Mayor Justin Bibb told Cleveland City Council that he took “full responsibility” for the city’s loss of $3.3 million in grant money to fix lead-contaminated homes.
Bibb’s comments opened the first annual budget hearing of his second term Tuesday morning. The remarks touched on one major theme of this year’s budget discussion: rehabilitating Cleveland’s old housing stock and citing those who own blighted properties.
The mayor said he was throwing more prosecutors at the work of enforcing housing codes. If he could write a blank check for anything, he would make it out for home repairs, he said. But the city’s Community Development Department — which manages grants for lead paint abatement and fixing up homes — had tied too many strings to city money, he said.
“Sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Bibb said, answering a council member’s question about the lost lead grant. “And we’ve created too much red tape, too many bureaucratic hurdles to get this money out the door faster.”
Council members and Bibb were cordial as they went back and forth about the city’s $2.3 billion budget over nearly three-and-a-half-hours. The session with the mayor is typically council’s only opportunity each year to grill him publicly about how he runs City Hall.
Bibb talked up his plans to lure businesses to town and highlighted the new software he said would make City Hall more efficient. Members encouraged him to crack down on negligent landlords and stop motorists from speeding.
Michael Polensek, the Ward 10 member who has served on council since 1978, rattled through the list of quality-of-life complaints he heard from voters in his latest reelection campaign.
“No. 1 complaint I get into my office every day is housing code enforcement, or the lack of it,” he said. “The LLCs that are descending upon our neighborhoods, just buying up everything, coming in with cash, buying up homes. Police obviously, but lack of traffic enforcement — virtually no traffic enforcement in our neighborhoods.”
‘The buck stops with me’ on lead paint, Bibb says
Last week, city officials broke the news to council members that Cleveland had lost $3.3 million from a state and federal lead paint grant. City Hall didn’t spend the grant fast enough, leading the Ohio Department of Development to revoke the money.
Initially, the administration left the impression that state regulations had tripped up the city. But city officials later acknowledged that City Hall had tied its own hands. Bibb reiterated on Tuesday that the city had fumbled the grant.
“It seems as if we imposed our own too rigorous regulations and red tape about how we deploy that money,” the mayor said. “We have to, I think, think outside the box and really get clear about how we make the easy things easy for issues of consequence.”
Council Member Kevin Conwell of Ward 9, who chairs the health committee, said he was disappointed to see the city lose the money.
“We’ve been trying to get this thing right for years and years and years,” he said of Cleveland’s fight against childhood lead poisoning.
Ward 11 Council Member Nikki Hudson asked who would take charge of making sure City Hall used its remaining lead grant dollars wisely.
“The buck stops with me,” Bibb replied.
Cleveland previously named a “lead czar” to work with multiple city departments to protect children from lead paint. But that approach didn’t work, Bibb said. Now he is tasking his directors of development, public health and building and housing to streamline how the city spends lead grants, he said.
Council debates Bibb’s big bets
The mayor said he was making a few strategic but calculated bets to help Cleveland, a long shrinking city, start to grow again.
One bet: attracting new businesses to the city, particularly aerospace and defense, advanced manufacturing and food manufacturing. Another bet: speeding up city spending on home repair and building new dwellings, including affordable and workforce housing. The third effort he named as one of his bets: making Cleveland safer.
Although Cleveland is generally affordable, Bibb said many residents have “too much month and not enough money,” meaning they don’t bring in enough to keep up with the bills.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do is make Cleveland a more attractable place for companies and for good paying jobs,” he said.
Bibb’s focus on business led to a philosophical disagreement with Tanmay Shah, the new council member from Ward 12 who ran as a democratic socialist. Shah said he had reservations about focusing on corporations.
At the end of the day, we know they’re not coming here to make our residents’ lives better,” Shah said. “They’re coming here to make more money.”
Instead, the city should focus on neighborhood investments, such as helping residents access food, Shah said. Bibb replied that he welcomed a “long, thoughtful conversation” about the pros and cons of a free-market capitalist economy.
A majority of the city’s General Fund revenue — about 63% — comes from income tax collections, the mayor said. That means that big companies such as Sherwin-Williams, Cleveland Clinic and KeyBank are supporting the city through their withholdings, he continued.
“If we aren’t creating the conditions for good-quality job creation, that’s going to give us less money to fund the things that you and I both want to fund,” Bibb said.
Shah replied that the people who live in Cleveland, not the corporations, were the city’s economic engines.
Polensek criticized another of Bibb’s big bets, saying there was a perception in the neighborhood that developing the downtown lakefront had captured City Hall’s focus.
Bibb downplayed what he called the “ancient, old argument of downtown versus the neighborhoods,” saying a “vibrant downtown jobs base” contributes to City Hall’s bottom line.
Keeping an eye on city progress
Cleveland has been signing up with a slew of software platforms to make CIty Hall run faster, Bibb said. Those include Docusign for inking signatures electronically, the customer service system Salesforce and the artificial intelligence-powered human resources software Workday.
The Bibb administration is also drawing up key performance indicators — often known as KPIs — to track how city departments are carrying out their jobs, the mayor said. The city also plans surveys to collect opinions from employees, he said.
Bibb, who campaigned in 2021 on modernizing an old-fashioned City Hall, said there is much more to do to improve how city government works.
“In no way can we declare mission accomplished,” Bibb said. “This work is still a work in progress.”