Cleveland’s air pollution is worsening. Mayor Bibb has a plan to change that: Catherine Widemire

I love Cleveland. I love the people here and the pride we take in our city. I love our city’s rich history and our ability to innovate in the face of changing industries. I have lived in northeastern Ohio my entire life, and I love that Cleveland is experiencing a renaissance.

However, as someone with asthma and an employee at the American Lung Association, there’s one thing about Cleveland that I don’t love: There’s a crisis quite literally hovering in the air that is more reflective of our past than our progress.

This spring, a report from the American Lung Association revealed that the Cleveland metropolitan area is one of the most polluted metropolitan areas in the country. Last year, Cleveland was ranked 54th worst in the nation for particle pollution, also known as soot. This year, Cleveland ranked 9th worst for the same metric – the most dramatic air quality shift of any metropolitan area in the report.

This year’s report looks at data from 2021-2023 and is the first year that the data reflects the Canadian wildfires that blanketed our city in 2023. I can still picture the haze that settled over Cleveland during that time and how it felt in my lungs, which are incredibly sensitive to air pollution.

While the Canadian wildfires served as a stark reminder of how quickly air quality can escalate into a public health crisis, the truth is that our city is chronically burdened by air pollution, even on days when the sky looks clear.

We may not be able to control the path of a distant wildfire, but we can control the local policies that determine how clean our air is and how prepared we are to mitigate health harms when the air quality is poor.

Although Cleveland’s industrial prime has passed, the legacy of that era lives on in the form of aging infrastructure and outdated facilities that continue to pollute our air. Alarmingly, for all of the changes Cleveland has seen over the past 50 years, one thing that hasn’t changed is our city’s air pollution code.

However, this past January, Mayor Justin Bibb and the Cleveland Division of Air Quality proposed updates to Cleveland’s air pollution code. The proposed amendment would place stricter requirements on polluting facilities. It would also require assessments that identify potential adverse health impacts on individual communities, especially those that are already overburdened by air pollution. In turn, these updates will help protect Cleveland residents like me from asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer, and worsening COPD.

Taking action to protect air at the local level is increasingly important as the national agency tasked with doing so – the Environmental Protection Agency – faces unprecedented attacks in the form of agency reorganizations, plans for deregulatory actions, and reductions and freezes in federal funding. In Cleveland, nearly $400 million dollars that would have been spent on local environmental projects were frozen earlier this year – including projects slated to support solar energy in low-income communities and reduce in-home pollution in disadvantaged communities.

I’m frustrated that the politicization of environmental issues is putting my health, family, friends and neighbors in harm’s way — but I’m encouraged to see our local government step in where the federal government is falling short.

If we want a future that reflects the pride we feel in our city, we must have the courage to confront this crisis and support Mayor Bibbs’ plans for a cleaner, healthier Cleveland.

Catherine Widemire is the development manager for the American Lung Association in Cleveland.