Council Meeting Highlights

Feb 02, 2026

City Council convened its regular in-person meeting in Council Chambers, which was also live-streamed. Council website and email addresses are now .gov. Don’t forget to update your contacts. The next meeting is Feb. 9th. Below are the highlights from today's meeting:

Tanisha's Law Enacted: Council passed legislation championed by Council members Stephanie Howse-Jones, Charles Slife and former member Rebecca Maurer, that establishes a new, compassionate approach to responding to mental health and behavioral health crises in Cleveland, prioritizing dignity, safety, and appropriate care over traditional law enforcement responses when possible. It is inspired in part by the death of Tanisha Anderson and seeks to prevent similar tragedies. Ord. No. 1198-2024

Key components include:

• Creation of a Bureau of Community Crisis Response within Cleveland EMS, led by a Deputy Commissioner, to coordinate citywide crisis response efforts in collaboration with public safety, public health, and other city departments.
• Unarmed Crisis Response Teams made up of behavioral health professionals, social workers, peers with lived experience, and clinicians. These teams will be dispatched—often instead of police—to non-violent behavioral health crises, wellness checks, substance-use crises, and quality-of-life calls.
• Crisis call diversion through embedding mental health clinicians in the 9-1-1 dispatch center to route appropriate calls away from policing and toward behavioral health responses.
• Follow-up care and service connection, with responders assessing needs, providing resources, making referrals, and helping individuals access appropriate facilities or services.

Transparency and accountability, including:

• Ongoing data collection on effectiveness, outcomes, costs, and return on investment
• An annual public report on program impact and recommendations
• A public online dashboard showing response data, police hours saved, and community feedback
• Expanded crisis intervention training for police, including:
• Mandatory crisis-intervention training for all officers (initial and annual refresher)
• Specialized, voluntary 40-hour training for designated Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) officers
• Stricter eligibility standards for CIT officers, excluding those with histories of excessive force complaints
• Public education and engagement, with outreach to inform residents about the new crisis response system and how to access it.

Expense Account Increase: Council approved legislation increasing their monthly expense accounts to $2,500, the first increase in 40 years. Members of council were reimbursed up to $1,200 per month for expenses incurred during the course of their duties. The reimbursement amount of $1,200 per month was established in1986, and has not changed in those 40 years. The $1,200 in 1986 is roughly equivalent to about $3,500 in 2026 dollars. Requests for reimbursement are submitted monthly in writing to the Clerk of Council. Expenses submitted for reimbursement must be substantiated by written documentation in accordance with guidelines for the reporting of expenses by members of Council promulgated by the President of Council and approved by the rules Committee of the Council based upon the applicable reporting requirements of the federal income tax code for employee expense reimbursement programs. Ord. No. 110-2026

Docking Fees Coming for East Bank of the Flats: Council approved legislation amending the existing 99-year lease with Flats East Management LLC (“Flats East”) to authorize the charging of boat docking reservation fees. The original legislation, passed in 2014, authorized the City to enter into a Lease Agreement with Flats East covering roadways, sidewalks, boardwalks, park space, and other infrastructure within the Phase II footprint. Under the Lease, Flats East is responsible for developing and maintaining the roadways and boardwalks/park areas, which must remain free and open to the public at all times, subject to the terms of the Lease, and serve as access to and from the development via the associated roadways and walkways.

Flats East has asked for a waiver from the U.S. Coast Guard to allow recreational vessel docking within a portion of the leased premises that had previously been designated as a restricted safety zone. In coordination with Flats Forward, Flats East has established the Flats East District Boardwalk Docking Program, which will design and operate a public website to allow users to reserve docking space and pay applicable fees. Revenue generated from docking reservations will be used to support the Docking Program and to assist with maintenance of dock infrastructure, life-safety equipment, and other related program expenses. Ord. No. 33-2026

Council Condemns First Energy Attempt to Weaken Service: Council passed a resolution, sponsored by Council Brian Kazy, condemning First Energy’s requests to the PUCO to allow it more time to restore electricity after an outage and to increase the number of permissible outages per year; calling upon the PUCO to reject First Energy’s requests; and supporting demands for the PUCO to launch a full investigation into First Energy’s persistent power outages affecting the City of Cleveland and other cities in northeast Ohio.

Since 2017, rate payers have paid more than $1.1 billion to First Energy to upgrade its grid, however an audit indicates that no significant modernization to the grid has occurred and CEI’s reliability has only gotten worse: the average duration of customer outages in CEI territory has increased by 12% for CEI customers from 2015- 2019 to 2020-2024. Res.No. 107-2026

Council Opposing Ohio ICE Legislation Meant to Bully and Intimidate Municipalities: Council passed a resolution strongly opposing Ohio I.C.E. legislation: House Bills 26, 42 and 281 and Senate Bill 172, which generally require state and local agencies, municipalities and hospitals to cooperate in all I.C.E. related immigration enforcement even if contrary to established federal or Ohio law and penalizes those institutions by eliminating funding if they do not comply. The resolution was sponsored by Council members Kevin Conwell, Tanmay Shah and Richard Starr with a majority of the members signing on as co-sponsors.

House Bill 42 requires state and local government agencies to collect and annually report information about citizenship and immigration status of persons with whom they come into contact, including K – 12 students, even though the US Supreme Court has held that states may not deny undocumented children access to K-12 public education.

House Bill 281 requires each hospital to allow ICE agents to enter the hospital to enforce immigration law; requires hospital employees to facilitate such access and penalizes hospitals that fail to comply which penalties include suspending Medicaid provider agreements and loss of grant funding from state agencies.

Senate Bill 172 requires state and local public offices and public officials to allow the arrest or detention of any person suspected of being unlawfully in the U.S. and allows such an arrest or detention anywhere in Ohio under any circumstances notwithstanding continuing Ohio law that extends privilege from arrest in certain cases, including in a courthouse and place of worship. The bill applies to arrests or detentions by a federal, state or local law enforcement agency or officer, with or without a warrant, and regardless of whether the proceedings are administrative, civil or criminal, despite the fact that protections under the U.S. Constitution and the Ohio Constitution continue to apply to any arrest or detention. A local government that violates this requirement is ineligible to receive homeland security funding from the state.

These bills violate not only the US Constitution, including the 4th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, but also the Home Rule provisions of the Ohio Constitution. These bills are meant to bully and intimidate local government entities into compliance; failure to comply will irreparably harm budgets and the ability to govern and provide services to the public. Res. No. 114-2026