Cleveland City Hall is pitching a revamp to the city’s lead safe laws to focus on ‘harm reduction, not perfection,’ as landlord compliance with the law stagnates.
The new legislation, introduced Oct. 12, would update the city’s lead safe laws passed in 2019.
Currently, the majority of rentals built before 1978 must pass an inspection for lead hazards, a process that many have re-do every two years. But city leaders estimate only about 30% of Cleveland’s rental stock has the proper certificate showing it passed an inspection.
“We still don’t have enough rentals in compliance,” said Rebecca Maurer, the city’s senior advisor for lead accountability, in a late-September meeting about the proposals.
Over the past seven years, she said, landlords who renewed their permits as required kept cycling through the system, taking up staff time. “And then we were leaving over 60% of our rentals untouched by the system.”
Maurer said the proposed legislation will allow the city to focus on high-risk properties and non-compliant landlords while rewarding owners who follow the law, an idea the city’s been kicking around since last February. Harm reduction –– a pragmatic public health strategy that seeks to minimize, not eliminate negative health impacts –– was one of the core values city officials considered while drafting the new legislation, according to a document the city shared with community members.
The amended legislation would incentivize landlords to replace windows and doors coated with lead paint, she said, which are the highest risk for creating lead dust. Unchanged is original law’s language on enforcement for landlords who ignore the law completely and never get their properties inspected for lead hazards.
Over the past several months, city officials gathered feedback on the proposal from landlords, city staff and an advisory board, lead safe workers and the grassroots group Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing. Members of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, a sprawling group made up of nonprofit employees, professors, landlords, lawyers, lead risk assessors and city staff, also voted on the proposed amendments. Results shared by the coalition showed 46 people voted, in favor of most of the city’s proposals.
Members of the coalition “expressed broad support for modernizing the law while preserving strong public health protections,” wrote Ayonna Blue-Donald, the chair of the coalition’s policy committee, in an email to Mayor Justin Bibb and Council President Blaine Griffin.
Longer renewal periods for lead safe certificates
Landlords who own rentals built before 1978 are currently required to renew their lead safe certificates with another lead risk assessment every two years.
The proposed law would lengthen that to every three years, instead.
Maurer said this mimics the direction other cities with high lead poisoning rates are taking. Rochester, which Cleveland has looked to as a model, requires renewal every three years in high-risk areas. Toledo requires a renewal every five years for properties that pass visual inspections and ones with wipes that test for the presence of lead dust. Philadelphia moved from every two to every four years in 2022.
The concern with moving to longer renewal periods is that properties with lead paint can deteriorate over time. A longer time period in between inspections means less supervision.
But Maurer said this concern will be buffered by the higher-standard of inspections the Bibb administration started to require in a 2024 executive order.
Landlords who replace windows, doors would be rewarded
City officials are also proposing longer renewal periods for landlords who take more significant steps to make their property lead safe.
That includes:
- A five-year renewal period for properties with windows replaced after 1980
- A ten-year renewal period for properties that pass a lead risk assessment, and receive a lead-safe certificate, three times consecutively
- A ten-year renewal period for properties that have had all windows, exterior doors, door frames and painted porch components replaced, stripped or enclosed
These properties are lower-risk, Maurer said. New windows are a boon because old wood windows are one of the main parts of the home that poison kids, Maurer said.
“The core of the idea is that if you make a significant improvement to your property, like the windows, you should be rewarded for that,” Maurer said.
Properties built between 1960 and 1978 will also get a longer renewal period of ten years under the proposed legislation. Post-1960 properties are less likely to have lead paint, Maurer said. As of February, the homes under Cleveland’s oversight for poisoning children with lead were all built before 1960, according to data the city shared.
About 91% of the Coalition agreed that the city should move toward a schedule like this one, which “rewards investments and risk grading.”
Abatement timeline to stay the same
The legislation Cleveland is proposing wouldn’t extend the renewal timeline for landlords who abate their properties. Abatement is a more intensive and expensive process because it requires eliminating or encapsulating lead hazards. The regular lead-safe certificates rely on tests to confirm that hazardous levels of dust aren’t present.
Currently, landlords who abate their properties can get a lead-safe certificate that lasts twenty years before they need to renew it. City officials considered stretching that to forty year or even lifetime — but decided against it.
At the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition meeting, Maurer spoke about why the city was torn on what to do. New York and New Jersey offer lifetime certificates after abatement, though only under certain conditions. But there’s some question around how much lead dust rebounds over time, based on what level of abatement is conducted, Maurer said.
“This is a tricky policy call. I don’t think there is a correct and clear correct answer. I think this is about what we as a city and as a group are comfortable with,” Maurer said.
The coalition was also divided. A little more than half asked the city to keep the twenty-year policy, while a quarter suggested moving to forty years and the rest requested a lifetime certificate.
“I would only support lifetime if all lead hazards have been completely removed,” one coalition member wrote.
The proposed legislation would create a new option for owners who can pass rigorous inspections to prove their properties are completely free of lead paint to be exempt from the lead-safe certificate requirement.
New local licenses required for inspectors
The new law also attempts to address fraudulent lead inspections, a challenge that’s popped up over the last seven years. In the September meeting with the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, the city’s Director of Public Health Dr. David Margolius said that there have been instances where lead risk assessors falsified reports. These assessors, who are privately employed, are currently licensed by the state of Ohio.
Under the amended law, lead risk assessors would also need to get a local license to operate in Cleveland and submit inspections required under the law. The city could revoke that license if they find fraud or other quality issues, Margolius said.
Board meant to monitor displacement by lead would be eliminated
The proposed legislation also makes a number of other changes to the city’s lead law — including to a board that the 2019 lead law authorized but never fully got off the ground.
The Lead Safe Housing Action Board was supposed to support residents displaced by lead issues. That could include tenants who are ordered to vacate their home because of a lead hazard within it or who need a place to stay while their landlord attempts to make their home lead safe. But the board never met regularly.
The amended legislation would eliminate that board entirely. Instead, it would assign the responsibility of evaluating the availability and success of programs to help relocate people displaced by lead to a different city board. That’s called the Lead Safe Advisory Board, which does meet regularly.
The proposed legislation also gives the city’s lead auditor — a third party meant to evaluate the success and quality of the program — the ability to report on whether any tenants have been systematically displaced due to the lead safe certification requirements.
The updated law would also add local legal protections for tenants who report concerns about lead hazards or that their property lacks a lead safe certificate. The proposed legislation would make it illegal for landlords to retaliate by shutting off their tenants’ utilities or threatening to end their lease. The city and state of Ohio have existing laws to protect tenants against landlord retaliation, but Maurer said that the new law would “formally” add advocacy around lead to the list of actions protected against retaliation.
