Cleveland Lead Safe Home Summit: Live updates

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Hundreds are gathering today at the Huntington Convention Center for the Lead Safe Home Summit, a free event designed to inform the community about lead poisoning and local efforts to address the problem.

Plain Dealer reporters Brie Zeltner and Rachel Dissell will share updates on the daylong summit, organized by the United Way of Greater Cleveland and the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition.

4:15 p.m.

As the summit closed, the Lead Safe Cleveland coalition announced the 16 members of its steering committee, which includes the chairs of the coalition’s five committees, city leaders, service providers and community members directly affected by lead poisoning. It also announced the formation of a new Research and Evaluation committee led by Case Western Reserve University’s Rob Fischer.

The coalition’s governance committee sought nominations for the steering committee over the past couple of months, and will continue to accept new members as the coalition grows, according to the Mt. Sinai Healthcare Foundation. The foundation’s president, Mitchell Balk, chairs the coalition’s governance committee, which thus far has acted as interim steering committee.

Community members of the steering committee include:

• Robin Brown, who is the founder of Concerned Citizens Organized Against Lead (CCOAL);
• Donnie Grissett, a grandparent, landlord and contractor who lives in the Buckeye neighborhood and is a member of CCOAL. His daughter and son were poisoned in a home he purchased when they were young.
• Diana King, chair of the Northern Ohioans for Budget Legislation Equality and member of Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH), whose two children were poisoned by lead in Cleveland;
• Sonia Monroy Matis, a community engagement worker with Cleveland Councilwoman Jasmin Santana in Ward 14. Matis lives in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood and is the chair of Northeast Ohio Association for Hispanic Health.

The new steering committee will take over leadership of the coalition in “late 2019,” according to Mt. Sinai.

See the full list in the news release below.

Logo contest

Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition announced a logo contest. They are putting out a call for artists to create a logo that speaks to the guiding principles of the coalition -- safe, affordable housing, genuine community partnership, collaboration and integrity.

• Sign up by clicking here by July 19 for more information and to be invited to an information session.

3:00 p.m.

City Council’s Health & Human Services committee discussed pending lead-prevention legislation.

Th legislation was introduced on June 3 by Councilman Blaine Griffin, Kerry McCormack and Council President Kevin Kelley. (During the hearing Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland and Councilman Tony Brancatelli also signed on as co-sponsors.) Mayor Frank Jackson also is a co-sponsor.

The committee voted unanimously to move the legislation out of the committee. It will get two additional hearings before the full council votes on it.

Several city departmental directors talked about the hard work it took to get to where legislation was possible and how they made choices of what could and could not be included.

Chief of Public Affairs Natoya Walker Minor said the city stopped and examined what was happening after The Plain Dealer published its “Toxic Neglect” series to see if there was any truth to what was being reported.”

Minor said the city learned it “had some vulnerabilities” and she got permission from Mayor Frank Jackson to create the Health Homes Interdepartmental Initiative to start to address the issues.

Building & Housing Director Ayonna Blue Donald said her staff was already working on how it can implement and administer the lead-safe certificate program.

Councilman Blaine Griffin said he’s gotten many questions about the way penalties would work if the law is passed. The city’s legislation currently call for criminal penalties for rental unit owners who do not comply.

Some have raised questions about whether the law as currently written could be legally enforced.

“I strongly believe personally we can withstand a constitutional challenge,” Griffin said.

Rachel Nigro Scalish, a city council attorney, said they are “comfortable with the constitutionality of our legislation.” Scalish said the legislation still might be tweaked before council votes on it.

Council also is discussing adding or enhancing a “conflict of interest” clause, she said.

Landlord Scott Kroehle said he owns 16 rental units on Cleveland’s West Side and that 25 children live in those units and he has invested to make sure his units are lead safe.

Kroehle said he supports the legislation, even though that might not be the easiest business decision.

For some, he said, rentals are a business, “money in, money out.” He said landlords can tally potential costs in protest or express resentment.

But a house is more than that. It is a home and “a house that can poison your children is no foundation to build a life,” he said.

Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition members also appeared before the committee. They thanked committee members for their work. Abigail Staudt, managing partner for housing at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, urged council to look at improving a few areas of the legislation, including:

• That there be absolute clarity in the penalty structure.
• Making sure penalties are enough of a disincentive that “bad actor” landlords comply but not-so-onerous that good landlords can’t comply.
• Adding a provision that would require that any city funding projects must be done to lead-safe standards so that "taxpayer dollars will not contribute to our lead-poisoning problem.”

12:30 p.m.

Panelists over lunch discussed communities most affected by lead poisoning.

In Cleveland, children who are refugees are one of the most at risk for lead poisoning, Dr. Aparna Bole, division chief of general academic pediatrics & adolescent medicine at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital said.

“I think it’s a common misconception that most refugee children are exposed in their country of origin. Most are exposed here, in Cleveland,” Bole said.

Monica Lewis-Patrick, co-founder of We The People of Detroit, got a rousing round of applause when she pointed out that people most impacted by the problem — with lead poisoning and water affordability and other environmental and health issues — need to be central to the conversation.

That means not only coming "in and just extract from the community all of their information and trauma.”

“It’s those front-line practitioners and those most affected who are the visionaries,” she said. “I think that putting people first will always be the proper solution to getting where you want to go.”

11:45 a.m.

Elizabeth McDade, the program manager for the Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning in Rochester, New York, had some lessons for Cleveland.

“It’s going to take a while to do this,” McDade said. Rochester’s coalition still meets monthly after 12 years.

At the time they started the push to prevent lead in Rochester, the goal “seemed insurmountable,” she said.

