LEAD LAW STRUCK DOWN
Judge Says Council
Glossed Over Effect on Children
by Jenny Laurie

In a striking victory for advocates of children's health and tenants' rights, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Louis York struck down New York City's lead-poisoning law, Local Law 38 of 1999, saying that the City Council had failed to consider its environmental impact before passing it.

The New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning had filed a lawsuit against Speaker Peter Vallone and the City Council, challenging the new law. The coalition, which includes Met Council, argued that Vallone and the Council leadership pushed the law through, weakening existing rules for cleaning up lead paint, without adequately debating and researching the impact it would have on children.

Vallone jammed the law through the Council in less than a month last year. It superseded Local Law 1, the city's never-enforced 1982 lead-paint law, and was endorsed by landlord groups such as the Rent Stabilization Association, The Council, in a common procedure called a negative declaration, voted that an environmental-impact study was not needed before passing Local Law 38 because the new law would have no significant adverse impact.

But in looking over the transcripts of the Council debate and at the changes caused by the new law, Justice York found that the Council had not, as the law requires, taken a "hard look" at possible environmental damage.

"The Council's entire legislative review process was mostly perfunctory, only occasionally rising to the level of cursory, with the operative word being alacrity rather than analysis," he wrote.

The court's job in this case, according to York, was to make sure the Council had followed procedures required by the state Environmental Quality Review Act (known as SEQRA), which says that an environmental-impact statement (EIS) must be prepared when the action of a local or state agency will have a significant effect on the environment. (The word "environment" does not just mean the treatment of water or air; it covers our entire living environment.) The judge agreed with NYCCELP that an EIS was necessary, because the new law made a number of serious changes in the ways the city agencies and landlords would repair painted surfaces containing toxic lead.

York held that Local Law 38 changed the pre-existing law, Local Law 1, in a number of significant ways, and did not include provisions that experts testifying before the Council had urged as necessary. He noted that the new law did not define lead dust as a hazard; it lowered the age of children protected; and it raised the amount of lead that was needed for paint to be deemed toxic. These issues are important because lead dust is now known to be the greatest cause of harm, because lead exposure is not safe at any age, and because even minute quantities of lead can cause severe health problems.

According to advocates for children's health and tenants' rights, the Council, under Vallone's leadership, wanted to avoid doing an EIS because it might have been used to convince people of the dangers of loosening standards for cleaning the highly toxic paint from apartments. In addition, the Vallone strategy was to introduce the bill, hold the hearing and enact the law very quickly, and an EIS would have slowed the process down, giving advocates opportunities to lobby doubting Councilmembers.

Justice York's decision leaves the previous law, Local Law 1, in effect, and also puts the city back where it was a year and a half ago, in contempt of court for not promulgating regulations which would allow city agencies to effectively enforce the law. Advocates, including Met Council, are gearing up to go back to the City Council with a new bill, one that includes the protections that were deliberately left out of the Vallone-RSA lead bill.