UPFRONT

windows, expired plates, running stops. Okay?”

Gerhard’s revisions have made immediate improvements. In 2022, up until his installment in October, East Cleveland police tallied 149 chases (14.9 per month), Gerhard told Scene. From October to December there were 31 (10.3 per month.)

“And only 10 pursuits this year,” Gerhard said. “I mean, at the end of the day you don’t get paid more because you catch somebody. We don’t have bonuses for somebody getting a ticket.”

Those chases, however, are still dangerous: Three were injured in a February crash when East Cleveland police officers pursued a drunk driving suspect.

But that’s only one part of his job guiding the force.

In March, eight officers were indicted (or re-indicted) for a laundry list of charges—from taking bribes, to tampering with evidence, to kicking suspects in the head— that are currently being examined in Cuyahoga County court.

“Make no mistake, there has been a cancer growing in the East Cleveland Police Department,” County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said at a March press conference following the indictments. “We are doing our best to remove every tentacle of that cancer so that this department can rebuild.”

With the 11 officers now facing indictments for misbehavior going back to 2020, the outcry from the region has been vocal. Gerhard and other officers said the blowback was heard at the station.

“The first two weeks were just awful,” a dispatcher told Scene, sitting at her computer station. “Threats. Names. I got called every single thing in the book.”

The string of threats, from persons as far as Texas and South Africa, hasn’t affected him personally. He said that him and King have discussed returning background checks on new officers to the rigor of the 1990s, when Gerhard was first hired as an auxiliary officer.

There’s currently no written best practice at the moment. Gerhard said he’s looking for the middle ground of giving new recruits “second chances” while turning anyone away who he perceives as “looking for action.”

“I’m not going to give an offer to somebody that’s got a history of use of force, or who’s written bad checks,” he said. “We’re not just going to bring anybody in the door anymore.”

Patricia Blochowiak, one of East Cleveland’s most outspoken councilpersons, told Scene that she believes in Gerhard’s chase policy revision but she is skeptical of his other vows for department renewal. Gerhard’s push to leverage a $150,000 federal grant for hundreds of ShotSpotter sensors to improve potential homicide response times, she said, is just one signifier of doubt.

Though the department’s sensors pick up, Scene found, about 30 shots a week since it was implemented in March, there have been no arrests yet with the technology’s implementation. Which hasn’t swayed Gerhard’s faith in it.

But Blochowiak points to a case in early April. A man was shot in a vacant house on Paige Ave. The ShotSpotter pinged patrol officers’ phones, and they responded in less than five minutes.

“But he died!” Blochowiak said. “[ShotSpotter] didn’t catch a criminal, and it didn’t prevent a death.”

Blochowiak, who herself has had numerous problems with police misbehavior, added: “Take anything [Gerhard] says with a grain of salt. You can’t trust him.”

On April 4th, some seven months into Gerhard’s tenure, he walked Scene around the department. He displayed the “closet” that critics said was in previous years used as a makeshift holding cell. (“Does a closet have this much space?” Gerhard said. “No.”) He showed off their ShotSpotter flatscreen in the secured office space, where three detectives work 12-hour shifts, and pointed to new cameras with youthful energy.

“My poor dispatchers got hell,” he said in the dispatch room, for the third or fourth time. “Getting calls from as far away as South Africa. From Los Angeles County, talking about, ‘Oh, you’re corrupt officers! How corrupt they are!”

He paused, then added, “I’ve been a cop for 27 years now. I’ve been in situations where you run up on somebody you have to wrestle to the ground. Now, did I ever stand there and high five people? No, we don’t teach that. I was never taught that.”

– Mark Oprea

scene@clevescene.com

@clevelandscene

Car washes are opening at a feverish clip across Northeast Ohio. Some suburbs have had enough.

By Maria Elena Scott

But in the summer of 2021, it had good reason to take what, at the time, was a bold stance against one sector when it passed a sixmonth moratorium on car washes: There were at least 12 operating within its borders at the time, including four that had been built in the last year. And the drumbeat was on by companies to construct even more.

“We were getting applications to put them down side streets, tear down businesses and put them right next to houses. That’s not something we want to do in the city of Parma,” Councilwoman Debra Lime told Channel 5 last year.

Council ended up extending the moratorium for three additional months as the city crafted an ordinance, passed last year, that now restricts them to commercial districts barring a zoning variance. The ordinance also notes that “the City has determined that permitting any additional car wash uses in the City of Parma will have a detrimental economic impact.”

Ohio’s seventh-largest city was something of a test case.

Other suburbs are now reckoning with the same quagmire: The desire to draw new business, the limits of economic impact car washes deliver, the reality of duplicative services and the knowledge that the trend very well might have an expiration date, leaving the possibility of defunct eyesores down the line.

