A shakeup is coming to Cleveland’s multimillion-dollar fight against lead paint.
In an executive order this week, Mayor Justin Bibb argued that the city’s five-year-old effort to clear household lead hazards was ineffective. The order came as a surprise to people who have worked for years to help City Hall carry out its battle against lead.
Now the mayor is reaching for a more expensive and difficult goal: lead abatement.
The term “abatement” means the full removal or permanent containment of lead in a house. That could entail replacing walls, baseboards, windows, doors – any surface coated with lead-based paint before the substance was banned in 1978.
Chipped and peeling lead-based paint that was applied to homes decades ago still poses a risk to children. Cleveland, with its old housing stock, has one of the highest lead poisoning rates in the country.
Cleveland’s “lead safe” law slow to take hold
It’s the city’s responsibility to inspect homes where kids have been poisoned and make landlords fix any lead problems. For the last five years, the city and nonprofit partners have been trying to prevent poisonings by setting up a certificate system for landlords. They’ve also been providing grants and loans to help landlords make repairs.
The system has emphasized making rental properties “lead safe,” a lower but more attainable standard of protection. A 2019 city law requires landlords to obtain certificates that their rental properties are safe from lead paint. Often, that means that rentals must pass a lead clearance examination performed with wipes that test for the presence of lead dust.
The city has faced an uphill climb in enforcing the current law. By the end of last year, Cleveland had certified almost 31,000 rental units as lead safe. That’s estimated to be about a third of the total number of rentals in the city. The rate of new applications has slowed, prompting the program’s independent audit to warn that City Hall was falling short.
Cleveland’s high lead poisoning rate ticked up last year
Then came news last week that Cleveland’s lead poisoning rate ticked up in 2023. The city’s health department found lead poisoning cases in 11 units that had been certified as lead safe, officials said.
“If we’re not moving the needle on lead poisoning, we have to reexamine the program,” Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole said in an interview. “That’s what’s being done here.”
City officials told Signal Cleveland this week that they now plan to require more intensive lead examinations known as risk assessments. If assessors find lead risks in rentals, they’ll give landlords a plan to remediate the problem and City Hall can hold property owners to it.
Even so, Emily Collins, the mayor’s point person for lead paint work, said the city won’t be insisting that every property be fully abated.
“What we’re doing is trying to get people on a pathway to abatement,” she said. “We’re trying to use the lead safe certificate process to get us much closer to replacing windows and doors, to replacing a lot of the things that are causing the poisonings.”
How Cleveland’s new order will work unclear
The news left lead-safe advocates wondering what becomes of the system that they and City Hall have spent five years setting up. The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition has raised $93 million in public and philanthropic commitments, although not all that cash is in hand. It has started building up a workforce of contractors and clearance testers.
Ayonna Blue Donald, a member of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s executive committee, said she is open to the conversation with the city about adjusting the lead program. Donald served as the city’s building and housing director during the early rollout of the lead law.
“We weren’t aware that the city was going to make this announcement and/or sign the executive order,” she said in an interview. “So what does that mean exactly? What it means is we’re evaluating that now.”
The full implications of the order for the coalition weren’t totally clear. Much of the coalition’s dollars are donations outside the city’s purview.
“I think it probably changes the repairs that we do, hypothetically,” Donald said. “All those conversations kind of still need to be hashed out.”
Marie Zickefoose, the mayor’s press secretary, told Signal Cleveland in an email that city staff had shared concerns about the current program with the coalition.
“Mayor Bibb was deeply alarmed by the news that 11 children were poisoned after their homes were deemed lead safe, and felt this demanded coordinated and immediate action to protect children,” she wrote.
City Hall is also making another significant change in its approach to lead. It is parting ways with Case Western Reserve University, which served as the auditor of the city’s lead program. The Bibb administration is now seeking a public accounting and consulting firm for that role.
Will move stall ‘barely sputtering engine’ powering lead effort?
Over the last few years, the lead program has been built up into what Council Member Rebecca Maurer described as a “barely sputtering engine.” The coalition paid for a resource center to build up a workforce of contractors and risk assessors while the city rolled out the lead law gradually.
“The question is whether a big, sweeping, grand change is going to be the kick start to get this engine moving,” Maurer said, “or rather it makes the engine die completely.”
Reflection on what has and hasn’t worked in the lead program is called for, said Yvonka Hall, the director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. The city should use both clearance tests and risk assessments depending on the needs of individual properties, she said.
But Hall said she didn’t want the mayor’s order to become an occasion to slow down.
“We can’t start all over from scratch,” she said.
