Former Cleveland City Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer will be Mayor Justin Bibb’s senior advisor for lead accountability, City Hall announced on Tuesday. She’ll start the new gig March 16.
Over the next few years, she’ll be tasked with nudging—or forcing—Cleveland’s landlords to replace lead paint in properties to address long-standing health issues.
It’s a massive undertaking even after the city passed lead safe laws in 2019, which Maurer helped advocate for before winning her council seat. The laws created the Lead Safe Coalition, a privately-run enterprise, that sought to make progress. That progress has been slow: Only roughly a third of Cleveland’s 100,000 rental properties have been registered since 2019 while landlords have balked at some of the requirements and the city has struggled with enforcement and inspection.
“Protecting Cleveland’s children from lead exposure is one of the most urgent public health challenges we face,” Bibb said in a release. Maurer “has spent her career advancing lead-safe housing and working alongside families, advocates and policymakers to reduce harm.”
Lead-based paints have been tied to rising crime rates in teenagers, lower grades and spiking anxiety, research shows.
Maurer and a new team will “accelerate our progress toward safer homes,” Bibb said.
There’s no doubt Cleveland needs that accelerator, especially internally at City Hall.
Although testing rates climbed citywide in 2021, they’ve fallen since then, Lead Safe’s dashboard shows. Cleveland’s lead problem is “two times higher” than Flint, Michigan, Maurer said, “at the height of their crisis.”
The issue is that testing has historically been reactive; Cleveland kids are surveyed for lead exposure only after the homes they’re living in have been looked at, certified and remediated with brand new paint. Maurer said it was her intention, working as a Legal Aid attorney in 2019, to write clear-eyed legislation to reverse Cleveland’s lagging approach and make it proactive and more preventative.
“Another way to think about that is that the child was the lead detector,” Maurer told Scene in a phone call.
“Testing homes for lead before a child became poisoned was the goal of the law,” she added. The incentives of property owners and parents were too far delineated. “But if it’s your kid and your property, you might help move things along and a little faster.”
Which Maurer could help do. Along with her Legal Aid stint, she served as counsel at Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing and later as co-chair of the Lead Safe Advisory Board during her time leading Ward 12.
It’s decade of input and experience that Maurer is bringing to City Hall in her new capacity. She’ll bring a philosophy that lies in policy related to the city’s Residents First program, which fines landlords if the rental housing they own is consistently not up-to-code.
“My goal is to be coordinating the work so there’s both carrots and sticks,” Maurer said. “Both carrots and incentives for landlords to comply, but also consequences if they don’t.”
The city has and will face an uphill battle. None of Lead Safe’s eight designated districts are more than half tested, leaving thousands of Cleveland kids lagging behind and living in homes that still have lead paint.
What Maurer can do is intensify the city’s connection, via her own cross-department team, with the Lead Safe Coalition, its steering committee, and the Lead Safe Advisory Board, she said.
All of which rely on American Rescue Plan Act dollars and taxpayer money to remediate homes—which can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 when it comes to repainting siding, windows or porches. Maurer said she’ll better focus city coffers to help ‘“fix actual components that are poisoning kids.”
A job much more easily carried out in City Hall.
“I’ve advocated on it from the outside, I’ve advocated on it from Council,” she said. “This is the next chance to roll up my sleeves.”
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