Parma Heights was watching its neighbor with keen interest: Last year it passed its own sixmonth moratorium as it worked on legislation to address the issue.

“This is a trend right now,” city council President Tom Rounds told the Parma Sun Post in January. “These car washes are going into a lot of cities, and we want to make sure we were in front of this issue.”

Council there is now considering legislation that Mayor Marie Gallo appropriately called a ‘saturation ordinance.” The suburb currently already has two car washes within its 4.3 square-mile city limits. With a population of just over 20,500, officials say that’s enough, among other reasons.

“Car washes take up a lot of acreage and produce very little economic benefit to a community with a limited number of commercial parcels that relies on income taxes to provide services to residents,” said Chrystal Heyborne, special assistant to Mayor Gallo. Heyborne cites a rise in “everything from informal inquiries, to use applications, to actual sites” in Northeast Ohio as the impetus to be proactive on the issue.

A new car wash facility creates between 5 and 20 local jobs, according to the International Carwash Association. Some municipalities think alternative businesses can make more of an economic impact.

“The City wants parcels filled with people who are employed and paying income tax that can be put back into the City. Car washes are still legal and welcome in Parma Heights, but this further regulation,” which would cap the number of car washes at one for every 12,000 residents with an additional limit that they be at least 1,000 feet away from another, “provides for the continued prosperity and level of service that our residents expect,” Heyborne said.

From Streetsboro to Brook Park to Cuyahoga Falls and a ‘burb near you soon, the same question a Strongsville resident posed at a recent council hearing on a proposed WetGo near Drake and Pearl is being asked: “How many car wash businesses does one town need?”

Americans love their cars. And they love keeping them clean.

The domestic car wash market is estimated to hit $16 billion in 2023 and grow to $27.89 billion in 2023, according to Future Market Insights.

And largely gone are the days of dad in the driveway with a bucket, a hose and a rag.

In 1996, 50% of car washes were done at professional facilities. Twenty-five years later, in 2021, that number rose to nearly 79%, according to the International Carwash Association’s consumer research surveys.

That’s partially due to environmental concerns – washing a car in one’s driveway means chemicals get into ground water and sewers; some countries like Switzerland and Germany have banned home car washing entirely – but mostly due to convenience and speed.

America’s first boom in car washes followed the post-World War II boom in car manufacturing. The first fully automatic car wash opened in Detroit in 1947. And with more cars hitting the roads than ever before and Americans flooding to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s, automatic car washes became a fixture across the United States.

What’s happened in the last decade puts that era to shame.

“There are more car washes built in the last five to 10 year period than ever before in the industry’s history,” said ICA CEO Eric Wulf. “And that’s been driven by a couple of things. One is some technological innovations, and then two would be some pretty significant consumer trends. And then most recently, probably the third piece would be maybe a consumer trend would be the popularity of what we call subscription programs.” Those monthly subscriptions can account for up to two-thirds of a car wash’s revenue.

Retired U.S. Marine Corp. Sergeant Brian Krusz, founder of local chain Sgt. Clean Car Wash, said technology advancements make the experience now worlds different than before.

“It has changed dramatically,” he told Scene. “Car washing was a hassle. It was a full production. There was no efficiency, there was no technology, everything was old school. It would probably take on average 15-20 minutes to get your car washed.

Since opening its first spot in Strongsville in 2013, Sgt. Clean has added 10 more locations around Northeast Ohio. He told Scene that the modern operation, with all its attendant speed and technology, is a far cry from what they looked like decades ago and something cities should welcome.

“When somebody thinks of the word[s] car wash, sometimes you get a little cartoon bubble above their head, the majority of the time they think of this nasty carwash from childhood or this nasty place where bad things happen,” Krusz said. “It used to get this negative stigma and my goal is to say look, like at Sgt. Clean, we’re involved in the community, we work to provide great benefits, we’re an asset to the community.”

Krusz, whose company plans on opening more locations, said the moves by some suburbs to curtail or limit car washes is shortsighted.

“We have not experienced [moratoriums]. I mean, there’s areas that we want to go into,” Krusz said. “I think we’re just going to the industrial revolution of just explosive growth. That’s kind of what we’re in, in the car wash space, it’s really telling us that they need marketing studies. And I think municipalities are taking a step back, looking at their master plan under city plans to figure out what they want to do.”

Demand, of course, is there, as more and more and more cars hit the road.

“From the mid ’90s until now, the number of cars on the road and the population [has been] growing,” said Wulf. “We estimate that there’s over 110 million more cars–not 110 million cars–110 million more on top of what there were in the mid ’90s of cars that are more frequently going through professional car washes.”

As Krusz said, “This is the cheapest form of maintenance.”

