A paperwork logjam is preventing the City of Cleveland’s small team of code inspectors focused on lead hazards from doing its main job: helping smaller landlords make their rentals safe from chipping or peeling toxic paint.
Two inspectors and other staff are reviewing 1,200 applications from landlords seeking lead-safe certificates from the city. It could be six months before the inspectors, who are also lead risk assessors, get out into the field to work with landlords.
Officials from Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration acknowledged the delay during a Cleveland City Council budget hearing Tuesday.
The admission is another sign of the difficulty that City Hall has faced in enforcing a 2019 law aimed at protecting children from lead poisoning. Under that law, landlords must hire private lead inspectors before seeking a lead-safe certification.
The city’s in-house lead team does not replace those third-party inspectors. Instead, the two city code inspectors are meant to aid smaller landlords who “have a farther way to go to get to lead-safe compliance,” as Building and Housing Department Director Sally Martin O’Toole put it in a council meeting last year. The group is focused on the owners of rentals with one to three units.
Ward 12 Council Member Rebecca Maurer said the city’s approach to lead was “not yet working.” Cleveland’s lead paint unit needs more staff, she told officials during Tuesday’s hearing.
“I believe that you need to be out conducting inspections sooner than six months,” Maurer said. “That is not an acceptable answer to me.”
Martin O’Toole agreed with Maurer that six months was too long to wait for the unit to hit the street. The department is trying to fill two vacancies for its lead paint work, she said.
Karen Dettmer, who manages lead-safe initiatives for the Building and Housing Department, chalked the backlog up to several factors. The city’s “Residents First” overhaul of housing codes and the mayor’s executive order on lead paint led to a surge in applications for certificates, she said. Last summer’s cyberattack also led to delays.
Cleveland has been lagging behind its goals in certifying thousands of rental properties as safe from lead paint.
Last October, Bibb signed an executive order upending the city’s efforts against lead. The order effectively raised the inspection standard for landlords seeking lead-safe certificates. The administration argued that the old standards were not moving the needle in cutting the city’s lead poisoning rates.
One critic of the mayor’s approach, Ward 13 Council Member Kris Harsh, said last week that the new standard was too expensive and would discourage landlords from participating. In December, Maurer said the city seemed unprepared for the sudden change in course.
How to pay for more Building and Housing staff
Cleveland’s Building and Housing Department is already adding code enforcement jobs as it works to fill vacant positions.
Harsh pushed for City Hall to put $1 million more toward housing code enforcement. The city could do so by transferring around 15 workers who are paid through the Department of Community Development into the Department of Building and Housing, he said.
Those workers help property owners with maintenance and repair issues. They’re employed by nonprofit community development corporations, but the city reimburses the nonprofits for the cost.
Harsh said that transferring these workers could assist the city in tackling the “absolute crisis” of lead poisoning.
“As everyone in Cleveland is acutely aware, we have the solution to this problem in our hands. We just aren’t delivering it,” he said. “I believe, Mr. Chair, that code enforcement is our No. 1 method to get that solution to the people that need help with those properties.”
Maurer agreed that Building and Housing needs more staff but argued that Harsh’s solution wasn’t realistic. O’Toole said the administration couldn’t simply transfer the workers. Instead, the city would need to post the jobs and go through the hiring process
Council President Blaine Griffin asked Harsh, Maurer and Martin O’Toole to talk more about the idea among themselves. Council would entertain funding changes for the department as part of the budget reconciliation process, he said.
Spencer Wells, a co-founder of the community anti-lead group Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing, attended Tuesday’s hearing to listen to the discussion. In his view, the mayor made a good move by emphasizing a higher standard of lead safety.
But it will still take some time for City Hall to reorient its fight against lead paint, he said.
“You can’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘We’re going to do it differently,’” he said. “There needs to be some phasing.”
