Displaying items by tag: Bill Roemer

Ilene Shapiro and Bill Roemer faced off in the Summit County Executive's race debate Wednesday afternoon at Quaker Station in downtown Akron, which was sponsored by the Akron Press Club. Democratic candidate Shapiro was appointed interim executive after the death of Russ Pry...she was county council president before that. Roemer, the Republican challenger, was previously a county council member himself. Shapiro said the county executive's biggest responsibility is fiscal responsibility. 

"Taxpayer money that each and every one of you pay into the county, is what enables us to keep our budgets steady, to be able to monitor what we need to do, and to forecast what we will be able to do in the future," Shapiro said. "We have a strong fiscal responsibility." Roemer said for him, the biggest thing is keeping Summit County safe. "As a part of doing that, we've seen the sheriff's budget reduced significantly. We've seen a wing of the jail closed," Roemer said. "Those are items that need to be addressed immediately." 

But Roemer and Shapiro disagreed on the costs of the closed jail wing.

Shapiro said there's a reason that the $3.5 million dollar cost estimate has been made...due to a legal settlement..."Part of the settlement in that was if we opened the pod, we would have to fully fund the jail, OK, the 50 officers," Shapiro said. "You do the rough math for the 50 officers, at let's say $60,000 without benefits or whatever, we're well over $3 million." Roemer said that he's talked with executives in the sheriff's office, and that the net cost would be lower.  "The net cost, given the amount that we paid to Geauga County, the amount that we are currently paying to open a portion of that jail when needed, the net cost of that would be $700,000," Roemer said. "The $3.5 million figure cited is the figure that is needed to bring the sheriff's department funding to the 2008 level." 

The candidates also talked about the sales tax increase which failed in 2014, which Roemer says he supported in its revised form because it supported law enforcement and the sheriff's office. Shapiro says she supported it before an arena proposal was removed, saying the county had a "window of opportunity" to fuel growth and the county's tax base.

Editor's note: the complete debate can be heard below. 

A recent email circulation featuring Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro has drawn the attention of her opposition, Republican Bill Roemer. Her campaign says it was an "honest mistake".

The Email is being sent by the County's Veterans Service Commission, and features a photo of Shapiro and a request to help the Democratic Party's "Get Out The Vote" campaign.

Roemer says he was contacted by a Veterans Service Commission employee regarding the Email... 

In a statement just out this afternoon, Shapiro's campaign says it was an "honest mistake."

The campaign says the Email went out by mistake to the VSC and other county agencies that do not use the county's summitoh.net for Email.

The campaign estimates that about 20 E-mails went out to those addresses, and that a VSC employee forwarded it thinking it was routine county Email.

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(Bill Roemer Campaign) Candidate for Summit County Executive Bill Roemer delivered a letter to the Veterans Service Commission of Summit County (VSC) today, asking for a full investigation into the recent use of county resources by at least one county VSC employee for partisan political activities in support of the candidacy of Ilene Shapiro for County Executive. The email, which was sent through the VSC email system to all employees, and included the official VSC logo, contained information from the Shapiro campaign regarding campaign events, fundraisers, and picking up campaign yard signs.

In a statement, Roemer said;

"I call on Ilene Shapiro to immediately reject this illegal use of public resources as part of her campaign, and scrub her campaign email database of any official county email addresses. This type of misuse of taxpayer dollars undermines the public's trust in county government. As County Executive, I will push for a charter amendment prohibiting county elected officials from soliciting or accepting campaign contributions from county employees they oversee and imposing limits on donations from those who receive unbid contracts from the county, so that the public can have full faith that employees and those who do work with the county will be focused on their jobs and not the political campaigns of their bosses."

The email was brought to the campaign's attention when VSC employees approached the Roemer campaign and said that they felt pressured to support the Shapiro campaign because the request came through the official VSC email system.

Bill Roemer is a former at-large county council member, and current member of the Summit County Educational Services Center (ESC) Board of Governors. He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and was director of Ohio sales for a major telecommunications firm before his retirement from the private sector.

(Elect Ilene Shapiro campaign, news release) The Elect Ilene Shapiro campaign is issuing the following press release in response to a press release issued earlier today by our opponent:

Shortly after Ilene Shapiro announced her intention to run for the position of County Executive, campaign staff began compiling an email database of volunteers, community supporters and members of the public that may have interest in her campaign. During that process, care was taken to keep the public emails of Summit County employees off the list. Campaign staff scrubbed the list of any emails with “summitoh.net” in the extension, which staff believed would keep all Summit County emails out of the database. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to the campaign staff, a handful of agencies, none of which are under the control of the County Executive, use email extensions that do not include summitoh.net. Those agencies were the Veterans ServiceCommission, Summit Metro Parks, Summit Children Services Board, Summit Developmental Disabilities and the Summit County Engineer.

After we were notified today that a campaign email was inadvertently sent to an employee on October 7, 2016 at the Summit County Veterans Service Commission, campaign staff determined that the same email went to less than 20 Summit County email addresses, all of which are emails in agencies that do not use the "summitoh.net” extension. While campaign staff attempted to prevent this issue, an honest mistake was made and has now been addressed so that the issue does not occur in the future. Out of the 11,031 email addresses that received the October 7, 2016email, this issue affected less than 20 Summit County email addresses.

The Elect Ilene Shapiro campaign apologizes for this honest mistake and has taken the proper steps to remedy the issue. The campaign has verified that the email in question did not go to Summit County email addresses for any employee that is employed by or under the authority of the County Executive. Additionally, the VSC staff member that forwarded the email is not a part of the campaign, and we believe she innocently forwarded the email to staff thinking that it was a routine County communication.

Candidates in the Summit County Executive race have agreed to an October debate.

Republican Bill Roemer and Democrat Illene Shapiro will take part in the Akron Press Club debate on October 19th at Quaker Station.

Shapiro and Roemer will get 90 seconds to answer each question from the panel, and the other candidate will get 45 seconds of rebuttal to each question.

Roemer is a former County Council member. Shapiro was council president until being appointed executive after the death of Russ Pry.

Former Summit County Council member Bill Roemer sat next to Tamela Lee when he was on council.

He says though the indictments handed down Thursday were no surprise, given the raid of her home earlier and other news about the FBI probe that came out earlier.

But reading the indictment, Roemer wonders if another shoe is going to drop in the case against Lee.

"I see there are mentions of a Judge 2 in the indictments and things like that," Roemer tells WAKR.net. "Are there other people that are associated with this, or is this the final situation. Is this the tip of the iceberg, or are these the final indictments."

Roemer says it's difficult to see how Lee can serve on council after this.

"I would expect that Ms. Lee would resign or in some manner step down," Roemer says. "because it would be very hard for her to meet her duties on county council, given the extensive indictments against her."

Roemer says he didn't see anything at council directly, because the indictments involve Lee's personal relationships.

He says with news of public corruption, other officials have to work "above and beyond" to overcome such things.