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The Harvard landfill site, 180 acres of unused land on Cleveland’s East Side on the southern edge of Slavic Village, has been a quagmire for years.
It’s been abandoned since 2010; the city has no record of what was dumped there for four decades; it’s been a burden on Mill Creek that runs alongside it; and the site boasts enough worries that nearby neighbors have methane readers installed in their basements. Naturally, given those facts, it’s been an obvious target for environmental advocates.
It’s why, earlier this year, Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer was to learn that the city and county would this coming year install seven megawatts of solar panels at the Harvard Road Refuse Site, as it’s officially known. Enough panels to power about 6,000 homes a year.
“It seemed like a fantastic opportunity to address the long-standing environmental issues and generate needed electricity,” Maurer wrote in memo to constituents on November 22. “Until it wasn’t.”
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County had been awarded roughly $130 million from a Biden-era program, a Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, to install 63 megawatts of solar panels in six areas, including off West 11th St. and in Brooklyn.
The Harvard site was a dual venture—half the land was in Cleveland; the other half was on the northern edge of Garfield Heights. And it was dually beneficial: Cleveland and Cuyahoga would have free power to throw into the grid, and neighbors would no longer have to deal with the former trash heap in their backyards.
But come September, plans were off the table. Cleveland Public Power Commissioner Ammon Danielson cited three reasons in a letter to the city as why the $15 million originally allocated to remake the vacant landfill would have to be spent elsewhere: scope, time and cost.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Brittany Madison, the most recent membership coordinator of Our CPP, a nascent advocate group of ten that’s tackling the issue, told Scene in a call.
“The problem with the excuses that were given is that they are in line with what was outlined in the grant,” she said. “What they’re saying doesn’t match up with what is being publicly presented.”
“We want transparency,” she added. “Then, once we have transparency, the conversation can go in the direction it needs to go.”
Our CPP feels that pressure must be put on Cleveland’s power authority, both to demand answers as to why exactly a win-win was thrown out and to urge CPP to reconsider building solar in Slavic Village after all.
But CPP’s hesitancy to go through, up until September, with a clean energy project also illustrates the clear gap between Biden-era optimism toward clean energy and a Trump administration that’s clearly pulled away from those grants in its second term.
As of October, Trump has slashed or curtailed nearly $8 billion in climate grants. That’s including ending a Solar For All initiative that would’ve given Ohioans $156 million to put free solar panels on their roofs and in their backyards.
A spokesperson for Cleveland Public Power did not respond to a request for comment.
The vague cancellation has led to a kind of rift between the county and city on how the power would be sold and moved along the grid. But advocates in Slavic Village believe they deserve a sounder explanation than a tangle of bureaucracy.
“We still don’t have clear answers as a community,” Krystal Sierra, planning director with Slavic Village Development, told City Council’s Utilities Committee at a special meeting on December 4. Sierra and SVD have scrutinized the site’s use (or lack thereof) for almost a decade. Slavic Village, she said, “is owed an apology and an explanation.”
“How many times does our community need to report that there are rock piles towering over their homes before the city does something about it?” she said.
Plans to use grant dollars to build the other five solar sites, including two megawatts’ worth on the Garfield Heights side, are still going forward, Mike Foley, administrator of Cuyahoga County’s Green Energy program, told City Council. Power from the Garfield panels will be used to fuel the new county jail, he reported.
And work continues apace on the County level.
“The $129 million grant is safe and committed,” a spokesperson told Scene. “We have already drawn down close to $20 million from it for the purchase of solar panels for Painesville and Cuyahoga County projects.”
“Cleveland made the decision not to proceed with the northern portion of the Harvard Rd. project. The County is reallocating the ~5 MWs of solar from Cleveland’s portion of the Harvard Rd. project over to the County,” they added. “The County is still working on developing solar on the southern part (Garfield Hts.) of the landfill project.
Our CPP plans to ramp up pressure on Cleveland Public Power leading up to the spending deadline of June 1, Madison said. For now, the Harvard landfill site sits in bureaucratic limbo, under the auspices, county records show, of court-appointed receiver Mark Dottore, most recently in the news for his role in disgraced Cuyahoga County Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze’s felony charge, resignation, and investigation by the Ohio Supreme Court disciplinary body.
“There hasn’t been much activity in Cleveland related to solar,” Madison said. “That’s why this is such a big issue: we had an opportunity to use free money to actually bring some solar to the city.”
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Mark Oprea
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