Last month News 5 Chief Investigator Ron Regan broke the story about Cleveland Water spending over $1 million to promote itself despite having no competition.
They’ve been buying things like toothbrushes and water bottles with their name and logo on it. In addition, sponsoring things like the home and garden show and even videos of elephants getting baths.
Two weeks after this news came out, Cleveland water wrote three blog posts called “Where Your Dollar Goes” because they say “we want to be accountable to our customers for every dollar we spend”
Here’s how they break it down:
- 41 cents of every dollar goes to Investment in Infrastructure
- 17 cents to engineering and maintenance
- The remaining goes to customer service, IT, human resources and communications.
We noticed some gaping holes.
Employee salaries are not accounted for. Cleveland Water has over 900 employees and 28 of them make more than a six-figure salary.
Robert Davis is the director of public utilities and his salary clocks in at just over 200 thousand dollars.
He has a brand new SUV and commutes around 120 miles to work — and residents are paying those bills.
With the $1 million for self-promotion, there’s no mention of those costs in any of the blog posts.
We reached out to both Cleveland Water and the mayor's office for comment, but neither have responded.
