Loan for TARTA levy drive paid

An agency that provides insurance and public-officials bonds to Ohio transit agencies has covered $49,000 that remained unpaid from loans the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority made to a levy campaign committee in 2007 and 2008.

In a statement issued this week, TARTA General Manager James Gee said the transit authority and the office of Ohio Auditor David Yost had submitted a claim to the Ohio Transit Risk Pool for the balance from the $66,885 the transit authority lent to Citizens for TARTA, and a check for the $49,000 had been received by the transit authority to retire the debt.

“The subrogation of this matter will be handled between OTRP and Citizens for TARTA,” Mr. Gee wrote.

Subrogation, he explained in an interview, is the process by which the insurer for an aggrieved party pursues payment from the responsible party.

Mr. Gee compared the situation to a traffic accident in which each insurer pays the claims from its insured, but then a nonfaulted driver’s insurer seeks reimbursement from an at-fault driver’s insurer.

“Citizens for TARTA will have to continue to fund-raise,” the transit manager said, while allowing that “there’s no set payment plan in place” and he did not know what would happen if the campaign committee were to default.

Mr. Yost, who in early May had declared the Citizens for TARTA loans illegal and ordered their prompt repayment, issued a statement yesterday that he was “pleased that they have paid the money back, though I wish it hadn’t taken so long.”

“I am still deeply concerned that this could have happened at all,” the auditor said.

And while Mr. Gee said he hoped the Ohio agency’s claim payment had settled the matter at the state level, a spokesman for Mr. Yost said the auditor had filed a complaint with the Ohio Ethics Commission about Mr. Gee’s fund-raising ­conduct.

In a May 11 follow-up letter to Mr. Gee, Mr. Yost said he wanted the commission “to review the roles that you played in your fund-raising to consider any violation of Ohio’s ethics laws” because of the transit manager’s dual role as Citizens for TARTA’s deputy treasurer when the loans were granted.

TARTA in 2008 obtained an opinion from the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, by referral from the Lucas County Board of Elections, upholding the legality of the loans, which by that time had been issued to Citizens for TARTA.

But the Ohio statute to which that opinion referred applied to private donations, implying that TARTA had been mistaken for a private corporation rather than a public agency.

And Mr. Yost said that regardless of any such advice, Mr. Gee should have known better.

“You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that you don’t use public money for political purposes,” the auditor wrote.

Paul Nick, the ethics commission’s executive director, said Friday he was unfamiliar with the case and could not comment on pending matters.

Along with being TARTA’s general manager and treasurer of Citizens for TARTA, Mr. Gee is secretary of the Ohio Transit Risk Pool, but he said he recused himself from all proceedings related to the Citizens for TARTA claim.

Waterville Mayor Derek Merrin, who had protested the Citizens for TARTA loans after finding them listed in campaign-finance reports, said while he hopes the subrogation process goes through, he said he finds Mr. Gee’s multiple roles troubling.

“I’m glad the taxpayers have apparently been made whole,” he said.

Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.