PD could use a lift
Union paints bleak picture of conditions without elevator at Youngstown Police Department
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Staff photo / Ed Runyan
Tracy Bonilla, a Youngstown police department clerk, talks to Youngstown City Council Safety Committee members Thursday about the condition of the building that houses the Youngstown Police Department. At left is Youngstown police Chief Carl Davis.
Humphries, who works in the city finance department, told members of the Youngstown City Council Safety Committee Thursday that when it was decided about eight weeks ago to take the elevator out of service, it left police detectives only one way to bring witnesses and others to the fourth floor to be interviewed after hours: the stairs.
She said there is an elevator in the first-floor cruiser repair shop that was was used for prisoners when the building had a jail, but it has to be manually operated 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 business of the department takes place.
She said some members of the public could not walk up to the fourth floor to talk to detectives when incidents happened at night and on weekends that necessitated members of the public walking up to the fourth floor with police officers.
"A lot of them couldn't even make it past the second floor because it was extremely hot and hard to get up there. There was no other way to get up there," she said.
The building is no longer compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, she said.
She said she spoke with the city's buildings and grounds supervisor, who told her the last time an elevator repair person came to work on it, something caught fire.
"He stopped it right away and said, 'I've already told you you need a new elevator. I don't want another Realty building incident happening here,'" she said of the Realty Tower downtown that had a natural gas explosion May 28, killing a bank worker and injuring nine other people.
Additionally, the fire escape on the back of the police department needs to be replaced, just like the one being replaced on the back of Youngstown City Hall, which is attached to the police department, she noted.
A police auto mechanic recently broke his ankle when he tripped on a hole in the basement below the cruiser-repair shop, where mechanics have to go at times to get equipment.
She viewed that basement recently for the first time, and it seemed to have more blacktop patch than floor, she said. Pieces of cement had fallen to the basement floor, "And I looked up and could see the rusted metal up there in the roof," she said.
At that point, Jimmy Hughes, the chairman of the committee, told Humphries that it's OK for her to provide information on the condition of the building, but the city administration makes the decisions on whether to make changes to a building.
Humphries said later that a goal of the discussion was to work to get police personnel on the fourth and sixth floors to be moved to another building in the short term or to move the entire police department out of the building. The elevator is planned for replacement at a cost of $609,180, but that will take about 15 months, officials have said. Humphries said the union plans to file a grievance over the conditions in the building.
Lt. Mohammad Awad of the detective division then told the committee how difficult it was to handle the lack of a working elevator in the aftermath of multiple recent shootings. He said shooting victims had to try to walk up "five flights of steps" to be interviewed on video.
"We were having victims come up there all the time, multiple injuries, felonious assaults and they can't (climb) the steps to get to interview rooms," he said. "It's becoming an issue with us investigating crimes."
Tracy Bonilla, a clerk who works on the fourth floor, said the water to the building is orange and "undrinkable," so she gets water hauled in, but that has been a problem with the elevator out of service.
When there was a water leak a couple of years ago, a plumbing company came to make repairs to the wall by her office, hit a roach nest and "walked off the job." She said there are "brown stains all over our ceiling. You can only assume that is some kind of sewer water. It's certainly not rain water. It's brown."
She said the roach problems continue and the "fourth floor smells terrible every single day. It smells like sewage," she said.
And detectives "are walking to the fourth floor 20 times a day," she said. "They are in and out, getting video, getting their witnesses downstairs, 20 times a day. That's not a fit for duty thing. That's excessive. Everyone is getting very discouraged."
Hughes told the union members that they have avenues through the contract to have such issues addressed. "My advice ... is you really need to follow this up with the (city) administration. I can't tell you what to do, but you do have options."
After the meeting, Humphries said the reason she wanted to speak to the committee was, "I was just hoping they didn't forget about another building for the police department."
She said police officers "are here to protect and serve, but nobody's here to protect and serve them."