The Cleveland coalition dedicated to distributing millions of dollars to make the city more lead safe plans to ramp up spending.
Coalition officials outlined goals Monday to dole out more in grants and incentives to rid homes of lead hazards in the next year than it has in the past five years. The grants and incentives are primarily targeted at landlords.
The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, which has raised almost $92 million in total commitments, was created in 2019 after Cleveland implemented a new lead safe law. The law requires most landlords in the city to get a certification proving their rental units are safe from lead.
The coalition funds a number of programs, from a Lead Safe Resource Center with a hotline for landlords and tenants to training for lead workers. It also pays landlords incentives to get certified under the city’s new lead safe program and gives out grants. Landlords and homeowners can apply for the grants, which pay to eliminate lead hazards by, for example, replacing windows or doors.
Since July 2020, the coalition has given out $8.6 million in grants, loans and incentives to property owners to remediate lead in homes. (That number does not include the cost of hiring managers to run the grant programs or do community outreach.)
Over the next year, the coalition plans to pay out $9.5 million in grants and incentives. It no longer offers loans.
Cleveland City Council Member Rebecca Maurer, who has criticized the coalition for slow spending, said she is excited by the news. Maurer said the program had previously struggled to balance protecting the dollars from fraud or waste and making sure the money gets to property owners in need.
“My read of what they presented today was that they think they’ve now hit the sweet spot, and now they can really ramp up production,” Maurer said.
At a Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition meeting Monday, coalition members described some of the changes made to make money more accessible to community members. The coalition removed income limitations to receive a grant and got rid of caps on how many grant dollars can go to an individual property owner.
Ayonna Blue Donald is a member of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s executive steering committee. She told Signal Cleveland that the coalition will be able to pass out more grants this year because it now has more agreements with more local nonprofits that can collect applications, inspect properties for hazards and hire contractors to work on homes and apartments.
In the first four or so years of the coalition, one nonprofit – CHN Housing Inc. – acted as the grant administrator, Blue Donald said. CHN is no longer an administrator for the coalition, which brought on three new organizations last year to do the work: Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp. and Famicos Foundation.
“That just expands the footprint and the web of how much work can be done,” Blue Donald said.
Even with the push to speed up grant delivery, it’s unlikely to make a huge dent in the backlog of interested applicants. In the next year, the coalition expects to remediate 237 units with its grants – about a hundred more than it fixed in its last fiscal year. But Blue Donald said the organization already has at least 1,000 grant applications in the door. She said the capacity of grant administrators and contractors is the obstacle to serving all of those applicants.
Because of that, interested grant applicants now have to fill out “interest forms” to be added to a waitlist.
That’s frustrating to some lead contractors, who have their own skepticism about the promise to ramp up spending and confusion about why more applicants can’t be served. Todd Knight, a lead abatement contractor who attended Monday’s meeting, said he’s been working for months to get on vetted contractor lists maintained by Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition.
“I have submitted all my information. I have done everything they’ve asked,” Knight said. “This has been going on for months, and I still don’t have a straight answer.”
Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition invests in other programs
In addition to grant and incentive programs for property owners, the coalition has plans to pay for several other projects in its sixth year.
That includes a new relocation assistance program, which pays for families to stay in hotels when they are displaced by lead hazards. In 2023, Signal Cleveland reported that families who discover their homes pose a lead poisoning risk often have nowhere to move. This program fills in that gap.
Since it began in May, the program has assisted four families. Zack Cofer is a co-director of programs at Environmental Health Watch, which runs the city’s Lead Safe Resource Center. One of the families helped through the relocation program lost their government rental assistance after the home was put under a lead hazard control order, he said. Homes are placed under these orders if property owners don’t fix a lead hazard within a certain amount of time. Most often that happens after a child is poisoned.
“We had to help them find new housing,” Cofer said. “That took roughly about a month and a half, that we had them in a hotel.”
The coalition also has a plan to provide long-term lead safe housing for people whose homes don’t get fixed.
The coalition budgeted $758,000 for relocation assistance, which is estimated to help up to 146 families in the next year.
The coalition also budgeted $1.9 million to make 72 childcare facilities safe from lead and about $400,000 for a program to improve lead testing in young children.
Children under the age of 2 are supposed to be tested for lead poisoning in Ohio, said PJ Kimmel, a project manager at Better Health Partnership, which received a grant to focus on the issue. But in Cleveland, only 69% of kids who had a well visit between June 2024 and June 2025 got tested for lead.
Better Health Partnership aims to raise that to 79% by the end of next June.
