The City of Cleveland spent May racing to line up homes to fix in the Glenville neighborhood before an $11.1 million federal grant to get rid of lead hazards expired at the end of the month.
It worked. Earlier this year, it looked doubtful that the city would make as many homes lead safe as the grant money allowed. That risked a broken promise and lost dollars for Glenville residents, whose children face some of the highest rates of lead poisoning in town. Lead can cause irreversible delays and behavior issues in young kids.
But the city now says it could meet the goal of fixing up 148 homes with the grant money it started spending in 2020 – or at least get close.
By the end of May, 67 homes were complete and 81 more are under contract, meaning the city can spend grant dollars for construction on them over the next six months, according to Rebecca Maurer, the mayor’s senior advisor for lead accountability. If all those homes are completed, it will add up to 148 homes.
That’s a massive ramp up from where the city sat at the beginning of May, when about half that many homes were at a similar stage in the process.
“We’re unbelievably proud of the work of the team at community development and our partners to get to 100% or near 100%” of the federal government’s goals, Maurer said.
Earlier this month, Maurer published a report that detailed the city’s shortcomings when it came to spending money to improve lead safety in homes. Her report followed news in February that the city lost $3.3 million in state funding to remove lead paint. Losing federal lead grants is a long-running Cleveland legacy: The federal government either reclaimed unspent grants or refused to renew funding for lead abatement under former mayors Frank Jackson and Michael White.
The city seems determined to fix that. In her report, Maurer called out the bureaucracy slogging down progress on the grant — ineffective technology, strict eligibility rules and hundreds of calls for help that went unanswered. Those challenges were compounded by a lengthy process to move homes from application to construction. The program requires eligibility evaluations, lead risk assessments and environmental reviews.
Since then, Maurer said the city put in new deadlines for each of those steps — for example, a lead risk assessment should take no more than eight days, while an environmental review and approval should take no more than 14. Over the last several months, city staff raced to speed up each step.
“Permitting, I think we got down to something like 48 hours,” Maurer said. “And every single step, there were folks … who just said like, ‘We are going to do this faster and better than we’ve done it before.’”
It’s not yet clear how much of the grant the city spent
The city isn’t completely out of the woods yet.
It accomplished the goal of moving enough homes into the construction pipeline so that it can spend the grant money. But the city only has 120 days, or about six months, to do construction on the 81 homes that haven’t been completed. Maurer said it’s possible that some homes will drop out over the next several months, leaving some of the money unpent. That could happen if contractors can’t complete the work in time.
The city won’t know how much money it used until after construction is complete.
The latest figures — updated as of mid-March — show the city spent about $3.7 million in total.
The city doesn’t expect to know how much has been spent until after the 120-day period is complete.
City braces for another lead safe spending push
Two more federal grants will also expire in the next several months.
A $5.7 million grant that can make homes safe from lead paint citywide faces a deadline in early fall. As of last December, about 35% of it had been spent.
Another $2 million grant to improve housing conditions, including lead, expires at the end of October. About 45% of it had been spent by the end of last year.
Maurer said staff began meeting June 1 — immediately after the Glenville grant closed in May — to make a game plan for the next two grants.
“That is absolutely on everybody’s mind,” Maurer said.
