Cleveland Clean Air Ordinance

Air pollution challenges 

Background

The City of Cleveland, Ohio, was once a national leader in air quality policy. In 1882, it passed one of the country’s first smoke ordinances to reduce emissions from burning coal. Over time, the city prioritized industrial and manufacturing development, building one of North America’s largest steel industries. These industrial assets produced important economic gains, but the city’s clean air policies did not keep pace. Cleveland’s current air quality ordinance has not been updated since 1977, even as the city’s economy—including its steel mills—have transitioned toward cleaner, more advanced technologies. As a result, Cleveland continues to struggle with air pollution. The American Lung Association’s 2026 “State of the Air” report ranked Cleveland as the 12^th most polluted city in the country for year-round particle pollution.

Today (April 2026), Cleveland seeks to reclaim its leadership role in air quality policy by designing and implementing a new Clean Air Ordinance. Work on the new ordinance began in 2018 with community outreach, background research, and broader stakeholder engagement. Through this process—which included meeting with experts from other cities—Cleveland city officials identified a key gap in its current air quality ordinance. Specifically, the current law does not address the cumulative impacts of multiple pollution sources, including factories and highways, which often combine with other social and environmental stressors to disproportionately burden Cleveland’s more disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Political context

The Cleveland City Council has substantial authority to promulgate environmental ordinances, and the Office of the Mayor can devise rules to implement the City’s ordinances. These authorities cover permitting requirements and the capacity to levy fees on businesses within Cleveland. However, the State of Ohio can preempt Cleveland ordinances via state law, constraining the power of Cleveland’s Mayor and City Council. As a result, city officials must carefully craft and implement their ordinances to ensure broad support among diverse stakeholders.

Local clean air solution 

Proposed solution

To address the cumulative impacts of multiple air pollution sources, Cleveland city officials—including the Cleveland Division of Air Quality (CDAQ)—have crafted a proposed Clean Air Ordinance (CAO) that will consider the totality of air pollution exposures and other stressors in a way that traditional, single-pollutant regulatory frameworks cannot.

A central feature of the proposal focuses on the permitting process. Under the new ordinance, when considering whether to grant permits for new or modified air pollution sources, the city will consider the existing social and environmental burden of the neighborhood in which the source will be sited. In addition, the proposed ordinance will create a fund for emissions reduction efforts, enhance reporting and enforcement, and emphasize the importance of indoor air quality.

Ordinance description

The Cleveland Clean Air Ordinance is a city-level air quality ordinance with several features. Most significantly, the CAO creates a multi-pollutant framework for air quality action that considers the cumulative impact of multiple forms of pollution-related and other stressors.  This ensures that clean air regulation is primarily targeted to benefit Cleveland neighborhoods with the greatest air pollution burden. Importantly, the CAO also creates opportunities for air pollution remediation actions.

1. Cumulative impact definition: The ordinance defines “cumulative impact” as the totality of exposures from air pollution sources combined with non-pollutant stressors or sources of increased susceptibility, including socioeconomic disadvantages, lack of environmental assets (e.g.,  parks and other forms of green space), and population health challenges (e.g., high rates of cardiovascular disease), and health disparities.
2. Cumulative impact assessment: Using a cumulative impacts framework, the CAO requires city officials to estimate each census block’s relative vulnerability to the health impacts of air pollution using social vulnerability index scores, health data, and environmental data. Census blocks are assigned a decile rank, where higher deciles indicate greater cumulative risk and vulnerability. City officials will use these decile ranks to determine the scrutiny applied to permit applications.
3. Three-tier permitting scheme: The CAO establishes different requirements for permit applications to install or modify air pollution sources depending on the decile rank of the census blocks where the source is located.  Applications for sources proposed in overburdened neighborhoods—defined as those ranking in the 8th, 9th, or 10th deciles of the city’s vulnerability index—are required to include a detailed evaluation of annual air pollutant emissions from the source. In addition, applications for sources located in the most disadvantaged census blocks (i.e., those in the 10th decile) must include a formal health impact assessment with air quality modeling and epidemiologic risk assessment. Based on this information, Cleveland city officials may deny permits where necessary to protect neighborhoods that are already heavily burdened by pollution.
4. Emission mitigation fund: Under the CAO, operators of every source of air pollution in Cleveland must obtain an air pollution permit and, in the process, pay into an emission mitigation fund. Higher emission sources pay more than lower emission sources. This enables Cleveland to raise funds that stakeholders can use for emission mitigation. For example, the Cleveland officials could use these funds to transition its vehicle fleet to low or zero emission vehicles.

