New Lead-Paint Battle Brews
by Steven Wishnia

Eight years after a state court held the city government in contempt for failing to enforce its own law on eliminating lead paint, the city health and housing agencies have scheduled hearings on new regulations for Nov. 17. Yet many activists involved with lead-paint issues call the proposals a scam.

Faced with possible contempt citations, both the Department of Health and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development have proposed new regulations. The HPD rules would require landlords to remove or seal up all lead paint, not just peeling paint; set time limits for performing repairs, and require landlords to cover relocating tenants while the work was being done.

“It’s a setup,” responds Andrew Goldberg of the New York Public Interest Research Group. They’re trying to manufacture a crisis so these regulations will never be promulgated.”

Goldberg points to comments in the proposed HPD regulations which call abating lead an enormous and costly task, possibly costing landlords $15,000 an apartment and the city $100 million a year, and add that a legislative solution is necessary. “They’re issuing these regulations and disowning them simultaneously,” he says.

The Nov. 17 hearings coincide with Buildings Department hearings on a new facade law. NYPIRG’s Ludovic Blain believes that that timing and the strictness of the proposed regulations are “clearly intended to inflame landlords to press the City Council to pass legislation that protects landlords’ fiscal health rather than children’s physical health.”

NYPIRG is backing Intro 205, a bill introduced by Councilmember Stanley Michels (D-Manhattan) early last year that is currently bottled up in the Council. Intended to be more enforceable than the city’s current law, which requires elimination of all lead paint, the bill seeks to focus lead-abatement efforts on apartments with small children and peeling paint. “It’s modeled after the window-guard law,” says Goldberg.

Intro 205 would require landlords to inspect every apartment with a child under 6 for lead-paint hazards at least once a year. It defines peeling lead paint in an apartment or common area in a building as a Class C (immediately hazardous) violation, and requires HPD to perform inspections within five days of a complaint. Landlords would have to complete repairs within 21 to 60 days of receiving a violation, or else HPD’s Emergency Repair Program would do the work and bill them. The bill also mandates more aggressive inspections and better training for inspectors.

However, Intro 205 has not yet received a public hearing—for which its supporters blame Council Speaker Peter Vallone.

Goldberg also questions the Giuliani administration’s sincerity in proposing new regulations when they haven’t hired the 76 new HPD code inspectors authorized by the Council. “How can you say they’re going to implement these regulations when they haven’t hired the inspectors?” he asks. One possibility is that a lead bill more favorable to landlords may be slipped through the Council in the week before Christmas, as was tried with Councilmember Anthony Weiner’s proposal to allow landlords to “self-certify” inspection results last year.

In 1996, the Department of Health found about 9,000 city children under 6 to have lead poisoning, out of about 225,000 who were screened. About 1,400 of them were more severely affected, with more than 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. In 1995, when 50,000 more children were screened, the department found almost 12,000 poisoned.

The children most severely affected were concentrated primarily in Brooklyn’s “lead belt,” Fort Greene, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, and Brownsville, as well as in Jamaica in Queens. Most were between 1 and 3 years old, and the vast majority were black or Latino.