Commissioners approve building permit changes
May 1—ASHTABULA — The Ashtabula County Board of Trustees approved a change to requirements for building permits at a meeting on Tuesday.
The resolution approved by commissioners requires anyone seeking a building permit from the Ashtabula County Building Department to, where applicable, submit to the county copies of permits from the health department and the relevant zoning official.
At a work session prior to the meeting, Ashtabula County Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Hebebrand said the decision was made in concert with building department officials.
"The process right now, there's no way for them to enforce whether or not there's been a zoning or health department permit issued, when they're issuing their permitting process," he said.
Often, people seeking permits will file for zoning and health permits at the same time, and the building department will process the request submitted to them without knowing whether the other entities have approved the permit requests, Hebebrand said.
"[County commercial buildings official] Dave [Strichko] recommended that the commissioners pass a resolution that would prohibit them from authorizing the work to move forward without those other permits, where applicable, being granted," he said.
Under the resolution, people can still submit an application without those two types of permits, but before it could be approved, the building department would need copies of those permits, Hebebrand said.
County Administrator Janet Discher said the issue is important, and she believes it is something the townships are in favor of.
Commissioners Casey Kozlowski and Kathryn Whittington said they were in favor of the move.
In other business:
—Ashtabula County Auditor Dave Thomas said his office has discovered they have paperwork on employees running back to the 1960s.
He said the county Sheriff's Office, Commissioners' Office and other offices may have a similar issue.
"Employee termination paper, new hire paper, OPERS information, just essentially a little bit all over the place, in boxes, not organized and not protected, going back to the 60s," Thomas said.
He suggested the office's older records be put onto microfilm every few years, but the first step for his office would be catching up to the present.
Discher said some county departments are good at converting permanent records to microfilm, and some are not.
Thomas said a quote for $30,000 does not include some additional documents that were found recently.
"We have a plan, moving forward," Thomas said. "We're starting to scan, we're starting to collect, to organize these things better moving forward. We've started to do that. We just kind of kept everything off to the side, and we've started to look at everything and realizing, heaven forbid there's a fire or a flood."
County Prosecutor Colleen O'Toole suggested the commissioners submit a request to her office to see if the Ohio Revised Code has changed to allow those records to be destroyed.
Thomas said he would do so, but the office's current records retention policy shows all of the documents as permanent.
He said his office is trying to reduce the cost in any way they can.
—The board approved seeking bids for a number of projects.
The first was for work on Footville-Richmond Road, with an expected cost of $1.7 million.
The second was for new flooring for county buildings in Jefferson and asbestos remediation at the courthouse, with an expected cost of $430,000.
The final item was seeking bids for the purchase of five vehicles for the county Department of Environmental Services.
—Representatives of the Ashtabula County Prosecutor's Office presented a budget for the office's Victims of Crime Advocate employees at the work session, along with a grant that has been awarded to the county.
