CLEVELAND — Cleveland City Council starts its new legislative session Monday night, and in the hours ahead of it, Council President Blaine Griffin shared their four biggest priorities with the media.
Griffin said the main goals revolve around public safety, oversight of American Rescue Plan funds, housing stability, and ward redistricting.
"Safety has to come first," he told reporters. "If our residents, businesses, and visitors do not feel safe, then everything else we do will matter little in this community."
Griffin says Council will make sure city administrators and police have all the funding they need. Last year, they budgeted for 1,350 police officers, but as of Sept. 6, only 1,117 are employed.
The council president stressed that a big problem officers are dealing with lately is "nuisance crime."
"These out-of-control block parties, drifting, nuisance complaints, a lack of traffic enforcement, and some of the other things we've seen cause problems in our neighborhood have been unfathomable this summer," he said. "Many of us in some of the neighborhoods that we represent have never seen this amount of lawlessness and this amount of challenge to authority even when police do show up to the scene."
For the second priority, Griffin explained that they will be making sure all ARPA money they've allocated gets delivered as promised.
"It is inexcusable whenever we have vendors that have been waiting to do this work," he said. "We need that money out on the street, and we're going to work closely with the administration to get that money out on the street."
But with all the money now allocated three years after being passed by Congress, Griffin did give a warning.
"We have to continue to look at creative financing and innovative financing, because ladies and gentlemen, the general fund is stressed and ARPA money is gone," he said. "So now, we have to make sure when we look at some of these big projects, we might have to have creative financing."
When it comes to housing stability, Griffin says that includes giving folks the help they need repairing and renovating houses, as well as making "true affordable housing" available.
"Not affordable housing by definition only, but affordable housing that poor people and people that live on the margins of our society and who are homeless or who are unsheltered are able to have good quality housing in our community," he explained. "In a place like Cleveland, we should never, never have that as a problem, and this council is committed to investing resources into that."
They'll also work to fund down payment assistance, reexamining their Community Reinvestment Act agreements with the banks to ensure lending is happening for small businesses and homeowners.
Lastly, Council is in the midst of redistricting.
"We have to cut two seats because of population decline," Griffin confirmed, meaning the chamber will drop from 17 to 15.
Legislators have hired consultants to help them with a new redistricting map. They also plan to have four community meetings to get feedback on the boundaries before making anything official, with the goal of having the new map approved before the end of the year.
3News asked Griffin for his reflection on last session's chaotic environment, largely due to disruptive demonstrators coming into chambers week after week demanding Council take a public stand on the Israel-Hamas conflict. After several months, Council did pass a resolution calling for cease-fire.
"We will never get that right with the subtleties of that conversation, but we do think that we got it right by supporting the U.N. resolution, which basically acknowledged all of the things that most of the people wanted us to address," Griffin responded. "I think it was unfortunate that that diverted a lot of attention. That's the reason why we changed a lot of rules."
Griffin was referring to the "rules" surrounding public comment, which was dominated by pro-Palestinian demonstrators for months. The new rules stated that all public commenters must pre-register to speak, only address the topic they registered to talk about, and cannot use language that is obscene or likely to produce imminent unlawful action.
Speakers shall only address their comments to the presiding officer over the meeting. Signs, posters, and banners are also banned in council chambers.
Additionally, the presiding officer now has the right to ask law enforcement to escort disorderly people out, as long as they first issues a verbal warning and are viewpoint neutral in their enforcing of the rule.