YOUNGSTOWN — The city’s firefighters union filed a complaint with the 7th District Court of Appeals to compel Youngstown to provide public records regarding correspondence to and from fire Chief Barry Finley regarding the recently-demolished Realty Tower.

In Monday’s court complaint, the union wrote that numerous requests to Law Director Lori Shells Simmons for the documentation — starting with the initial July 23 request — have gone ignored.

The union states the city “is improperly withholding public records” in violation of state law and asked the appeals court to order the city to produce them and pay “attorneys’ fees, statutory damages and any other relief the court deems equitable and just or in accordance with the law.”

Shells Simmons said the union has “the right to file” in court. She didn’t directly say if the law department is withholding the requested documentation.

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “We try to resolve issues with all the unions. The firefighters union is difficult but we try. They feel they’ve got to do stuff. It’s their right.”

Shells Simmons said she hasn’t seen the court complaint and referred further comment to A. Joseph Fritz, senior assistant law director.

Fritz said he didn’t “know anything about it yet. Until we read the document, we won’t have a comment.”

The firefighters union court complaint states on July 23, attorneys Ryan Lemerbrock and Brooks Boron submitted a public records request to the city on behalf of the union asking for correspondence sent to and received by Finley regarding the Realty Tower from May 1 to the date of the request as well as any correspondence he received or sent regarding city employees, including firefighters, being asked or solicited to respond, volunteer or work either on-duty or off-duty at the Realty Tower; anything to or from the chief regarding issues and / or concerns of the building’s safety, and any emergency demolition requests and / or emergency demolition orders issued or authorized by Finley for Realty.

The complaint states Shells Simmons didn’t acknowledge receipt of the July 23 request, didn’t respond to a July 30 email from Boron or another one he sent Aug. 12. Also, the law department has failed to fill the request or provide any response or acknowledgement as of Monday, the complaint states.

A May 28 gas explosion caused extensive damage to the former 13-story Realty Tower in the city’s downtown on Central Square. Akil Drake, who worked at the Chase Bank branch on the building’s ground floor, died in the explosion and nine others were injured.

A June 14 preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board stated a four-person scrap-removal crew, engaged by GreenHeart Companies of Boardman, was working in a basement area underneath the building’s sidewalk removing old utility lines when a crew member sawed three times into a pipe mistakenly believing it to not have natural gas in it. That caused the explosion.

A final report is expected to take one to two years to complete.

YO Properties 47 LLC, which owns the Realty site, chose to demolish the structure. Demolition began July 12 and finished Friday. The site needs to be filled with dirt and then gravel to turn it into a parking lot, at least temporarily.

Finley said July 3, nine days before the demolition started, that firefighters would go into Realty, heavily damaged in the explosion, on July 10 to retrieve some small belongings for tenants in the building’s 23 apartments. A structural engineer hired by the city already had determined the building on East Federal Street was not safe to enter and the demolition was planned.

The union on July 6 wrote Finley stating it believed “entrance into the Realty Tower building poses a significant threat to the life and safety” of the union members and “advised the members against entry into the building.”

It added: “Realty Tower is likely more unstable now than it has ever been. Crews of firefighters and equipment carrying out bags of luggage could be all it takes for a partial interior or even global collapse of the remaining structure.”

The firefighters union letter to Finley stated its members went into the building moments after the May 28 explosion and “asking our members to place their lives at risk in that building again, six weeks later, for anything other than to save a life is unconscionable.”

Finley already had declared an emergency demolition of Realty before he and three union members — Lt. Pat Bundy, investigator Charles Hodge and firefighter Sean Guerreri — voluntarily went into Realty on July 10 and got some small items.

The demolition started two days after that.

Moderalli Excavating, which did the demolition, had a challenging time taking down the building in part because of how structurally solid the steel was in the structure.