Cuyahoga County residents denounce plans for new jail (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Roughly 100 Cuyahoga County residents attended a community meeting Thursday to speak out against a new jail they say they don’t want.

For an hour and a half, residents asked dozens of questions about why a new jail is the best use of half a billion public dollars, how a new building will fix some of the inhumane conditions they said stemmed from leadership and staffing problems, rather than structural concerns, and what the long-term ramifications may be if the mitigation systems meant to protect the community from toxins on the site fail.

Their questions were left mostly unanswered. But Kenn Dowell, the consultant hired to moderate the community meeting, promised that all the questions will be shared with county council and the 12-member Justice Center Executive Steering Committee before any decisions are made about the fate of the jail.

“When we have another meeting, we will answer your questions,” Dowell told the crowd gathered at the Jerry Sue Thornton Center. “We’re just here to get your feedback.”

The county didn’t have an exact date of when those meetings would occur, but Director of Public Works Michael Dever said public discussion will continue through the end of September, including at the next steering committee meeting, yet to be scheduled. He also pledged to host another public meeting to discuss the jail’s design by the end of the year.

If the residents who attended Thursday’s meeting have their way, the process wouldn’t get that far.

“No new jail” was written on the signs they held, voiced in their comments, and repeated like a mantra by the collective body whenever they heard something they agreed with. Instead, they called for community solutions to prevent people from entering jails in the first place, rather than building new walls to house them.

“The problem is the system and the people and the attitudes,” Larry Heller with Northern Ohio Recovery Association said of conditions in the jail that led to a string of deaths in 2018. “Until we fix that, these all are window dressings.”

In the same breath, residents also agreed with speakers who denounced structural problems in the jail that prevent some inmates from seeing the sun, getting enough recreation time, or accessing other wanted programming. They called the conditions inhumane.

Rev. Vincent E. Stokes II talked about how the revolving door at the jail has shaped his life and said it was more important to consider the injustices of the current jail than the environmental justice of the potential new jail site at 2700 Transport Road.

“If we don’t have an alternative to this space, we need to come up with one because it’s not fair to keep them there,” Stokes said of inmates in the current jail. “We need a new county jail.”

Dever said he took away from the meeting that residents want to know more about the new jail’s operations and the potential for more diversion efforts, but he said what they’re seeking can’t be done in the current jail space. He called it antiquated and said it’s too cost prohibitive to update in any meaningful way.

Not building a new jail, he said, “it’s not an option.”

County council has not officially voted to build a new jail but has introduced plans to buy the controversial property where they’d like to place it and permanently extend an expiring quarter-percent sales tax to pay for it. Further discussion on that decision will occur when council returns from break on Sept. 13, but a final decision could come by the end of that month or early October, at the latest.

Also pending are the results of a second study on what it would take to renovate the existing jail as part of the Justice Center complex.

The public comments followed an hour of presentations detailing the studies done in the last 10 years that led the county to the conclusion it needs to build a new jail and why its preferred location is a good fit, despite the known toxins at the site.

A recently released environmental study showed conditions at the property have improved some over the decades, but still flagged oil deposits and other chemicals in the soil, as well as carcinogenic benzene and methane gases. The county can still use the site, the consultant who performed the study determined, but it will need to maintain a clean soil cap, install a vapor barrier under the jail and limit any exposure to groundwater in order to make it safe for residential use.

The cost of that potential work has not been disclosed in public meetings.

John T. Garvey, vice president of Partners Environmental Consulting, Inc., which performed the study, again shared examples of other brownfields that he says have been successfully remediated for residential use in the same ways Cleveland’s jail property would need to be.

One is the Geroge R. Vierno Correctional Center addition in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. That facility has used a methane mitigation system since 1993, he said. He also highlighted similar systems used by a 56-story apartment complex and the Cedars-Sinai Hospital Advances Health Sciences Pavilion, both in Los Angeles.

Cleveland examples include Battery Park, which was the former Eveready Battery Co.’s old Edgewater Plant that is now covered by townhomes, and the east bank of the Flats, which became a residential and commercial hotspot after undergoing extensive remediation.

Cleveland.com is researching other examples of correctional facilities being located on or near sites with environmental concerns, what remediation efforts were used there and whether there have been any ramifications that might be relevant to the work planned in Cleveland.

Chris Ronayne, the Democratic candidate running for County Executive, attended the meeting and called the environmental presentation “vague.” He questioned the location itself, noting while driving on the dead-end road to get there what he felt was a lack of access to public transit in a remote site hidden away from the community.

He wanted to know more about why other sites in the community were eliminated and called for the county to wait to make any decisions about a new jail until it has more input on what the public wants in a justice system, not just a jail.

“To me, there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Ronayne said.

At the start of the three-hour meeting, Cleveland City Councilman Richard Starr, whose ward borders the proposed jail site, warned residents that if they don’t cooperate on building a new jail at the Transport Road site, it could be moved outside the city. That would cost taxpayers more money and more harm, he said.

“It’s important to keep the jail in the city,” he stressed to residents.

“Keep it downtown,” was their shouted reply.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Cleveland City Councilman Richard Starr’s ward, which covers the right side of Broadway Avenue. The proposed jail site, on the left side of Broadway Avenue, is in Ward 3, represented by Councilman Kerry McCormack.