It’s been two months since the city introduced new air pollution regulations to Cleveland City Council. 

The existing rules have been in place since 1977 – and allow the city’s public health department another avenue to address Cleveland’s high rates of asthma.

But the new legislation has yet to be heard in committee, a first step in getting it passed.

Instead, city officials are in the midst of discussions with Cleveland-Cliffs, a major steel manufacturer and employer. In April, the company asked the city to consider making some of the proposed rules less stringent. 

Dr. David Margolius, the city’s Director of Public Health, said his department is currently taking feedback and seeking “areas of compromise” with Cleveland-Cliffs.   

“We haven’t made any official decisions on, like, which areas we won’t be able to compromise and which we will,” Margolius said.

The city also heard from another manufacturer, Alcon Industries, opposing the new regulations. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District also asked for changes. 

The back-and-forth has added uncertainty to when the next step for the legislation – a hearing in council’s health committee – will occur. Margolius said it’s the council’s decision on how to proceed. 

“At this point, you know, it’s just, kind of, a collaborative effort with City Council leadership of when they feel like we’re close enough to a piece of legislation that’s incorporated the right amount of feedback to be heard in committee,” Margolius said. 

Joan Mazzolini, chief of communications at Cleveland City Council, said the legislation will not move forward until the Department of Public Health is finished making amendments to the bill. 

New regulations address even small amounts of air pollution, which Cleveland-Cliffs wants changed

Since at least 2016, Cleveland’s Division of Air Quality has wanted to update the codes that determine the amount of air pollution that can be released by facilities like asphalt plants or steel mills.    

The proposed update is meant to specifically address neighborhood concerns around air quality, including Cleveland’s high asthma rates and the cumulative impact of new air pollution sources, wrote David Hearne, the city’s Commissioner of Air Quality, in an email to Signal Cleveland. 

Cumulative impact is the combined effect of multiple sources of pollution instead of a focus on one at a time. The new code would require facilities located in neighborhoods with already-dirty air and economic and health disadvantages to undertake a more extensive permitting process when adding new pollution – like estimating the potential emissions that would come from vehicle traffic at the facility. In certain instances, the company would have to assess the health impacts of the new pollution source before the city determines whether to allow it. 

Environmental justice advocates in Cleveland support the increased scrutiny for new pollution sources, saying it’s a way to address pollution historically borne by poor and minority communities. White-majority communities have the lowest burdens of exposure to air pollution in Cuyahoga County, according to Cleveland’s Fair Housing Center for Rights & Research.

“These things have accumulated over time, and they have caused us to have harm done to those communities,” said Yvonka Hall, the leader of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition and member of an advocacy group called the Cleveland Air Quality Coalition. “And for us, this is an opportunity for Cleveland to actually do something about it.”

But for companies looking to emit new air pollutants – or change the amount they’re currently emitting – the new rules could mean more work. Cleveland-Cliffs is asking that the city rules mirror Ohio law and exempt “insignificant air emission sources” from the new code, according to an email obtained via public records request. Ohio law currently doesn’t require sources that only pollute a little bit – typically less than ten pounds a day – to get an air permit.  

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs is asking the city to focus the stricter parts of the proposed permitting process on pollution sources that result in a “significant increase in emissions,” an amount set by the state. 

“We appreciate the goal to pass an ordinance that advances Cleveland as a leader in environmental health, while continuing to promote investment and economic development, and we believe these amendments are necessary to support the City’s goal,” the company’s director of State and Local Government Relations, Anna Ediger, wrote in an email to Council President Blaine Griffin. The email was also addressed to Council Member Kevin Conwell, the chair of the health committee.

The request to change the permitting process to only focus on larger pollution sources is an area that’s “harder to find compromise around,” Margolius said. Some of the company’s other requests around clarity of the regulations – such as adding a specific timeframe for permitting processes – may be easier to address, Margolius added. 

Cleveland-Cliffs’ request to exempt small pollution sources is not in line with the new regulations’ goals, said Kendall McPherson, a fellow in the Environmental Law Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and part of the Cleveland Air Quality Coalition. She said the regulations are meant to take into account the impact of all emissions sources together, including small ones – also called ‘de minimis emissions.’

Many small sources of emissions “all combined have a great effect,” McPherson said. “So to eliminate the regulation of the de minimis emissions, we feel kind of defeats the purpose.”  

Cleveland-Cliffs did not respond to Signal Cleveland’s request for comment.

Future of air pollution regulations currently unclear

Public records show Cleveland-Cliffs first reached out by email to Council President Blaine Griffin in mid-April, about a month after the regulations were introduced to the City Council.  

Griffin forwarded the email to Mayor Justin Bibb’s chief of staff in late April, saying, “Hello Administration. Can we discuss these concerns before we move this legislation forward?” 

The email was forwarded to Margolius, who wrote to two employees on the air quality team that he was working on setting up a meeting with Cliffs.

Margolius told Signal Cleveland that the legislation was supposed to receive a hearing in the health committee on May 5, but the meeting was canceled. 

“We were ready to go to committee. And then now we’re not scheduled for committee,” Margolius said. 

Mazzolini said committee meetings were never scheduled on May 5 due to the election on May 6. She added that it is not unusual to have to work out technicalities of legislation, especially large ones like the air quality code, which is about 100 pages long. 

Conwell said Griffin told him the administration was in the midst of discussions with Cleveland-Cliffs. 

“He said, ‘Kev, hold back on it for a minute,’” Conwell said. “We’ve got to still work out some things with the air quality. And I just told him, ‘OK.’ And I kept moving.”

Conwell hasn’t been involved in discussions with Cliffs about edits to the legislation, he said. 

When contacted for comment, Griffin said he was out of town and directed Signal to the City Council’s communications office.

Other groups have concerns about newly-proposed regulations, too 

A public records request asking for feedback the city received on a draft of its new air pollution regulations unearthed concerns from several other organizations that emit pollutants.   

The sewer district is a government entity, funded by residents who pay for the district to clean and treat the community’s sewage and stormwater. The organization monitors air pollution at several of its facilities, including an incinerator that burns sludge and diesel generators used when the power goes out.

In a letter to the city’s chief of Air Pollution Outreach, the sewer district said it supported the effort to address environmental stressors but had concerns about the cost of implementing the regulations, such as undertaking a health impact assessment.

“The cost of these requirements for public utilities like NEORSD will be borne by ratepayers, including the residents of the most vulnerable areas of the city,” the letter said. 

The district asked whether the code could exempt projects with a “demonstrated public need” from certain requirements, such as parts of the health impact assessment. 

And in a comment on the city’s public feedback form for the regulations, the president of steel manufacturer Alcon Industries wrote that, in general, he didn’t support the changes.

“Alcon Industries support(s) Cleveland Air Quality initiatives but does not want to be targeted, nor bear unfair or unreasonable burdens,” wrote Gary Wilson, the company’s president. 

But one local advocacy group – the Cleveland Air Quality Coalition – asked the administration to make the rules stricter. A major request the group has is to add language that will trigger the Cleveland Department of Air Quality to deny requests for air emission permits in certain areas that are already heavily burdened with pollution. 

“We need them to amend the current draft that they have to protect the people who are in the most polluted areas of Cleveland,” Hall said. 

Currently, the proposed code says that the city’s air quality division “may” deny a permit if it’s determined that pollution from a new facility would disproportionately impact overburdened communities.  

In January and February, the department held several public meetings, including one online, to gather public feedback on the proposed air code.

“Essentially what they saw from community residents is folks were in favor of more, stricter regulation for companies who are polluting, along with the health impact assessment and other features of the air code,” Margolius said.