While the CAO has many facets, the way it considers the cumulative impacts of both air pollution and non-pollutant stressors in the permitting process is a central feature of the proposed ordinance that enables a more targeted approach to regulation in a way that prioritizes and protects the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Health impact assessments and stakeholder feedback

Central to the CAO’s regulatory system are health impact assessments (HIAs) for proposed new and modified pollution sources in highly impacted neighborhoods. The CAO specifies some elements of the HIAs that firms must conduct—for example, air quality modeling and epidemiologic assessments—but it leaves other details to be determined by CDAQ. This gives city officials flexibility to define the scope of the HIAs to ensure the system protects the public’s health without overburdening firms or imposing undue costs. However, this flexibility may also create ambiguity for applicants, some of whom have expressed a preference for more certainty in permitting application requirements. Consequently, Cleveland city officials have continued to engage in dialogue with a spectrum of stakeholders about the exact scope of HIA requirements. Securing support for HIAs from potential permit applicants will facilitate the codification and implementation of the CAO by the Cleveland City Council and CDAQ.

Additional program activities

Beyond the cumulative impacts assessment and tiered permitting system, the CAO entails several other notable facets:

• Emission control action programs: The CAO requires all operators of air pollution emitting sources and all city departments to establish specific plans to reduce emissions during air pollution emergency days.
• Enhanced enforcement and reporting: The COA also strengthens mechanisms for facility non-compliance and requires the CDAQ to provide more frequent and transparent reporting to the community.
• Indoor air quality program: The proposed ordinance establishes municipal services to provide residents with resources for improving the air quality within their homes, recognizing that the indoor environment is critical to overall respiratory health.

Required resources

Implementing the CAO ordinance requires a significant expansion of municipal technical and administrative capacity:

• Extensive community collaborations: The proposed CAO is the result of a years-long effort to build trust and share resources with several communities involved in air quality monitoring. These include both neighborhood groups in Cleveland as well as industry groups and even air quality teams in other cities, who provided support to Cleveland officials when they were designing their cumulative impacts framework.
• Technical Support: The CDAQ relies on technical assistance from the U.S. EPA. While EPA support has changed under the current presidential administration to deemphasize environmental justice, EPA scientists continue to provide key technical support on issues of cumulative impact assessment.
• Staffing for Review: The tiered permitting system and HIA review process require specialized staff capable of evaluating complex epidemiological and environmental modeling data. Critically, the City of Cleveland directly employs 7-8 air quality experts, whose primary focus is to protect air quality for Cleveland residents. These positions are funded by a very small income tax increase that the City Council passed in 2017.

Overcoming Barriers

Despite the ordinance’s public health goals, it faces some barriers to implementation:

• Industrial opposition and public utility concerns: Some industrial firms have pushed to exempt “insignificant air emission sources” (those polluting less than 10 pounds per day) from the new code. They argue that stricter local rules could hinder economic development and that the city should align with more lenient state standards. Firms and public utilities have also objected to the potential uncertainty and cost of HIAs.
• State-level preemption: Ohio state legislators can pass laws overriding Cleveland ordinances. State officials are aware of Cleveland’s proposed CAO and have provided no indication that they object to it. However, recent Ohio budget legislation includes provisions that may roll back “air nuisance” rules, which signals some hostility toward more air quality regulations.
• Advocacy pressures: Environmental justice groups argue the current draft is too discretionary, demanding that the language be changed from the city “may” deny a permit in overburdened areas to “shall” deny.

Key Takeaways 

The Cleveland Clean Air Ordinance illustrates the transition toward a “total exposure” model of urban environmental health. Key takeaways from the Cleveland experience include:

• Partnerships and communication are key: Cleveland city officials began building in earnest relationships with community groups in 2018. In 2020, they established a partnership with Newark, New Jersey through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to learn about cumulative impacts frameworks. In approximately 2023, city officials began meeting with technical experts from the U.S. EPA to define its proposed ordinance. And throughout this process, city officials continued to engage with a spectrum of stakeholders, including industry partners, to reach a consensus on the CAO and its various facets. Without these extensive efforts to communicate and build partnerships, city officials would not have been successful in crafting and advancing the CAO.
• Data should drive equity: The creation of a Cleveland-specific vulnerability index for each of the city’s census blocks provides a transparent, scientific basis for requiring more rigorous scrutiny of industrial siting in historically marginalized areas.
• Political resilience: Local air quality initiatives must be prepared to navigate friction between neighborhood advocacy groups, industrial stakeholders, and state-level legislative shifts.
• Modernization is key: Air quality codes from the 1970s are insufficient for addressing the synergistic effects of modern multi-source pollution burdens and social vulnerability.