Staff photo / Brandon Cantwell . . . William A. Cafaro, Cafaro Foundation trustee and Cafaro Company co-president, left, presents Vienna Trustee Phil Pegg with a $250,000 check intended to support the township’s emergency services during a news conference at the Eastwood Office Centre on Tuesday.

NILES — On the heels of passing a May levy deemed integral to getting emergency medical services back in the township, those services could come back sooner thanks to a donation from the Cafaro Foundation.

On Tuesday, Vienna trustees and Cafaro Company officials gathered at the Eastwood Office Centre to announce a $250,000 donation to the township from the company’s nonprofit arm, the Cafaro Foundation.

The money will go toward helping the township operate its fire and police departments, with the fire department set to receive funds from its newly passed 3.5-mill levy in 2026. The levy was built into the township’s fiscal recovery plan adopted by trustees Dec. 16, and will bring in $507,186 annually. It replaces two levies from 2003 and 2006, which the township no longer is collecting on.

William A. Cafaro, a Cafaro Foundation trustee and co-president of the Cafaro Company, noted his roots in the township, where he is a longtime resident.

“My family have been longtime residents of Vienna Township; my wife and I, as well as my three sons, live in Vienna Township. And my siblings and I grew up in Vienna Township,” Cafaro said. “I know Vienna is under some fiscal difficulty right now, and we wanted to give at least a small token of assistance for Vienna Township, for their fire department, for their police department.”

“A community needs those first responders; it’s a community in need of police protection, fire protection and ambulatory services,” Cafaro added later. “With the fiscal difficulties that the township is under today, it’s imperative to make sure that those services remain for the township.”

Trustee Phil Pegg said the donation will “greatly increase” the speed at which the township gets its ambulances back on the road, adding that they’ve already instructed fire Chief Gus Birch to start looking for paramedics.

“They are the hard personnel to find and employ, they’re few and far between; but with this donation, we feel we can start it up a lot sooner — hopefully in the next month or two at most,” Pegg said. “Without this donation, we were looking at least nine months before we could even start to try.”

He thanked their mutual aid departments — Brookfield, Howland, Liberty and Fowler — for their help thus far, adding the township could only expect so much from them.

“We need to be back up and running our own service,” Pegg said.

Pegg said the police department was “financially OK” but the department was still down to several officers. Similar to medics, officers are hard to find, he added.

Pegg said the police department has one officer covering them from midnight to late afternoon, but they’re covering things the best they can with the help of the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office. He thanked Sheriff Mike Wilson for his assistance.

He clarified that a majority of the donation would be going toward the fire department, deeming it their key shortage.

Trustee Mike Haddle said the donation keeps them on track with their fiscal recovery plan, too.

“Originally, we were going to use traffic camera money, but when that went away, we pushed the timeline back,” Haddle said. “This just moves it forward again — things are kind of resetting and balancing out.”

Haddle said the donation would not be built into the plan, as it was a one-time cash infusion.

“We’ll just use it for what it is and restore services; a generous donation,” he said. “This pushes our timeline back to normalcy; (it) keeps us on track to get out of fiscal emergency in 2028.”

Birch, who found out about the press conference last week along with the rest of the community, said the donation was the “best thing that’s happened” since he took over as fire chief in October to help with the rebuild.

Birch said he’d like to start hiring in August, but it’s dependent on how many applications he gets and the interviews he can conduct, echoing Pegg’s concerns about finding people.

Birch expressed his gratitude to the Cafaro Foundation, explaining the donation would help residents greatly and enable a quicker response from those mutual aid departments.

‘”We’ll be able to get our ambulance back in service, get to the people in need in an emergency situation a lot faster than the mutual aid departments from outside,” Birch said. “Kudos to them for helping us the way they did. Hopefully, once we’re up and running, we’ll be able to return some of the favors.”

The Ohio Auditor’s Office placed Vienna in fiscal emergency last July after confirming the township was more than $1 million in debt.

Since the township’s financial woes began last February, former fiscal officer Linda McCullough, who served as Vienna’s fiscal officer from 2019 to early 2024, pleaded guilty to all 10 charges against her at her June 16 trial date. She will be sentenced July 22.