Eastside Market Needs a New Operator Soon

The city is on the hunt for someone to save the Eastside Market.

Cleveland, which owns the property, recently ended its lease with NEON, the embattled non-profit that had been managing the grocery store in what has been a food desert in Glenville. Amidst its wider financial issues, NEON had accumulated around $200,000 in back taxes and overdue utility payments.

“We have to seriously look at a different operator,” Council President Blaine Griffin told Scene in a phone call on Monday.

Conversations have been had with Mayor Bibb, Griffin said, about replacing NEON with a more responsible entity in charge, although he wouldn’t offer any details as to what kind of entity. “That’s premature until we actually make a plan for it,” Griffin said.

The Eastside Market had been and is envisioned as an east side version of the West Side Market, in an ideal world.

Under NEON, things hadn’t gone smoothly.

In early March, NEON CEO Willie Austin was accused by his employees—mostly nurses and officer workers—of engaging in wage theft and withholding tens of thousands of dollars in payroll. On March 13, a handful of them filed a civil suit in county court.

Then, on March 27, Ward 10 Councilman Michael Polensek wrote a letter to the Cleveland FBI office urging the agency investigate NEON for possible fraud.

Two years ago, in Feb. 2024, a contractor working for NEON at the Eastside Market, 61-year-old Arthur Fayne, was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for embezzling about $760,000 using fake invoices.

Polensek felt the financial malfeasance might extend to the Eastside Market’s operators.

“It goes without saying, when you talk about a mismanaged and alleged corrupt operation,” Polensek wrote, “NEON Health Services Inc. comes to mind.”

Griffin, in an interview Monday, said he was more concerned with shaping Glenville’s public market into a grocer worthy of its name. He shared feelings that Ward 9 Councilman Kevin Conwell shared with Cleveland.com last week: the Eastside Market should imitate Cleveland’s gem of a nonprofit-run market in Ohio City.

“And like CentroVilla,” Griffin said, referring to the Latin-themed, indoor market that opened up in Clark-Fulton last year.

“It would be great if you could have the West Side Market and Eastside Market partner in some kind of way,” he added. “I think that would be a great model.”

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