Mahoning County Democratic Party committee to select replacement for McNally, Gains

Mahoning County Democratic Party Chair, Chris Anderson will be holding a meeting Saturday morning at 8:00 to select replacements for former Youngstown Fifth Ward Councilwoman, Lauren McNally and former Mahoning County Prosecutor, Paul Gains.
The meeting will take place at Saint Luke's Roman Catholic Parish on South Avenue in Boardman. The need for replacement comes after McNally had won the race for 59th District State Representative in November and Gains had announced his retirement in November.
Currently, Gina DeGenova is serving as interim prosecutor following Paul Gains' retirement. She is currently running against Brad Gessner to permanently fill the role of county prosecutor.
The race for McNally's seat consists of seven candidates including Brandon Kovach, Carie Watson, Patrick Kelly, Terry Grenga, Paul Dahman, David Height and Richard Yaslik.
Two other candidates, Cynthia McWilson and Emmett Watson have dropped out of the race.
When asked about a potential resurgence of the Democratic Party locally, Anderson told 21 News he was very optimistic about the amount of local Democrats running and the performance of local Democrats this past election.
"I think people are excited about the changes within the local Democratic Party. I think they're starting to realize to an extent that they've been served a false bill of goods by the local Republican Party," Anderson said.
Anderson went on to say that local Democrats outraised local Republicans by 400%.
"If you're using that metric, it's tough to figure out how to spin that one in favor of the Republican Party," Anderson said.
DeGenova has recently been subject to a lawsuit with Mahoning County maintenance employee, Ricky Morrison suing her, all three county commissioners and county administrator Audrey Tillis accusing them of conducting a secret meeting to fire him due to his support of Geno DiFabio.
DeGenova denies knowing about this alleged meeting.