The Citizens’ Voice
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Wilkes-Barre Township taxpayers already paid enough to own the headquarters of the embattled township fire department.
But now, due to the crimes of the ex-fire chief, they’ll pay $75,767 more.
Council on Monday night voted 5-0 to take ownership of the fire hall on Watson Street and assume the remaining mortgage — a debt that should have been paid off nearly three years ago.
Under a previous agreement, the fire station was owned by the independently run volunteer department, but the township issued a monthly stipend to cover the mortgage.
Except, someone stopped using the money to pay the mortgage.
That someone, township officials and firefighters said Monday night, was former fire Chief John Yuknavich.
“The person who signed the mortgage is currently in a federal penitentiary,” township Solicitor Bruce Phillips said.
Yuknavich is jailed at Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, serving a six-month sentence after pleading guilty to stealing at least $45,000 from the fire department. Much of that money was supposed to pay for the fire station’s mortgage.
Phillips said it was in the township’s best interest to take over the mortgage for the cash-strapped fire department and own the property. The loan was already in default and a bank could have sold it to anyone or any business, which might not have been a good neighbor to the township municipal building, Phillips said.
Councilman John Jablowski Jr. described the deal as getting something for “ten cents on the dollar.”
Records indicate the building is valued at $661,000.
The township and fire department agreed on a 50-year lease for $1 per year.
Several members of the fire department attended the meeting and signed the paperwork to make the deal official.
“You guys had nothing to do with this,” Kuren said, noting the blame was on Yuknavich. “Two and a half years ago, the loans were supposed to be paid off.”
Kuren said keeping a volunteer force active in the township is better than trying to contract with neighboring towns.
Phillips said the township is “making sure we get them back on their feet.”
“Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. We’re trying to pick up the pieces here,” Jablowski said.
Joe Cannon and Joe Porzucek, both founding members of the volunteer fire department, spoke at the meeting, criticizing the fire department for giving so much control to Yuknavich.
“It has got to be run the way we set it up. It can’t be run the way it was,” Cannon, 75, said.
Porzucek said in the past the fire chief was responsible for the fighting fires, while a separate person was in charged of finances.
“There was always check and balances,” Porzucek said. “Not one person running the whole show.”
At one point, Yuknavich was chief of the department, president and treasurer of the relief association, and president of the executive board, said Walter Halecki, the relief association’s secretary.
Halecki said the state stopped providing money to the department’s relief association in 2009 because the former leaders weren’t cooperative with state investigators. State officials determined $150,000 in undocumented loans were taken out of the relief associations account.
Current members of the fire department don’t know what was done with the money as Yuknavich handled all the finances.
“There’s no paper trail,” Halecki said.
Halecki told council one of its vehicles — a tanker truck — was repossessed by a bank a few years ago because only one payment was ever made.
Before he was federally indicted, Yuknavich’s stewardship of the volunteer fire department’s finances had been scrutinized since July 2006, when state liquor control agents cited the Firemen’s Inn — a former bar run by the fire department — for failure to maintain complete and truthful financial records. The state Bureau of Charities then sanctioned the department for similar reasons. Then, the state police moved in and filed criminal charges against Yuknavich. They state eventually dropped the case against Yuknavich after he was charged federally with stealing from programs that receive federal funds.
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