Cleveland’s budget negotiations reached a crescendo earlier this week with a skirmish between City Council and Mayor Justin Bibb over $4.6 million in discretionary ward spending.
Over Bibb’s opposition, council took a sip out of the $61 million pool of unspent money from last year’s budget. The move gives council members a total of $10.2 million to spend on local projects in their wards – or $600,000 each.
This is the second helping of money that council has ladled recently into a fund it created for neighborhood projects. Council previously set aside $10.2 million out of cash left over at the end of 2023.
There’s plenty of that first round of money left to spend. As of Jan. 31 of this year, council had slated $4.1 million for projects, according to a spreadsheet that the legislative body shared with Signal Cleveland.
Here are a few examples of council ward projects, according to spending records.
Ward 17’s Charles Slife spent $660,000 helping to give Impett Park a full makeover, complete with a new playground and zipline. Ward 5 Council Member Richard Starr slated $377,850 for repairs and upgrades to Dwayne Browder Field, a neighborhood football field on Outhwaite Avenue.
Deborah Gray dedicated $425,000 for building a community pavilion at Luke Easter Park in her Ward 4. Brian Kazy of Ward 16 spent $50,000 on equipment at the First District police fitness room.
Several council members went in together on $172,500 in food assistance for residents. That money paid for almost 5,200 grocery store gift cards, 720 turkeys and 670 hams through Famicos Foundation.
As with council’s share of casino tax revenue, discretionary projects still must go through City Hall’s contracting and reimbursement process.
There is still roughly $6 million unbudgeted from the first round of neighborhood funds. In his statement opposing another round of ward funding, Bibb knocked council for letting millions of dollars “sit idle.”
Council members say it’s not so simple. Jasmin Santana of Ward 14 has allocated only $15,000 of her first $600,000 — but that’s because she’s saving up to overhaul Storer Avenue, she said.
“I haven’t spent my money because 600 wasn’t enough,” she told reporters this week.
But $1.2 million, the rough total she’ll have once the budget passes, would get the project moving, she said.
Finding loose change in the Cleveland budget
Council also tried to take a scalpel to Bibb’s office as it searched for savings during budget negotiations.
Council proposed cutting four vacant “special assistant to the mayor” jobs, according to budget reconciliation records released this week. The reduction would have saved an estimated $508,000.
The administration said no. Council didn’t force the issue when it amended the budget Monday.
Special assistants do any number of jobs for the mayor, from communications to coordinating City Hall’s initiative against homelessness, for instance. This budget bumps the number of special assistant positions from 16 to 19.
At $4 million, the mayor’s office is a sliver of the overall $810 million General Fund. But spending in Bibb’s office has grown over the last few years. On average, mayor’s office staffers also are paid more than council staff. Those two facts didn’t sit well with council during budget hearings.
Council also proposed nixing 16 other empty jobs throughout city government described as “long-vacant or duplicative.” The jobs included a plumber, a traffic sign technician, a buyer of city supplies and a smattering of other roles, according to a list compiled by Ward 12 Council Member Rebecca Maurer. That idea, which would have saved an estimated $1.4 million, didn’t make the final budget deal.
Finance Director Paul Barrett acknowledged that those jobs had been vacant for a while.
“But it doesn’t mean we don’t want to fill them,” he told Signal Cleveland.
An earlier version of this story misspelled Dwayne Browder Field.
