The Money to Get Lead Out of Their Homes Was Right There. They Gave It Back.

Community / Health — REAL POWER.TV

There is a poison in the walls of the houses where Black children in this county grow up. Everybody with power knows it. The money to get it out was sitting on the table. And twice this year, the people responsible for spending it let the clock run out and handed it back.

Start with the number nobody’s putting in a headline. On July 31, Cuyahoga County forfeited nearly $1.2 million of an $8.1 million state lead-remediation grant — money from Ohio’s Lead Safe program, funded with federal COVID-relief dollars, aimed straight at Cleveland and East Cleveland, the places with the highest lead-poisoning rates in the region. The vendors carrying the work, CHN Housing and Enterprise Community Partners, couldn’t move it fast enough before the deadline. County spokesperson Kelly Woodard confirmed the loss.

That’s the second gut-punch this year. Back in February, the City of Cleveland forfeited $3.3 million of a $4.9 million grant from the same state program — because, officials said, the money moved too slowly and the rules were a “regulatory nightmare,” capping spending at $15,000 a home for windows and doors that wasn’t even enough to get a house certified lead-clear. When the state’s deadline hit, the city had finished 26 homes. Twenty-six. The rest of the money went somewhere else.

Add it up. In a single year, roughly four and a half million dollars meant to pull lead out of the homes of the most vulnerable children in this county went back unspent. And this isn’t new — Cleveland lost $2 million in federal lead money back in 2012 for the same reason: too slow.

Here’s what makes it worse than a missed deadline. The barrier wasn’t a shortage of poisoned homes. It was paperwork. The federal rules required income verification so complicated that, in the words of Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s own spokesperson Wyonette Cheairs, “many property owners didn’t complete their applications.” Read that plainly: the system built to help these families put up a wall the families couldn’t climb, and then blamed the families for not climbing it. The money didn’t fail to reach them because they didn’t need it. It failed to reach them because the process was built for everyone’s convenience but theirs.

And understand what lead actually does, because this isn’t a budget story — it’s a body story. Lead poisoning in a child is permanent. It rewrites brain development. It shows up years later as trouble reading, trouble learning, trouble regulating — the kind of damage no grant reimburses because it can’t be undone. When we let lead money expire, we’re not losing dollars. We’re losing the futures of specific children, in specific houses, on specific streets, most of them Black, most of them in neighborhoods this city has been failing to fix for a hundred years.

Give the record its due: childhood lead-poisoning rates in Cleveland have actually fallen to their lowest level ever, two years running. That matters, and it proves the point rather than softening it — the work works when the work gets done. The tools are real. The money was real. What failed was the execution, the will, and the machinery that’s supposed to turn one into the other before a deadline arrives.

So the question isn’t whether Cleveland and Cuyahoga County care about lead. Everybody says the right things at the budget hearing. The question is who owns the failure when the money to protect Black children comes in, sits, and goes back — and whether anybody in the Bibb administration, the county, or the vendor offices holding these contracts will be asked that question out loud before the next grant, and the next deadline, and the next quiet forfeiture.

Because the poison’s still in the walls. The clock is already running on the next round of money. And the children in those houses don’t get a do-over.

Who’s accountable when the money to protect our kids gets handed back? We’ll keep asking — subscribe and follow this one with us. → realpower.tv