Representatives from two vital city connected programs gave year-end progress presentations before members of Toledo City Council on Monday.
“It comes down to landlords taking accountability for what their property is and making sure that it is not going to be harmful for people that are living there,” Councilman Nick Komives said during discussion on the city’s lead remediation program before council’s Neighborhoods and Community Development Committee. “Whether that is lead, bad heating, lack of access to water, those things need to be fixed immediately.”
The lead presentation was given by Rosalyn Clemens, director of the city’s department of housing and community development, and Monica Smith, the city’s lead safe coordinator.
“A number of measures in the United States and Ohio use children as canaries in a coal mine to detect the presence of lead,” Ms. Smith said, noting that efforts in that regard over the last year have yielded things like increasing advertising campaigns on billboards around the city to push for a greater percentage of the city’s 18,000 children to get their lead levels tested.
Data presented by Ms. Smith showed that 76 percent of the city’s children still have not been tested.
Ms. Smith said her office continues to “rely on partnerships” to make inroads in the community through the county auditor’s office, the county health department, Toledo Public Schools and Toledo Lead Poisoning Prevention Coalition.
The auditor’s office, for one, helps with the “rental registry,” a list of rental properties in the city. As 2023 comes to a close, the total number of properties on the registry is over 15,000 and the total number of those properties that have received an inspection and certificate that they are “lead safe” is 3,749.
“We have been going through the courts but the numbers are steadily increasing,” Ms. Smith said of the number of certificates.
Ms. Clemens added that continued funding from federal, state, and local sources remains essential to making real progress on accomplishing the ultimate goal of making more city homes lead safe.
Through challenges to Toledo’s lead laws that are ongoing in the Sixth District Court of Appeals, Ms. Clemens wants her department to repair 50 homes per year going forward.
“We test on one hand and educate people on the importance of testing but we need that money once we test to help repair these properties,” Ms. Clemens said.
In other business, Malcolm Cunningham, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and Josh Davies, commissioner of the school based arm of one of that department’s programs, Save Our Community, gave a similar presentation about the progress of their own activities.
Save Our Community, a gun violence reduction program, has been experiencing great success in the past year working with small numbers of students in four area schools, the Toledo Maritime Academy, and Waite, Scott and Woodward high schools, organizers said.
“We have really been blessed to have your support and partners in the school,” Mr. Davies said, reading a message he was sent by Aaron Lusk, the maritime academy’s superintendent.
The caseload for the program in the schools, after roughly the four months of being operational, is currently at just 24 students, Mr. Davies said, but organizers want to expand that to 60 in the coming year as interest is being drawn from other area schools.
The program is intentional about the students it includes and only takes those who are at the highest risk to be affected by gun violence.
Mr. Cunningham said a microcosm of how his organization is developing an “ecosystem” in the community is through what it is calling its “coordinating crisis incident response.”
“There was a shooting that occurred in a certain public housing complex and a number of people were affected by it,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Some people were shot, some people were doing the shooting and many, many youth saw it happen.”
This led to a street response team being sent to the neighborhood within 72 hours of the incident, talking with and connecting those affected to resources.
The school based program then stepped in to work with some of the involved young people in the schools they were attending — some through getting them on to the program’s formal caseload and others through a grief group that was established at a local elementary school for children that were below the program’s threshold age of 14.
Councilmen in attendance praised the thorough nature of the presentation the two men gave, and the complexity of the work they are doing.
“I think this is helping, I really do,” Councilman George Sarantou said after the presentation. “I think we are turning the corner on this but we have to continue to get more people involved in the community, churches, and so forth.”
First Published December 12, 2023, 1:29 a.m.