Search Twitter and elsewhere and you’ll see conspiracy theories suggesting that money laundering is at the heart of the proliferation, the same sort of explanation that came with the explosion of mattress stores years before. But those ignore the fact that car washes simply make money, and are making more thanks to subscription services. According to ProjectionHub, they can bring in $500,000 to $900,000 in annual profits.

And the arrival in Ohio isn’t unique, it’s just happening here for the first time.

“Based upon my experience, the majority of car wash construction in the last 10 years has been the Sunbelt states, the southeastern part of the U.S. all the way to Texas,” said Wulf. “My hunch is it may appear to folks in Ohio as if it’s an explosion, I would say that’s been the experience in other parts of the country for several years.”

From his perch in the industry at the top of the International Carwash Association, it’s just a minor shock to the system for some.

“One analogy I can think of is it’s almost like when fast food became popular. It was sort of like, ‘Oh, why would we need more restaurants? We’ve already got several restaurants.’ And it’s because of a technological change,” said Wulf. “And that change is driving demand.”

Streetsboro is home to roughly 17,000 residents, the historic Singletary House Museum, and four car washes–with a fifth on the way.

In January, Streetsboro became yet another city to implement a temporary moratorium on car washes, which officials said will give it time to complete a retail study.

Before the vote, Mayor Glenn Broska outlined his concerns of oversaturation. Although competition can lower prices, Streetsboro is trying to prevent price wars.

“I’m a firm believer in letting people do what they want with their money, but at the same time I want to protect the people that are here, that have invested in the city, and that have spent a lot of money to put their business here,” said Broska in January. “If somebody comes in with something new and something bigger, it may have a profound effect on them. That’s what we’re trying to guard against.”

Five of Streetsboro’s seven city council members voted in favor of the ordinance.

“I am very hesitant to tell someone who wants to invest in our community that we don’t want them, unless of course it brings an adverse impact to our community,” council member Justin Ring, who opposed the ordinance said. “I believe in free market capitalism and feel that government should be involved as little as possible, certainly not cherry-picking business types on a whim.”

Opponents to the moratorium question why car washes are targeted, instead of other industries, and have advocated for taking action through zoning instead.

“If we don’t want it, anymore of those in the city, then we need to change the code, not just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to pause you for six months or a year just because we want to get a study that now allows us to take you out. To me it’s, again, unnecessary.I don’t think it’s government’s job.”

Sam Jakabcic, who oversees Blue Falls Car Wash’s eight current Northeast Ohio locations– and two in development, says that companies feel the saturation too.

“Certainly, there’s a lot of competition within our market. There’s a lot of people moving into this area from outside our area,” Jakabcic said, citing “the amount of washes that were not here five years ago. And I think national companies or private equity firms that look to try to get as many rooftops up as possible, looking at markets that don’t have a lot of saturation. And I would imagine that this was one of those markets, you know, five, six years ago that had that look and now I think that it’s all starting to happen.”

But those in the industry hope, predictably, that moratoriums won’t last as a standard response.

“Areas that have taken the time to understand the business rarely, if ever, consider a moratorium. Certainly, planning and zoning folks declining applications for car washes, that’s been happening since car washes existed. There’s reasons for that. There are zoning areas that you want to have a particular residential area you would want to the carwash next to your house,” said Wulf. “But the moratorium is an extreme thing that we haven’t seen in this industry, certainly not in broad application. But our hope is, to be honest, it’s not a trend because of what the consumer wants.”

But municipal governments aren’t the only ones with objections to constructing more car washes. In a Strongsville City Council meeting in March, several residents showed up to oppose the proposed development of a WetGo, Giant Eagle’s brand of car washes, near an existing GetGo, Giant Eagle’s chain of gas stations. The proposed WetGo would be within walking distance of a Sgt. Clean, less than one mile away.

“The question my neighbors and I have is, overall, does the city of Strongsville really need another car wash with presumably out-of-state ownership competing with locally-owned car washes and businesses?” said Patricia Lonergan in the council meeting. “And, as council members ask yourselves: ‘Is this in the best interest of your constituents or does this primarily benefit the outof-state business?’”

The question at the heart of the matter for cities, however, isn’t usually centered on whether ownership is local or not. It’s pure numbers, and they’re trying to play catch up on a trend that began a while ago but that only recently presented itself as a problem.

Stow has had a moratorium on car washes since April of 2021, and could extend it again as the city debates legislation that would limit them in the future. Proposals currently call for a limit of one car wash per 10,000 residents.

Roughly 34,000 people currently live in the suburb.

Five new car washes, approved prior to the moratorium but delayed because of Covid, have opened in the Stow area in the past two years. mscott@clevescene.com t