CLEVELAND — Long before she was a voice on Cleveland City Council for lead safety, Rebecca Maurer was a voice in her community for lead safety.
"I've been doing that in every single stage of my career, since being at Legal Aid," said Maurer, who still recalls trying to help a mother and her toddler who had tested positive for elevated blood lead levels.
"The whole time her 2-year-old daughter was scribbling on my yellow legal pad with my blue highlighter pen, and it just always sat with me, it lit a fire for me that we hadn't done right by this mom, we had not done right by this daughter and that was just one case," Maurer said.
On council, Maurer was vice-chair of Health and Human Services and the Lead Safe Advisory Board, roles that ended in January after she lost her seat in last year's elections. But when Mayor Justin Bibb created the role of Senior Advisor for Lead Accountability, it was for Maurer the perfect fit.
"This is the call that, it's the next step for me and I am ready to fight for the City of Cleveland and for our kids," she said waisting no time. "I got the formal offer on Monday and I came into the office at 9 a.m. on Wednesday and I've been working ever since," though her official start day is Monday, March 16.
Her appointment comes less than a month after Mayor Justin Bibb acknowledged the city lost a $3.3 million grant for lead abatement for taking too long to spend it. A process slowed by the city's own stringent guidelines.
"Sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of the good and we've created too much red tape and too many beuracratic hurdles to get this money out the door faster," said Bibb at a February 17 council hearing.
"The buck stops with me and I'm going to need this body's support and partnership to correct this wrong," he said.
Maurer admits it was difficult news to learn. " It was heartbreaking, it was heartbreaking because that is a grant that was supposed to go into such, it was so badly needed to fix up properties. It could have replaced windows, it could have replaced porches that were poisoning kids and instead we lost it and we cannot ever let that happen again," she said of the responsibility that now falls to her.
"Absolutely that is my number one task is making sure that we understand what went wrong with those dollars and making sure that we never lose another cent," she said.
She'll also use her council knowledge in helping to rewrite the city's 2019 Lead Safe Law, using what they've learned in the last seven years with a greater focus on homes built before 1940.
"I think the numbers are something like 343 kids have tested positive for elevated blood levels in homes in Cleveland, 341 of those pre-1940. It's almost all of the pre-1940 properties," she said. "So if we can get those newer properties out of the way let's do that and that is going to require ammendments to the law."
Maurer sees her role as team captain, coordinating with the city departments already focused on lead abatement like the Department of Public Health, Building and Housing, and the Department of Community Development. "I think this team captain role is really going to help us coordinate across so many different people who care and are engaged and we just want to do right by this issue."
She said there's been progress since she started this fight years ago but so much more needs to be done.
"We have seen decreases in the lead poisoning rates but please remember our decreased numbers are still two times higher than Flint Michigan at the height of their crisis. So we need to celebrate wins but say we have not gone nearly far enough. "
