A Recent History of Lead Advocacy in Cleveland

Recent History of Lead Advocacy in Cleveland and Ohio

Former Mayor Michael R. White in the early 1990s  faced pressure to act after testing revealed dangerous levels of lead in the blood of 86 percent of kids tested in Glenville, the neighborhood he’d represented. In 1993 Mayor White convened a summit at the Cleveland Convention Center that included 200 participants, including a panel of 45 national, state and local experts. [  ] Despite initial enthusiasm, over the next ten years projects that emerged from the summit either stalled or expired.

Mayor Jane Campbell, elected in 2001, also vowed to reduce the scourge. In 2004, Campbell announced that public and private agencies would join forces to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in 10 years. "We want to become a national model," Campbell said. The effort included plans to screen more children, enforce lead abatement laws and train more workers to remediate aging housing stock. It would be aided by a $1.6 million grant from the Saint Luke’s Foundation that would re-energize work of the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council.

In 2005 Cleveland enacted a Lead Safe Housing registry. No one ever registered.'

In 2006, the city’s health director and chair of the city’s public-private lead advisory council, Matt Carroll, acknowledged that neither of the city’s goals could be met. The work was stymied in part by federal cuts to lead prevention and remediation programs and by federal grants lost because of mismanagement and slow progress. See Someone Else's Problem PHOTO of child testing at lakeview

2006 Efforts to hold Sherwin Williams liable.

•  RealNEO reports on Greater Cleveland Lead Action Committee GCLAC  

• Cleveland Scene did a retrospective of the Sherwin Williams campaign: Decade-Old Pro-Business Ohio Bill Let Lead-Paint Manufacturers Off the Hook for Paying for Cleanup

In 2016,  Cleveland Branch of the Federal Reserve bank held a symposium on childhood lead poisoning. 

2015-2018 Reporters Rachel Dissell and Brie Zeltner support the Toxic Neglect Series of articles. Some key examples:

• Oct. 20, 2015, Cleveland.com Toxic Neglect: Curing Cleveland's legacy of lead poisoning

• Oct. 02, 2016. cleveland.com. Cleveland's troubled Department of Public Health: A familiar story, decades in the making.

• Feb. 12, 2017. cleveland.com. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson's concerns about rental inspections: Displacing poor families, burdening landlords

• Jan. 06, 2019 ‘An uphill battle’: Lead poisoning stunts students’ learning while Cleveland leaders fail to tackle lingering problem

2016 Toledo enacts Lead Safe Ordinance. City Club presentation on lead safety. Cleveland Lead Safe Network founded.

2017 Councilman Jeff Johnson introduces a lead safe ordinance at Cleveland City Council. The legislation never got a hearing.

2018  Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing formed to create a citizen ballot initiative for lead safe certificate. As a result, Cleveland City Council adopts Cleveland Lead Safe Certificate Program in 2019.

In 2021, Governor DeWine released a Lead Task Force Final Report. Three years after Dewine's State of the State message. the commission focused on child well being, but never mentioned lead poisoning. 

In May 2023, Ohio Department of Health adopted a new definition of lead poisoning called "elevated blood lead" Under ODH guidance, EBL is to be treated with outreach and education of parents during normal working hours. No inspections until a child's EBL reaches 10 mg/dl.  Wait! that was same the standard that Ohio used BEFORE the CDC standard issued in 2021.  A person who works in "the system" observed that the decision to make a change that was no change was "driven by economic considerations."

More History of Lead Advocacy

The "modern" history of lead advocacy in Cleveland is pretty well documented by Rachel Dissell and Brie Daniels. Cleveland Lead Safe Network and our successor organization CLASH are direct descendants of Rachel and Brie. CLASH put lead poisoning back on the public agenda, but seven years later, the fundamentals have not changed: housing is still full of lead and children continue to be poisoned. 

There were a remarkable number of civic/philanthropic attempts before LSCC (see lead and amnesia)

Addressing Lead poisoning in Cleveland

Presenters: Spencer Wells, Darrick Wade

(george questions are in red) 

Overview of lead poisoning. 

• Antiquity: lead as a condiment

• Lead paint, lead in gasoline Thomas A. Midgely. Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 discovery of tetraethyl lead

• 
  

  • Midgley invented Ethyl gas and got lead poisoning. Bounced back and invented Freon. Then contracted polio in his 50s, invented a mobility of ropes and pulley so he could move around the house, accidently hung himself when his rope system strangled him.

• 1970--Herbert Needleman. Identified lead as a medical and public health issue; fired for his reasearch at University of Pittsburgh, moved to University of Pennsylvania. His research was challenged throughout the 1990s, later his results were confirmed by subsequent studies.

