Cuyahoga Voters Approve Levy Restoring $4 Million for Addiction Care

Cuyahoga County voters approved the property tax levy that pays for the county's health and human services safety net, passing Issue 11 with about 60% of the vote, according to unofficial results. The levy will let the county restore $4 million it had cut from the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board.

The same ballot carried Issue 10, a separate levy for the county's Board of Developmental Disabilities, which passed with nearly 63%. Together the two measures will raise property taxes by $166.50 a year for every $100,000 of home value — $87.50 for health and human services, $79 for developmental disabilities.

Signal Cleveland reported the levies will deliver almost $100 million more each year to the developmental disabilities board and more than $110 million to county health and human services.

What the health and human services levy covers

The levy combines a 4.7-mill renewal with a 2.5-mill increase, a package sized to run for 10 years. It pays for children in county custody, senior services, universal pre-K, the MetroHealth System and the ADAMHS Board, which contracts with providers across Cleveland and its suburbs for detoxification, outpatient counseling, crisis response and medication-assisted treatment.

That last line item is where the addiction money sits. The ADAMHS Board is one of the few local funding streams the county controls directly as state and federal shares shift, and it is the piece county officials had most recently reduced.

The cut the vote reverses

The county's current budget trimmed more than $20 million in safety-net spending through 2027, including a $4.5 million reduction to the ADAMHS Board. A county fact sheet says the new levy dollars allow $4 million of that to be restored.

The levy also offsets money the county expects to lose elsewhere. Officials have estimated about $10 million in additional costs from changes in federal food assistance policy, part of a broader pattern of the county absorbing responsibilities that federal dollars used to carry.

Health and Human Services Director Dave Merriman told County Council earlier this year that the levy, paired with fiscal discipline, would bring a decade of stability to the department. Passage is expected to cover the county's health and human services expenses for the next 10 years, though Merriman has said that depends on spending discipline rather than the revenue alone.

The developmental disabilities levy, and why it moved

The Board of Developmental Disabilities serves an estimated 15,000 residents and had not gone to voters for a levy since 2005. Its CEO, Amber Gibbs, told council members this year that without new revenue the agency would face dramatic program reductions, with caregiver wages and caseloads both climbing.

About 81% of the board's levy revenue goes to the local share of a Medicaid-backed caregiving program, which means the levy is effectively matching federal money rather than replacing it. That structure is why the board framed the request as a Medicaid-adjacent cost rather than a new service.

"This investment will help ensure long-term stability for essential programs and supports relied upon by thousands of county residents and their families," Gibbs said in a statement early Wednesday.

One of 62 counties asking the same question

Cuyahoga was not unusual in putting health and human services money before voters. Sixty-two Ohio counties had a health and human services levy on Tuesday's ballot, according to a tally by the Center for Community Solutions, a Cleveland research and advocacy group. Renewals made up the largest share at 41, followed by 15 new levies.

The common thread across those campaigns was arithmetic counties have been running for several years: property tax collections lagging, federal reductions arriving, and service costs rising faster than either. A renewal that passes keeps a county level with inflation at best; a renewal with an increase, like Cuyahoga's, buys a decade of planned spending at the cost of a visible tax bill.

For residents, the practical effect arrives slowly. The ADAMHS restoration has to move through the county's budget process before any provider sees it, and the levy does not by itself add treatment beds or hire counselors. What it does is remove an immediate threat to detoxification contracts and crisis services that had been priced into a cut.

The measure's backers made that trade explicitly: a property tax increase voters could see on a bill, in exchange for not finding out what the county's safety net looks like without one.