City leaders gathered in front of a trash-strewn alleyway in East Baltimore Monday afternoon to kickoff a new community cleaning program that will pay residents to tackle litter and waste in their own neighborhoods.

Grants from the $14.7 million “Clean Corps” initiative will go to six community groups covering neighborhoods in East, West and South Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott and city officials said. City leaders hope the new initiative will serve multiple needs, removing trash while creating jobs for underemployed Baltimoreans and establishing a new pipeline of workers for the city’s strapped Department of Public Works. Officials said Monday the program will create dozens of full-time jobs for its two year span.

But the program has also drawn criticism from some members of City Council, who have argued that the idea is a shortsighted waste of federal funds that could have gone toward getting city services back on track. The program, which was first announced in August 2022, comes as the Department of Public Works has not set a timeline for restoring curtailed recycling services, a source of frustration for members of the City Council. The agency is also dealing with hundreds of open positions.

Scott’s administration has argued that workforce shortages, not a lack of funding, are the driver of the agency’s curtailed services, and the mayor said Monday that the city must take “bold, yet measurable” steps to clean disinvested parts of town.

“Our frontline workers at agencies like DPW continued to work hard collecting trash and disposing of waste, all while battling COVID-19′s impacts on staffing, supply chains and so much more,” he said. While some city agencies remain limited by the impacts of the pandemic, Scott said community groups are stepping up through programs like Clean Corps to help.

“This is part of the solution,” he said.

A total of 33 neighborhoods in low-income, predominately Black parts of the city were eligible for Clean Corps grants, based on high levels of 311 cleaning requests, as well as high home vacancy rates and increases in home vacancy over the last decade. Officials on Monday announced funding for six organizations across 16 total neighborhoods:

• Bon Secours Community Works, Inc., is to work with residents of the Boyd-Booth, Penrose, Carrollton Ridge and Franklin Square neighborhoods, as well as Fayette Street Outreach.
• Broadway East Community Development Corp., is to work with residents in the Broadway East and East Baltimore-Midway neighborhoods.
• Civic Works, Inc., is to work with residents in the Coldstream Homestead Montebello, Darley Park and Four By Four neighborhoods.
• Park Heights Renaissance is to work with residents of the Arlington and Greenspring neighborhoods.
• The Lazarus Rite, Inc., is to work with residents of Harlem Park, Penn-North, Sandtown-Winchester, Upton and Druid Heights neighborhoods.
• Westport Community Economic Development Corporation is to work with residents of the Westport neighborhood, drawing on a separate funding source from the rest of the program.

The public works department said last year that Clean Corps would pay residents $15 an hour, focusing on cleaning dirty alleys, clearing public trash cans and maintaining vacant lots, where trash often collects. Department of Planning Director Chris Ryer said Monday that the each neighborhood will work with crews of six or seven people, while Mayor’s Office of Employment Development Director Jason Perkins-Cohen said the city will provide the workers with services to help find longer-term employment.

Funding for Clean Corps comes almost entirely out of Baltimore’s $641 million in federal pandemic aid funding. Scott’s administration has divided its federal stimulus across more than a dozen spending categories, including crime prevention, renovating parks and recreation centers, expanding broadband access, fighting blight and vacancy and providing emergency housing for homeless residents.

The Clean Corps allocation has drawn criticism from some elected officials, who have questioned whether the program is wise investment of the city’s one-time stimulus.

Last month, Councilmen Zeke Cohen and Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer criticized the decision to invest limited federal stimulus in Clean Corps in a letter calling on the public works department to reinstate weekly recycling pickup.

And at Monday evening’s City Council meeting, Cohen and Schleifer introduced a resolution calling for higher wages for the city’s sanitation workers, who are currently engaged in contract negotiations. Schleifer said the call to action was especially important on a day when the city’s is dedicating millions of dollars to “further privatizing” its solid waste services.

“It’s insulting to the hardworking men and women of DPW when they see outside entities buying shiny new equipment and hiring employees who we so desperately need,” he said, arguing that the city should be investing in longstanding infrastructure and staffing needs.

Still others see promise in the program. East Baltimore Councilman Robert Stokes, speaking in support of the program at Monday’s news conference, expressed optimism that the program will get more residents engaged in their communities and foster a sense of neighborhood pride.

“Hopefully, when we finish this, we won’t have to use this anymore, because the community will be involved themselves,” he said.

Mark Washington, executive director of the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Community Corp., has overseen a small scale pilot of the Clean Corps program, and testified Monday to the impacts the approach could have for other areas of the city.

Unlike more affluent parts of town, the low-income communities benefitting from Clean Corps haven’t had the resources to pay for additional cleanup to supplement city services, he noted.

“We now get to, in our own neighborhoods, supplement solid waste services, which can only be a good thing — not only for our communities, but the city of Baltimore,” Washington said.

This story was updated to say that six community groups will get funding for the "Clean Corps" initiative.

adam.willis@thebaltimorebanner.com