McDade started out as a grant writer but had a “light bulb moment” when she learned that a pregnant woman could poison her child in utero while nesting — cleaning in preparation for her baby. She became a dedicated advocate.

“I’m a lot of fun at parties,” she joked.

Rochester’s coalition had some uncomfortable moments, where they didn’t get along and even had people yelling at meetings.

But they realized: “You really have to look at the end goal,” McDade said.

After a lead-prevention law was proposed, one that required inspections for rentals, landlords flooded council members with letters, she said.

Rochester’s lead-prevention law was “going to crash the housing market, landlords were going to run screaming.” That was the prediction.

The City Council meeting where the law was passed in 2005 was the longest session ever in city history.

The law passed. None of what was predicted happened, McDade said.

Now, 90 percent of the rental units inspected each year pass.

McDade shared several keys to Rochester’s success:

• Banning state, county or local government subsidies for rental housing for low-income families, emergency housing and foster care if the homes are not certified as lead-safe.
• Evaluating lead-poisoning screening rates by pediatric practice for accountability.
• Securing pro bono advertising and marketing help for the education campaign over time.
• Letting the coalition take a tough stand on issues when politicians or agency employees felt they could not.
• Not vilifying landlords and taking the time to educate and understand what types of grants and programs will help them comply with a new standard.
• Paying attention to big and small items, such as eradicating references on lab, public subsidy and school paperwork to “normal” lead levels. No level is normal.
• Building lead-safety questions into all processes and programs: health, educational, housing. Make it the rule, not the exception.

McDade said Cleveland can learn from Rochester but ultimately will need to come up with its own best ways to reach its goals.

“This is a way of deciding in your community what you are going to accept,” she said. “Right now, this isn’t the most pleasant thing in the world to be talking about. The beauty is, at the end of this, you will have hard-won relationships. Then you can move on and tackle other problems together.”

10:26 a.m.

Keynote speaker Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and public health advocate who was the driving force behind revealing the Flint water crisis in 2015, called for everyone to open their eyes to the reality of environmental health threats like lead and to commit to action.

“We can each be a piece of the answer, doing what you are all doing now: putting an end to a social crime,” she said.

Attisha delved into the history of the lead-poisoning crisis, with its roots in the use of lead in gasoline and paint and industry insistence on proving harm from their products rather than proactively protecting the public from the toxin.

“To this day, health officials and policy makers, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, continue to demand proof of harm” from exposure to toxins, she said.

Hanna-Attisha had to prove this harm to children in Flint from contaminated water after the city changed its water source in 2014 from Lake Michigan to the Flint River.

What she discovered were “astronomical” levels of lead in the city’s drinking water after this change. “Our drinking water was corroding engine parts,” she said, yet the people of Flint who knew something was wrong were “told to relax, that everything was fine.”

The pediatrician said she was hopeful and inspired to see action in Cleveland and other cities, and that we are “finally respecting the science” of the toxicity of lead to the developing brain.

She also called for holding the paint industry accountable for “generations” of children poisoned by lead in the United States.

While lead-poisoning levels in children are dropping across the country, Hanna-Attisha said “we cannot yet claim this social justice victory. Our work is not finished.”

“We live with the legacy of lead, and it is our country’s most vulnerable children that bear this burden.”

9:30 a.m.

Opening the summit, Augie Napoli, President and CEO, United Way of Greater Cleveland told those gathered: “This is not an easy conversation, but it’s one we have to have so we can take the necessary steps to change the futures of children in our community affected by lead poisoning.”

Napoli pointed to sugar packets on the ballroom tables pointing out that the amount of lead dust in just one of those packets could damage a child’s brain and cause lifelong damage.

“Every day four children in Cleveland are poisoned by lead, robbing them of their potential,” Napoli said. “This must change. The children of Cleveland deserve better.”

City Council President Kevin Kelley and Councilman Blaine Griffin said lead poisoning and solidifying the public-private partnership around solving the problem was at the top of council’s agenda.

“This really represents the soul of Cleveland, that we are coming together,” Kelley said.

Griffin said Cleveland parents and children have been experiencing this “toxic neglect” for years. But that will change, he said.

“This is only the first step,” Griffin said. “We are not going to fix this overnight.”

Mayor Frank Jackson said the work to be done now is to make sure that changes made to prevent lead poisoning need to happen automatically and “that it’s the culture of Cleveland no matter who is in charge.”

The agenda

The agenda includes more than 30 speeches and panel discussions including local, regional and national experts working to reduce the number of children who are poisoned by lead.

Topics include:

• Tenant rights;
• Lead poisoning 101, including demonstrations of home inspections and different methods of controlling lead in the home;
• The role of housing court in addressing environmental hazards.

This isn’t the first time Cleveland has hosted a summit to help galvanize widespread community support around the issue. It is the first time it has done so with local lead poisoning prevention legislation on the table, and public commitments from politicians and community leaders.

The proposed legislation would:

• Require all landlords and property owners to secure lead-safe certificates for their rental properties by March 1, 2023;
• An increase in rental registration fees from $35 to $70;
• Establish a Lead Safe Housing Action Board and Lead Screening and Testing Commission, to be composed of non-city employee members, a Lead-Safe Advisory Board which will include city employees, coalition members and a new Lead Safe Auditor position within the Building & Housing department.

Read more about the legislation here.

City Council’s Health and Human Services Committee will hold a two-hour public hearing starting at 1:40 p.m.

At the end of the gathering, organizers will focus the conversations on “next steps” for Cleveland.

The most pressing concerns are a building a workforce to handle lead hazard inspections in rental housing and creating a sustainable lead safe fund to help landlords remediate homes and to ensure tenants aren’t displaced. Council also will likely have to address community questions and about how the legislation will be enforced.