Cheers to the Butler County Bar Association and its member attorneys for backing a key function of our court system: the county Victim Outreach Intervention Center.

The center will continue to represent victims in Butler County Court despite losing $200,000 in state funding. The organization offers confidential services to all victims of crime. Domestic violence cases and violent crime in general constitute the bulk of its work.

VOICe director Heidi Artman said the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence has given the organization $50,000 — a 3-month extension of funding — which will keep VOICe's legal services funded through September.

That money releases a $35,500 pledge from the bar association.

Janis Hackett, the bar association's executive director, said the pledge was approved June 10, contingent on VOICe receiving “sufficient funding” from other sources for legal staffing of its protection from abuse services.

VOICe spends about $90,000 per year paying two attorneys to work with protection from abuse petitioners. The rest of the coalition grant money was used to pay for paralegal, administrative and court costs.

The bar association says 385 protection from abuse petitions were filled out at the county courthouse in 2014. VOICe represented 315 of the petitioners.

Without VOICe's services, “it would just wreak havoc on the court system,” said Bar association President Elizabeth Smith.

A series of mistakes — not a criminal conspiracy — led to the destruction of 24,000 emails related to the Internal Revenue Service tea party scandal, the IRS' inspector general told a congressional committee last week.J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, says his investigation “did not uncover evidence that the erasure was done in furtherance of an effort to destroy evidence or conceal information from Congress and/or law enforcement.”Apparently George can't let the facts speak for themselves because the facts say something else:• A previous IG audit, conducted in May 2013, showed former IRS official Lois Lerner improperly singled out tea party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.• Last year, the IRS belatedly informed Congress that it didn't have all of Lerner's email messages because she'd suffered a computer hard drive crash.• Eventually it was disclosed that IRS workers erased 422 computer backup tapes that “most likely” contained as many as 24,000 emails to and from Lerner. The workers erased the tapes a month after Lerner's hard drive crash.• George says the workers were unaware of a year-old directive not to destroy email backup tapes.• The IRS has produced 78,000 Lerner emails — it says no more could be recovered. But the IRS never examined the backup tapes to see if the erased emails could be recovered, George testified Thursday.The IG now says the facts amount to an unlikely series of innocent mistakes committed by a misinformed, bumbling staff of IRS agents and their leader, Lois Lerner.That's not exactly the detail oriented, relentless and feared tax agency we thought we knew.

Cheers and a cry of “play ball!” for Jay Fennel and a group of volunteers who restored the three youth baseball fields behind Penn Christian Academy in Penn Township. They got the job done in a week.Fennell has operated the Nothing But Baseball Camp every summer for 13 years on his own property, where he had constructed infield, outfield and bullpen practice areas. He sold that property last year, and a tentative deal to use another park fell through just days before his camp was to open.“I have two sons who go to Penn Christian and I knew of those fields behind the school,” Fennell said. “Cindy Dodds, who is in charge of the school, told me if I was willing to refurbish the fields, I could use them.”The fields had gone to weeds over the past three years since the Penn Township Baseball Association ceased operation. High grass and weeds had overtaken them.So Fennell and his band of volunteers went to work. They brought in mowers, tractors, weed whackers, rakes, and wheelbarrows full of fresh soil. They spent 120 man hours over a seven-day period to get the job done.Why did they do it? Baseball players know why; for them it's a labor of love.“I played on these fields when I was a kid,” said Tim Nicolazzo, one of the volunteers. “This is giving me goose bumps, watching this.”Butler graduate Bobby Swartwout, one of 15 current high school or collegiate athletes working the camp, added: “Seeing these kids out here enjoying baseball, learning the game, me having a chance to give back, the hard work was all worth it. Now kids have three fields to play baseball on they didn't have before.”The camp went on as scheduled and featured 90 kids — Nicolazzo's and Fennell's included.