By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com
He’s been a familiar face around City Hall for nearly nine months now but Rob Ratliff can officially start digging deep into the inner workings of Bucyrus. Ratliff was sworn in as the Bucyrus City Law Director Tuesday afternoon after beating out John Andrew Motter for the seat in the November election.
“He is no stranger to any of us,” Mayor Roger Moore said during his introduction of Ratliff. “He’s been here since I think late February, March and it’s just a privilege to be working with him. I’m sure most of you if not all of you have the pleasure of working with him in some fashion and you’ll see maybe just a little bit of change from what we’ve had in the past. He’s very experienced and talented and we just welcome him to fill the unexpired term left by Matt Crall, who went on to be our county prosecutor.”
Ratliff’s term will last through Dec. 31, 2015 when he will have the opportunity to run again alongside the Council, auditor and mayor.
“I didn’t know all of these people were coming but I guess all the get-out-of-work-free emails went around,” Ratliff joked to the group assembled in the Council Chambers. “I’ve been here for a few months now and met all of you, had a chance to work with all of you, look forward to continuing that. There’s a lot of things I know with police, fire and Council that we’ve got on the agenda. I think now we kind of have a clear path to start getting some of those things done. I hope I can be the kind of attorney that’s not a roadblock that’s standing in the way, that can be helpful to the city and help us kind of achieve the things we want, get things done and move forward and make Bucyrus a better place.”
Ratliff plans on getting ready for some long-term planning, including police training, increasing forfeiture activity, and enforcing the Property Maintenance Code.
“Basically, day-to-day stuff in the city,” Ratliff said as he summed up his goals. “Really want work to make Bucyrus a place that businesses want to come to and grow and expand and make it a better place for all of us.”
Ratliff has a varied background that he believed will be beneficial to Bucyrus. He graduated from law school at the University of Cincinnati in 1997 and practiced criminal defense law in Cincinnati for four years before moving to Mobile, Alabama. He worked on sports projects there with his dad as well as various community and non-profit projects. He continued to focus on criminal defense and even worked a bit in immigration law.
“Over the years, as we did more and more things with the city and (I) got more and more interested in that area of the law, this opportunity came up and it was a perfect time for me to make the transition to get in to this area of law, which I was really enjoying, on a full-time basis,” explained Ratliff. With his son just starting first grade, Ratliff saw it as the perfect opportunity to move back to Ohio.
Ratliff agreed that his background really helped prepare him to take the position of Law Director. “I don’t think that any other stage of my career, you know doing this (the) first ten years or so, I would have been prepared for a position like this but, especially after we moved to Mobile in ‘01 and the more work we did with the city, the more work we did sports-related functions and creating events and creating municipal organizations—the local sports foundation that was something we started—I think it just goes perfectly with what this job requires.”