EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio — East Cleveland’s new mayor is demanding help from the state, examining the city’s books and asking for millions of dollars, citing what he called “fiscal collapse” Wednesday.
In a letter to Auditor of State Keith Faber, Mayor Lateek Shabazz said the state “bears direct responsibility for allowing this condition to worsen” in the 13 years the city has been under state financial oversight due to its fiscal emergency.
“I mean their advice didn’t help the city,” Shabazz said.
Shabazz said the city has racked up millions of dollars in unpaid bills to vendors.
That includes $300,000 owed for garbage collection, and another $2 million to a company for replacing water mains in the city.
Shabazz confirmed the construction crew stopped work because of the unpaid bills.
“They haven’t been paid and they’ve got to pay people for material, they’ve got to pay their employees, so they can’t keep working for nothing,” Shabazz said.
The mayor said he’s negotiated payment plans with both companies but admits he’s not sure where the money to pay them went.
It’s why Shabazz, who took office last week, is demanding the state provide a forensic audit of East Cleveland’s finances.
“This audit is going to tell me everything,” said Shabazz. “It’s going to tell me who the money went to, who did it and what.”
Dee James, who lives in East Cleveland, called the situation disturbing, but not surprising.
“Just because of the several years of East Cleveland not having substantial mayors or people who took care of the finances responsibly, so I can imagine that things aren’t intact,” said James.
In his letter, Shabazz demanded up to $5 million “to satisfy unpaid vendor obligations” as well as emergency funding to pay court-ordered judgments against the city, including police misconduct claims.
When asked why he believed the state should pay the city’s debts, Shabazz said he believed the state owed it to East Cleveland.
“East Cleveland pays a lot of taxes and that’s what we pay taxes for, the state,” Shabazz said.
In a statement Wednesday evening, a spokesman for the Auditor of State Keith Faber said they would be happy to look at the mayor’s letter once it arrives, but blamed “decades of management failures by local leadership” for the city’s financial situation.
The statement said the auditor’s office welcomes the opportunity to work with the new mayor to “find a long-term solution to East Cleveland’s fiscal problems.”
