Will Council Sneak Through Weakened Lead-Paint Law?
By Steven Wishnia

The City Council leadership may be planning to rush through legislation weakening the city’s lead-paint law.

Andy Goldberg, a lawyer with the New York Public Interest Research Group, says NYPIRG was informed May 21 that the Council leadership was going to introduce a lead-paint bill, hold hearings on it for one day, and have it passed eight days later. The bill’s content was unknown, but it is likely to be much more favorable to landlords than Intro 205, a measure sponsored by Councilmember Stanley Michels (D-Manhattan) that has been bottled up by the Council leadership for the last two years.

Neither Goldberg, who represented the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning in its lawsuit to get the city to enforce its current law, nor NYCCELP co-chair Cordell Cleare, a staffer for Councilmember Bill Perkins, has seen any actual legislation yet. “No one I know has seen it, but we know it’s not going to be the right thing,” Cleare told Tenant/Inquilino. Council Speaker Peter Vallone’s office referred calls to the Council’s legislative-agenda office, which said they wouldn’t know until the day the bill was actually introduced.

Met Council plans to picket Vallone’s Astoria district office on June 8, to demand a hearing on Intro 205 and to protest any weaker lead-paint bill that might be introduced.

“There is a real lead-paint bill. Stan Michels has sponsored it. It has not moved,” Councilmember Stephen DiBrienza told Met Council’s annual assembly on May 22. “There are not a lot of gray areas. It’s not a place to cut corners.”

Lead poisoning affects 30,000 New York City children, with 1,049 diagnosed as severely poisoned in 1997. Especially at the levels considered severe—20 micrograms per deciliter of blood—it badly hinders children’s intel- lectual development. According to Goldberg, 90% of buildings built before 1947 have lead paint, and it is most likely to affect children in poorly maintained buildings.

The highest concentrations of severely poisoned children occur in a belt stretching through central Brooklyn into Queens, from Red Hook through Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Flatbush to Jamaica, with other clusters in the western Bronx, Washington Heights, and the industrial neighborhoods of western Queens. Bushwick was the neighborhood most affected, with 4.8 out of every 1,000 children diagnosed as severely poisoned in 1997. Of the 1,285 children diagnosed as severely poisoned in 1996, nearly half were black, and over 90% were black, Latino, or Asian.

While the number of new cases of severely poisoned children declined from 1996 to 1997, Goldberg notes that the percentage of children screened for lead poisoning also dropped, from 56% of all city children under 7 in 1996 to 44% in 1997—and is likely to have fallen further since then, as the Giuliani administration has used welfare cuts to push families off Medicaid as well. Eighty percent of lead-poisoned children are eligible for Medicaid, he told the Met Council assembly.

The city’s current lead-paint law, Local Law 1, was enacted in 1982, but has never been enforced. City officials and landlord advocates contend that the law, which presumes that any paint in a building built before 1960 contains lead and mandates removal of all lead paint in apartments with a child under 7, would cost landlords far too much money—$15,000 to $18,000 an apartment, a figure disputed by tenant and lead-protection advocates—if it were enforced. In 1985, NYCCELP sued the city to get them to enforce the law. After the city failed to obey several court orders, NYCCELP and the city agreed to stay the current order until June 1 so the Council could pass legislation.

In this context, Intro 205 represents something of a compromise. Its basic standard is that apartments should be “lead-safe” instead of “lead-free.” It would set definite deadlines for the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development to inspect apartments where children under 6 live and for landlords to correct lead-paint violations, and would extend the city’s lead-paint regulations to cover day-care centers, schools and playgrounds. However, the Council has never held a public hearing on it. “Lead paint is an issue of code enforcement,” says Goldberg. “It has to be dealt with at the source.”

If the Council pushes through a different bill, it is likely to include elements of legislation proposed by the Rent Stabilization Association. The landlord-lobbyist group, which claims that 92% of city buildings don’t have lead paint, has pushed a measure that would give landlords a 30-day “pre-violation notice” before they would be penalized for lead-paint violations, would not require immediate treatment of children living in affected apartments, and would not require lead paint to be removed by federally certified contractors or in compliance with rules for safe handling of lead dust.

The Giuliani administration would also like to eliminate a provision in the current law that holds the city liable if it’s negligent in enforcing the law, according to Goldberg.