal fees — to disqualify Sarisky from the case.

In that filing, Markota wanted a hearing in front of Sweeney on the request. He acknowledged there is “no statutory procedure for disqualification of magistrates,” but it is “within the discretion of the trial judge.”

Sweeney’s March 28 decision will come without a hearing on the request.

Markota and Kopp were permitted to withdraw as M.J. Joseph’s legal counsel on this and two other cases: one was a breach-of-contract case in front of the 7th District Court of Appeals filed by MS Consultants Inc. for $322,908 for nonpayment of design work on the stalled project and the other is a foreclosure case in common pleas court that also was filed by MS and joined by others including the city.

As requested by MS, the appeals court dismissed the nonpayment case Feb. 20 after M.J. Joseph didn’t hire an attorney and missed another filing deadline. Sweeney still has to rule on a motion in that case that Markota and Kopp had submitted asking her to reconsider her decision in favor of MS by default when the attorneys missed a filing deadline. A March 27 hearing is set in that case in front of Sarisky, Sweeney’s magistrate.

The foreclosure case is ongoing in front of Magistrate Dominic DeLaurentis even though M.J. Joseph doesn’t have an attorney and hasn’t responded to any court correspondence.

In addition to the grant and the property and demolition / abatement costs, the city’s lawsuit contended it had lost at least $575,000 in income tax revenue from the project’s failure at the time of the court filing. That lawsuit said the “full amount of lost income tax revenue will be proven at trial,” but the city was losing about $18,333 a month. At that rate, the city would have lost more than $600,000 in additional income tax revenue.

Knowing the city’s lawsuit was coming, M.J. Joseph and Joseph Manufacturing Co. Inc. filed a May 24, 2021, lawsuit against the city to stop it from reclaiming the $1.5 million in grants. That suit also contends the city doesn’t have any legal rights to money, property and buildings.

In a March 29, 2021, certified letter, the city informed Joseph he had 60 days to construct a number of buildings and hire about 150 workers or it would file a lawsuit. The city followed through June 17, 2021, with the lawsuit that was postponed because of the Joseph legal action.

A Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge ruled Nov. 29 that the companies and Joseph owed $2.58 million to Richard A. Briskey, a Sunbury businessman, in a breach-of-contract lawsuit. Briskey won the case by default when the companies and Joseph never responded to the lawsuit. Briskey is now a party in the foreclosure lawsuit.

Have an interesting story? Contact David Skolnick by email at dskolnick@vindy.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @dskolnick