UPFRONT
Photo by Sam Allard
COUNCILMAN BASHEER JONES’S LAST DAY AND UNTANGLING THE NEON DEBACLE SOMETHING BIZARRE HAPpened at last week’s marathon committee of the whole meeting at 601 Lakeside. Cleveland City Council was spending the day considering legislation it would likely pass at its evening meeting — this was to be the final meeting of the year, the final meeting at which Council President Kevin Kelley and Mayor Frank Jackson would be in charge — and the agenda was bursting with ordinances, both new and zombified, to be muscled through under the wire. Early in the day, Michiel Wickers of the city’s community development department and Ebony Webster of the nonprofit Northeast Ohio Neighborhood Health Services (NEON) presented to council on behalf of legislation that would allocate $2 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars to NEON. These funds would provide support for health services on Cleveland’s East Side, things like lead testing, food distribution, and health literacy materials. The funds would also go toward a series of
criminal record expungement clinics in conjunction with LegalWorks Inc. and capital repairs at a NEON facility in Hough that had sustained crippling damage in a fire this May. Cleveland.com reporter Robin Goist wrote in a Sunday A1 Plain Dealer story that Ward 7 Councilman Basheer Jones was making the NEON ordinance his “final legislative push.” Jones ran unsuccessfully for Mayor in 2021, surrendering his council seat in the process, so Monday was to be his final meeting as well. At the hearing — this was the bizarre part — Jones made a dramatic motion to amend the ordinance. He wanted to double the size of the allocation, from $2 million to $4 million. He said he’d like to create a mechanism where the additional $2 million would be encumbered for NEON but would be set aside in some sort of bucket, and that NEON would have to return to council in two years to seek the second half of its total allocation. Only if NEON lived up to its promises, Jones said, should council
give them this extra funding. Everyone was extremely confused. Kevin Kelley coaxed formal amendment language out of Jones, with an assist from Councilman Charles Slife, but several council people were visibly vexed. Hadn’t a framework for ARPA spending already been established? Wouldn’t this new $2 million for NEON mean $2 million would have to be taken out of something else? Was it even possible to abruptly tack on two million dollars via an amendment at the committee table without any prior warning or discussion? Did the ARPA guidelines even permit such a spending structure? Didn’t this all seem sort of slapdash and untoward? And come to think of it, weren’t there serious questions about NEON? Were there ever. Reporting by The Land and cleveland.com in recent weeks had revealed grave financial issues at NEON. The organization was providing fewer and fewer services to fewer and fewer patients and incurring substantial debt in the process. It was reeling from a $1.3 million wrongful termination
settlement with the (now deceased) former CFO, after CEO Willie Austin canned him for insubordination when he’d questioned the invoices of one Arthur Fayne, a contractor who was managing NEON’s for-profit subsidiary, the East Side Market. It turns out the former CFO was on to something, as Fayne was later indicted for embezzling nearly $1 million from the East Side Market to pay off gambling debts. In spite of these scandals and this precarious fiscal situation, NEON’s board saw fit to give Austin a $100,000 raise in 2018. Austin is now paid, per The Land, upwards of $500,000 per year, “more than 20 times what a typical NEON patient makes and $300,000 more than the CEOs of two other [Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers] in Cleveland, Care Alliance and Neighborhood Family Practice.” Given these concerns, several council people voted no on the amendment. For a tense few moments, it appeared that the motion might not even be seconded. Jones acknowledged the trepidation, but
December 15-28, 2021 | clevescene.com |
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