• 1978-84: lead banned from residential paint, real estate disclosure rules, lead banned from gasoline. A backstory you didn't know, Dec 17, 2024. Santa Barbara Independent. Money Talks: Self-Driving Cars, Lead Gas, Hidden Data Companies Will No Longer Have to Report Traffic Deaths. "Lead was finally only taken out of our engines by the tragic Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. President Nixon visited our oil-soaked beaches and decided to establish the Environmental Protection Agency. A year later, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970. This new law mandated that by 1975, every newly manufactured car must have a catalytic converter built into it. The problem for the Ethyl Corporation was that their lead additive also killed the catalytic converters and caused cars to die at the gas pump. The result was that, finally, unleaded gasoline became what we put in our cars. The point is that greed will always prevail if you leave the safety and governance of things as ubiquitous as cars to be determined by corporations. The result is massive profit for the companies and massive suffering for the rest of us."

• 2014: Flint changes everything. Darrick prods Hillary to go on the record.

CLASH's history of lead work in Cleveland and Ohio

1987-2007: Rehab at Lakeview; Demetrius illness; claims against CMHA.

1996-1998; The HELP Coalition: National efforts to address lead poisoning as a public health problem based on a medical model. secondary vs. primary prevention, the origins of the expression "children as lead detectors"

2004 -- Cleveland enacts lead safe registry. No one ever registered.

2009--Ohio law suit against Sherwin Williams dropped. https://www.cleveland.com/business/2009/02/ohio_drops_leadpaint_lawsuit_a.html

2015-2017: Changing the problem into an issue

• Toxic Neglect

• Flipping the script to Primary prevention. Learning from Rochester and Toledo. 

• Lead Safe from Lead Free: Interim controls vs. abatement

• Defending against State Preemption. 2017.

  • Lawmakers deciding future of Ohio's lead laws hear debate over state versus local control

  • Rep. Merrin Releases Statement on Budget Amendment to Protect Ohioans from Lead Exposure

  • Legislature must not derail Ohio cities' anti-lead-poisoning efforts: editorial 

2016-2018. Cleveland Lead Safe Network: A power analysis. Testing a theory of change: good government/consensus building. . It would be great to hear your perspective on how you have worked to bring about change in Cleveland. strategy that gained traction

• Cleveland vs. Metropolitan vs. model project?

• writing the ordinance/lobbying city council

• water vs. paint in CLE

• Focus on rental housing.

• Designing a legally bullet proof model. Funny in retrospect. Models from Cleveland (Jackson’s efforts to block predatory lending and Toledo’s failure to survive a legal challenge).

2018-2019: The emergence of CLASH as a political force

Shifting from citizen advocacy to political activism. 

Triggering reaction from the oligarchy.

https://www.cityclub.org/forums/2021/04/29/building-a-lead-safe-cleveland

2020-2023: Implementation and broadening the “community”.

1. LSCC becomes the public-private partnership (analyzing the corporate/philanthropic/government model)

2. CLASH reforms (gains and losses), become a 501c3, decides to continue be an all volunteer. Moves to broadens the issue base, musters more forces, and extends the geographic base.

3. The pandemic diversion

4. The 2022 Municipal elections: wins and losses

What about Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition?

LSCC opEd: what *could* it mean? 

• Bibb's Executive Order on lead safe certificates is a rejection of the LSCC model. Is this article a way for LSCC to acknowledge The mayor's control over the Lead Safe Certificate program?

• At the last Health Committee meeting, the LSCC "report" was cut short before Committee members could take questions about LSCC expenditures. LSCC's operating fiscal manager, Ayonna Blue Donald, expects that sooner or later, the Health Committee will bring them back to the table to answer financial questions. Could this article be a way to undermine Council's effort to hold LSCC financially accountable?

• Is LSCC laying the foundation for a change of direction in 2025? You may remember when the foundations/corporations began to give up on the "Say Yes to Cleveland" public-private partnership. Their message was shift the  operating costs to local government and we'll manage the assets (scholarships)

  • • Jul. 11, 2024. Cleveland.com. Say Yes program secure another year, but looking to greater federal funding for future. "For the first time in the last two years, Say Yes Cleveland has solid funding, but it’s banking on a federal grant next year to stay that way. The program needs just $1.6 million from Cuyahoga County to round out the funding required to sustain its support specialists another year, Executive Director Diane Downing told council’s Education, Environment and Sustainability Committee this week.

    • November 08, 2024 Crain's Cleveland Business. Say Yes Cleveland executive director plans to retire in early 2025. "Say Yes Cleveland executive director Diane Downing, shown here speaking at the Education Forward summit at Cleveland State University in May 2022, will retire at the end of the first quarter of 2025. Say Yes Cleveland executive director Diane Downing, who has overseen significant growth for the organization since its launch in 2019..." paywalled but note that this story broke the day after the Presidential election.