After Cleveland lost $3.3 million in state grant money for lead paint removal, city officials Monday pointed to onerous spending rules.
In particular, the program limited the city to spending just $15,000 per house, officials in Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration testified before Cleveland City Council’s health committee. That wasn’t enough to replace lead contaminated windows and doors inside many Cleveland homes.
But the Ohio Department of Development said Cleveland — and not the state — set that $15,000 funding limit.
“The Lead Safe Ohio program has a cap of up to $50,000 per unit,” state development department spokesperson Mason Waldvogel wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland. “However, the City of Cleveland imposed its own cap of $15,000 per unit.”
Rebecca Maurer, a former City Council member, flagged the discrepancy between the two numbers in an email to her former colleagues this week. She shared the email with Signal Cleveland.
A spending limit of $50,000 “is usually sufficient to cover all the needed repairs,” Maurer wrote.
Cleveland’s self-imposed spending restrictions
On Thursday, the city was unable to say definitively why the city limited itself to $15,000. Tom McNair, Cleveland’s chief of integrated development, told reporters he was “trying to better understand and get as much information as humanly possible” about the figure.
“What I do know is that the scope was altered, was limited, and that was a choice by the City of Cleveland,” he said. “And that was, in a way, dictating how the dollars were spent and how much was spent on each home.”
Cleveland restricted its own spending in another way, too. The city limited the dollars to window and door replacements, even though the money could have gone to other work, McNair said.
McNair said that prior leadership in Cleveland’s Community Development Department made those calls. The shaky standing of the grant program only reached his desk at the end of last year, he said.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of transition in that department over the last several months,” he said. “None of the folks that were here in the creation of that grant program are currently here…You’ve got folks that are coming in doing their best to get up to speed on all of this stuff as quickly as humanly possible while also doing the work.”
Cleveland’s contract with the vendor administering the program, CHN Housing Partners, lists the cap as $50,000. Maurer shared the contract with Signal Cleveland.
Alyssa Hernandez, the city’s former community development director, told Signal Cleveland that she did not recall the size of the spending cap. She said the city had been trying to find a use for the dollars that didn’t overlap with other repair programs.
“This was an effort to make it manageable and to focus where other home repair offerings did not focus on at the time,” she said.
Now the state has allowed the city to broaden the scope of its spending, McNair said. Cleveland is retaining $1.6 million from the grant with the aim of repairing around 63 homes in addition to the 26 already fixed up, he said.
Testimony from Bibb administration officials on Monday left the impression that the state had restricted Cleveland’s spending. The limits meant that CHN Housing Partners needed to find other sources of money to supplement the work — sources that came with their own rules.
“When the state, say, creates a program like this, they are looking at it very broadly to impact as many areas in the state of Ohio as it possibly can,” McNair told City Council on Monday.
He continued: “But I do think that a part of it was that some of those regulations make it more challenging in a place like this, where the need is so great, where, again, you can’t both say you must get lead clearance for this home, you can only spend $15,000, you can only do it on windows and doors.”
‘Who is captain of the ship’?
The city sought out the $4.9 million Lead Safe Ohio grant about two years ago. The money ultimately came from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. Earlier this month, the state said it would take back $3.3 million that the city hadn’t spent yet, city officials said.
Cleveland’s Community Development Department has seen a recent exodus of leadership. Hernandez left City Hall in November. The former deputy director took a new job with Cuyahoga County last summer.
McNair said that 176 people applied for Hernandez’s job and that the city is in the “final stages” of interviewing candidates.
Maurer referenced the turnover in the department in her email to council members.
“I was struck by the lack of clarity on ‘Who Is Captain of The Ship,’” she wrote, adding, “Who is planning how we will spend the dollars we do have to fix up homes in Cleveland?”