Geauga Safety Center Slated for Renovations

April 10, 2025 by Allison Wilson

The Geauga County Safety Center’s visitation room will soon get a makeover, after a statutory committee approved design plans at the April 1 Geauga County Commissioners meeting.

While the design drawings are not public record, the committee — comprising commissioners Jim Dvorak, Carolyn Brakey and Ralph Spidalieri, Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand, Geauga Clerk of Courts Sheila Bevington and Magistrate Randy Taylor — did discuss some details. Geauga County Juvenile/Probate Court Judge Tim Grendell was invited, but was not present.

“The project is taking the existing, approximately 450-square-foot (video) visitation room … that consisted of 10 outdated video monitoring stations. These monitors have not been used for some period of time and have been replaced by three video visitation wall-mounted phones,” Geauga Maintenance Department employee Charles Tkatch explained. “The goal of this project is to reconfigure that existing space into two separate rooms, a reduced, approximately 86-square-foot video visitation room … and then convert the remaining, approximately 364-square-foot space into office space for jail operations, health and environmental specialists.”

The project would consist of the removal and demolition of the existing visitation booths and wall, and modifications to the floor so it could support the installation of a new wall separating the jail operations and visitation space, he continued.

There would also be HVAC, electrical and fire suppression system modifications, among other similar items, Tkatch added.

“That building was designed over 20 years ago,” Hildenbrand said. “Technology has changed. We don’t have people coming in to visit like we used to because there’s other technology, they can visit from home.”

The biggest problem in the jail is mental health and addiction, he said.

“That’s what these rooms are for, is for the mental health people to have a place to work,” he said. “Right now, they’re trying to work on the backside of this visitation room. It’s a very small room, it’s a very important part of the jail.”

This is one way to better help those counselors and hopefully bolster their progress, he said.

While the jail does not have full-time counselors handling mental health and addiction, counselors from Ravenwood Health regularly work at the jail, he said.

The renovation project estimate is $150,700, Tkatch said.

The statutory committee unanimously approved the plans.

During the public comment section of the meeting, Commissioner Ralph Spidalieri clashed with a Chagrin Valley Times reporter, who asked him why his county email was only set up in March when he has been a commissioner for 12 years.

Spidalieri replied he’s had an email account since day one, which was probably set up when he took office. His password was updated and the program reinstalled on his desktop, he said.

Spidalieri affirmed he had checked his email before, questioning why she had made the public records request to begin with.

The reporter stated Spidalieri refuses to talk to her.

“I refuse to talk to you because every time I talk to you outside of the public, I give you a statement, what you report and what I gave you is selective hearing of what you want to hear,” he said.

Spidalieri also alleged having security problems with his county email.

“We have had situations where I know myself, (former Commissioner Tim Lennon) and also (former County Administrator Gerry Morgan) had our emails entered in, where we physically watched one day here in the office, where emails were shown being opened and being closed again,” he said.

Spidalieri called it “interesting” for the reporter to be asking him questions about his emails.

“I’m going to ask for an investigation, probably with the sheriff’s office, to investigate this because you’re going to be (a) witness of who told you this. Because whoever’s telling you this is probably who’s been behind opening emails,” he said, noting commissioners have sensitive documents in their emails.

The reporter asked Spidalieri why he uses a Yahoo email account if his emails are privileged. Spidalieri replied he can’t stop people from sending him things to his Yahoo account.

The reporter asked Spidalieri whether he uses the Yahoo account for county business. Spidalieri replied he does not.

“I made the choice, personally, to not effectively engage myself with (my county email account) until (former) County Administrator Morgan left,” he said. “When I came back and saw that, I was not going to get engaged into my (county) email at all so I could testify under oath to say 100% that I had no access, no involvement with my email at all in that course of time if there was any allegations made to me.”

County emails are being opened and read, he emphasized.

However, Frank Antenucci, deputy chief administrator for the Automatic Data Processing board, who oversees county cybersecurity, said in a followup email he had never heard Spidalieri’s claims before.

“At no point has anyone from the commissioner’s office indicated concerns about an unauthorized outside party accessing their email,” he said April 4. “Given the robust security protocols in place — including multiple layers of encryption and the fact that county email has been hosted securely through Microsoft for several years — I am uncertain how such unauthorized access would be feasible.”

There are alert systems in the network to make ADP aware of hackers, he added.

“In my 14-year tenure with the county, the only significant email breach occurred at the (Geauga County) Department of Water Resources, prior to its integration under the Automatic Data Processing board,” he said.

The Geauga County Maple Leaf obtained the same records sent to the Chagrin Valley Times, which detail the set-up of Spidalieri’s email account in March of 2025.

The records show the completion of the set-up, Antenucci clarified, confirming the actual account was created in 2013, after Spidalieri took office.

A license for Spidalieri was added when county emails were migrated to Microsoft several years ago, Antenucci said, adding it looks as if he never fully utilized the new account and the password was long expired.

Included in the records are work notes for the email’s setup on computer and phone.

“Updated computer since PC was not logged into or turned on for a very long time,” the March 18 notes read. “Roughly 2,900 unread emails.”