Mayor Justin Bibb pledged urgency in fixing Cleveland’s lead poisoning crisis, one of the worst in the country. But a new report shows his administration has been slowed by its own bureaucracy — including ineffective technology, strict eligibility rules and 787 calls for help that went unanswered.
The report released today details how the city struggled to use federal and state dollars to fix homes to keep kids safe from lead exposure, which can cause irreversible delays and behavior issues. It comes as the city approaches yet another deadline to spend a multi-million-dollar federal grant by the end of May.
“We have two enemies in this business: lead and bureaucracy,” wrote Rebecca Maurer, who was hired in mid-March as Bibb’s senior advisor for lead accountability.
A third challenge she pointed out was waning trust amongst city residents. In one stark example, the city rejected a grandfather’s application for help because his grandkids could no longer visit his home – a rule he was required to follow because a child had been poisoned there.
Bibb brought Maurer on board after Cleveland lost a $3.3 million state lead paint grant in February for spending it too slowly. She’s a former city council member and advocate who pushed to require city landlords to certify homes as lead safe.
After 30 days on the job, Maurer turned over a report to Bibb on some of the biggest issues she identified and potential ways to fix them:
- Applications for lead safe grants were tracked with cumbersome and changing software systems and spreadsheets, leading many to fall through the cracks.
- A phone number the city advertised for the federal lead programs did not have a staff member manning it, causing more than 700 voicemails to go unanswered over a span of nearly two years.
- Despite work to speed up spending, the city is still in a mad dash to move dozens of homes through a federal grant program by the end of this month. If it fails, the city could lose millions more dollars.
- Millions in federal COVID recovery funding committed to lead-related projects went unspent or were redirected to park improvements.
“This role of senior advisor for lead accountability, it’s named that way for a reason that the mayor takes seriously and I take seriously,” Maurer told Signal Cleveland in an interview. “…We need to be transparent and clear about what we’ve done well and where we failed.”
The report recommends ways to improve how the city spends money on lead safe housing and gains trust with residents. One request the city has already taken action on is to hire a lead safe ombudsman – a point person that residents, landlords and contractors can go to with concerns or frustrations about the city’s processes and programs. The city posted the job in late April.
Maurer said as federal grant programs wind down, she will be looking to develop new lead safe pilot programs that move money out the door quicker. Those could potentially rely on more flexible city dollars.
Unanswered: 787 calls to lead line
The city advertised a phone line for people to call about lead grants. For 20 months, nobody checked the voicemail as 787 messages accumulated.
In her review, Maurer discovered that no staff member had formal ownership of the number.
While staff members sometimes picked up the phone, no one was checking the voicemail – despite the message saying that residents would get a call back the next business day.
No staff members had the voicemail passcode, so staff had to use IT help to review the voicemails, which went back to July 2024.
They heard from parents, landlords and health care providers interested in the program. Others were looking for help with home repairs unrelated to lead or help getting the lead safe certificate that landlords need from the city. (A Signal Cleveland reporter calling to report on the program was among the voicemails, Maurer confirmed.)
“It was devastating,” Maurer wrote. “… Lead is already a deep matter of trust in this city. People already feel left out and left behind. And we had just made that broken trust 787 times worse.”
Once discovered, Maurer went to Bibb immediately and asked for help returning all the calls – prioritizing ones that mentioned a child who was poisoned.
The goal was to get people help and to apologize.
“I made many of the callbacks myself,” Maurer said. “I expected folks to be really frustrated, and what I found was that people were really grateful for the call back because they had been calling many places. And there was just so much confusion, they were just grateful to have somebody talk them through it.”
The phone number is now assigned to one staff member, who is responsible for checking the voicemail, Maurer said.
Technological challenges slowed grant spending
The city struggled to track progress on the homes it was trying to make lead safe with grant money, the report found. That led to confusion and slowed down residents moving through the program, many of whom were directed there after a child in their home tested positive for high levels of lead.
“It is a recipe for losing people. It is a recipe for folks falling through the cracks. And truthfully, that’s what happened,” Maurer said. “We absolutely had folks who, you know, we thought were being tracked here and instead they weren’t.”
One of the grants saw just 40 homes get fixed up in approximately six years, about a quarter of what the federal government estimated was possible with the money.
Though staff members were dedicated and passionate, the tracking process was tripped up by technological challenges, Maurer wrote. The federal lead grants involve many steps, some of which are required by federal funding – an application, an initial lead inspection to identify hazards, the creation of construction specifications, an environmental review, hiring a contractor and an inspection of the property after the work is complete.
Almost all of those steps, Maurer said, require a different staff member. Yet the software program where each of those steps could be tracked did not work well, leading staff members to create their own separate spreadsheets. That made tracking cases difficult and cumbersome.
Maurer wrote that putting a tracking system in place is necessary.
City is speeding towards federal deadline after revamping spending processes
Maurer said other changes made to speed up how fast the city spends federal money are finally clicking into place. In the last month, the city completed work on 19 housing units for one of its federal grants, more than it completed in the entire year prior.
“I really want to congratulate the staff because this is more work in the last couple of months than has happened in the last six years of this program,” Maurer said. “Everyone agrees it was not acceptable to have this long of a delay for us to get a working system.”
The city updated its processes starting last spring, after nearly losing an $11.1 million grant that helped improve lead hazards in the Glenville neighborhood, which historically has had some of the highest lead poisoning rates in the city. The federal government gave the city one more year to spend the money.
Here’s how it sped up spending:
- Cleveland hired a contractor who could manage construction in bulk.
- It slimmed down the number of steps necessary to move a person from application to construction.
- It added deadlines to the remaining steps – for example, the environmental review shouldn’t take more than seven days.
- It removed red tape the city had added on top of federal rules, like lower income qualifications for renters and a higher number of hours a kid under six stayed in the home.
The city is now facing another federal deadline at the end of the month – and it still has millions left to spend on the Glenville grant. By May 29, all homes that will be paid for by the grant must have a contractor assigned. Construction must be completed by the end of September.
Maurer said the city is moving as fast as it can to assign dozens of homes that are already in the grant pipeline to a contractor before the end of May. That opens the possibility that the city may get close to fixing up 90% of the number of units that the federal government expects.
“I’m more optimistic on this grant than I have ever been,” Maurer said.
Because the projects are not billed for until after construction is complete, the city may not know whether all the grant money was used until late summer, Maurer said. As of mid-March, about one-third of the $11.1 million grant had been spent.
The city also has two other large federal grants that can help improve lead hazards in Cleveland. Those grants have deadlines this fall. Maurer said if applicants in the pipeline for the Glenville grant don’t meet the May deadline, they will be redirected to the other grants.
Federal COVID relief money dedicated to lead poisoning was unspent, redirected
In 2022, Bibb administration officials argued that they needed $4 million in COVID recovery money for lead safety projects. Those included hiring prosecutors to deal with noncompliant landlords and pitching in on housing projects that the federal grants couldn’t cover.
The move caused friction because the money had been promised to the city’s partners, the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, a group of nonprofits and philanthropists also working preventing lead poisoning by removing hazards from homes, training contractors and operating a resource center.
Maurer’s report found that very little of that $4 million was spent to help fix lead poisoning problems. Instead, $2.1 million had to be redirected to other projects, like park improvements, to meet federal spending deadlines.
The $1 million the city committed to hiring prosecutors ended up being unnecessary because the law department had already budgeted money to pay for the positions.
Maurer said it’s her job to figure out what comes next for the money meant to go to prosecution.
“My next mission and my role is to spend this money in a way that protects kids from lead poisoning,” she said.
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