Cleveland City Council Meeting Highlights—October 26, 2026
Oct 29, 2026
Tonight, October 26, 2026, Council President Blaine Griffin convened a Cleveland City Council meeting at 7:00 pm and adjourned it at roughly 8:20 pm.
You can find tonight's agenda here and watch the complete meeting here.
Good evening!
I've been mentioning sports a lot in these updates over the last few weeks, which I chalk up to the Guards' postseason run. So, this week, I resolved not to mention sports at all.
Shows what I know.
The Browns dominated the discussion of two of the three pieces of legislation I'm highlighting from tonight's meeting. Both were contentious, and one of them failed to pass.
The non-Browns piece this week is a big one: Revising the City's Lead ordinance. Lead is a scourge on our city. Cleveland is demonstrably among the nation's worst major cities for childhood lead poisoning. If someone actively poisoned tens of thousands of kids, we'd be rioting in the streets. But lead is insidious and invisible, and it's hard to maintain anger at faceless decision-makers from decades past. So maybe rioting isn't the right approach, but we need a broad movement and new approaches that let us minimize lead's harm as quickly as possible. Tonight's legislation is a big step toward the second goal.
LAST WEEK
On Thursday, October 22, 2026, Councilman Kris Harsh convened a meeting of Council’s Operations Committee to discuss the ethics of providing food gift cards to residents. City lawyers have raised ethical and legal concerns about the program.
The Committee heard testimony from four professors from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, and Baldwin Wallace University. While Councilmembers agree that food assistance is a legitimate use of public money, they disagreed over who should decide which expenditures are appropriate and how much discretion Councilmembers should have in distributing them.
Interesting Quote: Kelly Coble, a Baldwin Wallace philosophy professor, said, “Helping constituents is not the same thing as buying votes, even if one of your motives in helping constituents is to get reelected. Corruption and expenditures that generate political goodwill aren’t simply synonymous."
The Development Planning and Sustainability Committee convened on October 22 and 23, 2026, to discuss the Community Development Department's presentation on the Program Year 2026 budget, the five-year Consolidated Plan (2026–2030), and proposed changes to grant administration. The committee took no votes. The department administers approximately $28.1 million in federal HUD grants, including $19.656 million from the Community Development Block Grant. Click here to watch the October 22, October 23 (first part), and October 23 (second part) hearings.
TONIGHT'S MEETING
Leading on Lead. Tonight, Council approved Ordinance 1244-2026 to update and strengthen Cleveland's lead certification program. Cleveland has roughly 100,000 housing units that need lead abatement. Since the City’s lead safe law was passed in 2019, roughly 31,000 units have been made lead safe. While that is a huge number, the city and lead-safe advocates agree the process needs to be faster and more effective.
The Bibb Administration collaborated with the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition and the Lead Safe Advisory Board and held dozens of conversations with tenants, landlords, and advocates over the last year to develop this legislation.
The proposed changes will incentivize landlords to focus on high-contact areas like porches, doors, and windows, where clouds of poisonous lead particles are most likely to form, and will reward investment in lead safety by allowing landlords to qualify for longer certification periods. Ordinance 1244-2026 passed unanimously.
No Repair. Tonight, Cleveland City Council considered Ordinance 931-2026, which would have authorized the city to pay for required repairs to Huntington Field. The City of Cleveland owns Huntington Field, and the Cleveland Browns operate it. The October 23, 1998, lease requires the City of Cleveland to maintain the structure and keep it usable as a sports facility. Under the lease, the City of Cleveland must reimburse the Browns for necessary emergency repairs the Browns perform or cause to be performed. This ordinance would have authorized total reimbursement of $1,122,824.02, more than half of which is for concrete and joint repairs. Despite the City’s obligations under the lease, Councilmembers were divided, and many expressed frustrations about having to pay the Browns' maintenance expenses on a building that they will cause to be torn down in three years. They also expressed anger at the deal the city struck with the Browns over leaving the city. Proponents expressed similar frustrations but concluded they were obligated to fulfill the lease terms or spend even more money to defend the city in a subsequent lawsuit. Ordinance 931-2026 failed 6–7.
Brookpark Road. The City of Brook Park applied for and received a grant from the State of Ohio to help pay for resurfacing Brookpark Road between W. 130th Street and Rocky River Drive, which goes through Brook Park, Parma, and the City of Cleveland. Ordinance 1205-2026 authorizes the city to enter into agreements with the cities of Brook Park and Parma to resurface the portion of Brookpark Road located in the City of Cleveland. Some Councilmembers were reluctant to agree to this ordinance because it is part of preparing roadways leading to and from the new Browns Stadium being constructed in Brook Park. This ordinance was also a matter of debate. Despite Councilman Charles Slife's advocacy for the project, which would repair a long-neglected stretch of road in his ward and help prepare the surrounding neighborhood for future Browns' traffic, some members of Council again expressed their frustration at helping fund anything Browns- or Haslam-related. Unlike Ordinance 931-2026, Ordinance 1205-2026 passed 8-5.
Cleveland City Council is off next week leading into Election Day. The next full Council meeting will be held on Monday, November 9, 2026, at 7:00 pm in Cleveland City Hall's Council Chamber.
Have a great Halloween! Don't forget to set your clocks back and don't forget to VOTE.
Mike
(Any errors are mine. Accuracies are likely someone else's.)
Please remember that the official record of Cleveland City Council proceedings is the weekly City Record, not this email.