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CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- After less than a year on the job, City Finance Director Rodney Hairston will be leaving at the end of this week to take a new post closer to home in Akron. Hairston came on board in January, becoming the third finance director -- with as many interim appointees -- to serve under recalled mayor Kahlil Seren. Much of Hairston’s work became damage control, such as gathering financials from 2023 that still needed to be forwarded to the Ohio Auditor’s Office, a lapse that has affected the city’s credit rating. Interim Mayor Tony Cuda announced Hairston’s departure at Monday’s meeting, thanking him for leaving the department in much better shape than it was when he took it over. “He definitely made a great impact, along with some great hires,” Cuda said, with one of those being Assistant Finance Director Rachun Caldwell. She will be getting a promotion next week, at least on an interim basis. Cuda also contracted with former director Andy Unetic -- who retired in December 2023 -- to come back for the 2026 budget hearings as a consultant. It doesn’t hurt that interim City Administrator Sharon Dumas served as finance director for the City of Cleveland. “Rachun will be stepping in for double-duty,” Dumas told council Monday, noting that Caldwell has 20 years experience in governmental accounting. This includes annual budgets for Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, where she worked with Hairston, and prior to that as chief accountant for the City of East Cleveland. Unetic and an outside firm will be “assisting us in getting our financials together, including fiscal years 2023 and 2024, which are almost completed,” Dumas said. “And we are up to third quarter in fiscal ’25.” Caldwell will return to her assistant position the last week of December as the city transitions over to its new mayor, Dumas noted. “We have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time,” Cuda told council. He spoke of “making great strides in very vigorous discussions” already underway. “And you will have a 2026 budget draft on Nov. 1.” Metro Healthy Council also heard from MetroHealth System President and CEO Christine Alexander-Rager about plans to close its 10-bed Psychiatric Emergency Department at its Cleveland Heights location on Severance Circle after only about a year in operation. While they are closing that location in a move from a “centralized to a dispersed model using all ambulatory centers,” Alexander-Rager said that behavioral and mental health services remain a vital part of the MetroHealth mission. Especially in Cleveland Heights, where the $42 million, 112-bed Behavioral Health Hospital opened in 2022 will remain intact. The same goes for the standard medical emergency room, physical rehabilitation, primary care, sports medicine and a “bustling senior care practice.” Responding to Council President Gail Larson about patients in immediate need of emergency psychiatric care, Alexander-Rager said they will be able to go to any MetroHealth System emergency room in the system. As for the 10 emergency psychiatric beds left over at the end of the year in Cleveland Heights, they can serve as flex space for regular MetroHealth hospital operations, Alexander-Rager said. Lowered Shaker Lake In his mayor’s remarks, Cuda said he’s met with Shaker Heights Mayor David Weiss and Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) officials about the latter’s "revised recommendation" on the fate of Lower Shaker Lake. “There are three alternatives that the sewer district is now looking at,” Cuda said, referring to a Class I (high hazard, over 60 feet in height) dam and a Class II (over 40 feet) as the first two options. “But I think the one that’s had the most discussion is the idea of having some kind of water feature," Cuda said. Cuda noted that sewer district CEO Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells would be “willing to do a feasibility study on a water structure that could have a stormwater management capability." That would allow the sewer district to pay for it. “I said I hope you can design something that would indeed fulfill that, because that’s the way it could happen without us being financially involved.” As a result, Cuda plans to schedule three meetings with council and other agencies. They include the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), which regulates dams; Cleveland Metroparks, which signed onto a somewhat similar Garfield Park Pond Restoration project several years ago; and eventually NEORSD, for obvious reasons. “Here’s the bad news -- they really want to do these during the day,” Cuda warned. “And I know your days are very booked up and actually very difficult for those working.” Larson pointed out that any scheduling should include Shaker Heights as well, “since we’re coordinating all of this with them.”
