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Neighborhood Assistance details lead-hazard grant, home-repair progress and rising animal/jail contract costs
Summary
Director Eupren Lash outlined neighborhood services' priorities: closing a $1.8M grant, administering a $7.75M lead-hazard grant, completing 308 home repairs to date, and negotiating higher-cost animal-control and jail-bed contracts as part of a broader cost-rightsizing effort.
Neighborhood Assistance officials presented the department's 2026 priorities and laid out several substantial grant-funded programs alongside negotiated intergovernmental contracts that will change the city's service costs.
Director Eupren Lash told council the department is working to close a $1.8 million Less Safe Ohio grant by August 2026 and is administering a $7.75 million lead-hazard reduction demonstration grant that runs through 2029. Lash said the city has completed 308 homes under the Akran home-repair program so far, representing about 54% of the stated goal across phases.
Lash also described plans to hire two to three additional staff to support lead remediation training and to integrate HUD's seven Healthy Homes principles into programming. Staff said the housing programs rely heavily on grant funding and warned continued federal funding cuts make future support uncertain.
On code compliance, staff outlined modernization steps including mobile computing for inspectors, mandatory fee-based inspections for eligible rental units, and a renewed enforcement push to bring roughly 2,100 unregistered landlords into the rental-registration program.
Lash and county-contracted staff explained that the animal-control facility contract with the county is being renegotiated; staff provided a working figure of about $1.44 million for the new animal-control contract and described a restructured jail-bed contract that trims Akron's guaranteed beds from 100 to 40 at a proposed $2.9 million — changes staff say will reduce costs by roughly $2 million for the jail contract. Combined changes to the two contracts were presented as producing roughly $0.5 million in net annual savings when both new contracts are in their first full year.
Why it matters: Lead-hazard mitigation and home-repair programs affect health and housing safety in neighborhoods; changes to the animal-control and jail-bed contracts reallocate significant service expenditures and may affect how residents' animal and public-safety needs are met.
What's next: Staff will continue negotiations with the county on animal-control and jail contracts and will bring more detailed implementation schedules and budget figures back to council.
