Outrage Stalls Weakened Lead Law

The Harp administration’s proposed amended lead paint law was grounded after lawyers, healthcare providers, community activists, and mothers blasted it for loosening regulations and related war stories of trying to get the city to protect lead-poisoned children.

Such was the outcome of Thursday night’s Board of Alders Legislation Committee meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

The sole item on the agenda was the city Health Department’s proposed new lead paint ordinance amendment.

Committee alders voted unanimously to table the proposed law change, thereby leaving it in legislative limbo until the committee decides at a future meeting to take the item off the table and vote in favor or against it.

The six committee alders present for the public hearing didn’t deliberate at all on the proposed legislation before unanimously voting to table it at the end of the nearly three-hour meeting.

They did, however, spend ample time grilling city officials on the details of the proposed ordinance amendment and listening patiently as nearly a dozen members of the public approached the microphone to voice their opposition.

The committee’s decision to not pass along the amendment to the full Board of Alders for a final vote represented a clear victory for the bill’s critics, who argued throughout the night that the proposed changes represented a monumental step backwards for local public health law.

“This proposed ordinance guts [the existing lead paint] law entirely,” said New Haven Legal Assistance Association Attorney Amy Marx. ​“It totally eviscerates it.”

At the core of her and her fellow amendment opponents’ critique was that the proposed law change would give the city health director too much discretion about when the department must conduct full lead paint hazard inspections involving XRF machines, dust wipes, soil samples, and water samples.

Current law, as interpreted by legal aid in various recent lawsuits against the city and as supported by four state judges in six different court cases, requires the city to conduct a full inspection and enforce lead hazard abatement whenever a child under 6 years old tests at or above the federal Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) reference level of 5 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL).

The proposed law, Marx said, would only require the health department to order lead paint inspections when a child hits the state lead poisoning threshold of 20 μg/dL.

The ordinance amendment takes a step in the right direction by clearly defining an ​“actionable blood lead level” as 5 μg/dL, she said. But it then immediately undercuts the impact of that clarity by stripping the existing regulations of all inspection mandates for children who test at that level.

Instead of requiring the city conduct a full investigation of existing lead hazards whenever a child tests at 5 μg/dL, the proposed new law would only require the department to engage in a more robust distribution of educational materials to landlords and parents about the dangers that lead poisoning poses to children’s cognitive and behavioral development for children at those levels.

“The current law is fabulous,” she said. ​“The judges have interpreted it properly, and these children need to be protected.”

City Acting Health Director Roslyn Hamilton, Community Services Administrator Dakibu Muley, and state Department of Public Health Epidemiologist Kimberly Ploszaj defended the proposed legislation as providing necessary updates to a decades-old city law.

They pointed out that the proposed amendment clearly defines an ​“actionable blood lead level” as matching the CDC’s reference level of 5 μg/dL. They said the law calls for the creation of a revolving loan program to help low and moderate-income property owners pay for lead hazard abatement, and wold charge landlords for the cost of every health department lead inspection.

They argued that the discretion afforded by authorizing rather than requiring the health director to conduct full lead hazard inspections whenever a child tests at 5 μg/dL would give the city the necessary leeway to figure out which internal departmental policies are most effective at protecting children while not exceeding limited financial resources.

And ​“perhaps most importantly,” Muley said while reading a prepared written statement to the committee towards the beginning of the hearing, the ordinance amendment would allow the city to ​“respond and put an end to legal action” filed by legal aid regarding the city’s lax enforcement of existing lead laws.

The passage of the amendment would mean the city would spend a few hundred thousand dollars more on hiring five new full-time lead inspectors, he said, which is substantially less than ​“court-ordered relocations in the high tens of millions” of dollars.

Westville Alder and Legislation Committee Vice-Chair Adam Marchand later asked Muley to clarify and expound upon that latter statement about expensive court-ordered mandates necessarily resulting from leaving the current law as is. Muley was not able to provide an explanation. He promised to collect his notes and return to the issue later in the hearing. But before voting and adjourning, the committee alders never called Hamilton, Muley, and Ploszaj back up to testify.

“These Children Are Our Future”

After hearing from city staff about the rationale behind the proposed lead law change, alders opened the hearing up to public testimony.

Over the next hour and a half, they heard not just from Marx, who called on the committee to table the matter and allow the city’s Lead Paint Advisory Committee time to weigh in on the proposed ordinance amendment, but also from a diverse array of activists, healthcare professionals, and affected residents adamantly opposed to the proposed changes.

Half a dozen of those who testified were mothers of children with elevated blood lead levels above the CDC level of 5μg/dL but below the state level of 20 μg/dL. All of them said that they had witnessed first-hand the harmful effects that lead poisoning has had on their children’s development, and they asked the alders not to loosen local regulations so that people like them wouldn’t even be entitled to a full lead paint inspection going forward.

Orchard Street resident Chyrise Holmes told of how her 3‑year-old daughter tested at above 10 μg/dL last year. Although the city conducted an inspection, she said, she had to fight tooth and nail with the help of legal aid to get the city and the housing authority to make sure that her Section 8 landlord abated her apartment.

“It was very traumatic, and very stressful,” she said. ​“I noticed there was a difference in her,” in her new difficulties with speaking after being diagnosed with an elevated blood lead level. ​“These children are our future,” she said.

Audrey Brown, a mother of four who lives on Howard Avenue, said that her son tested 10 times at or above 5 μg/dL. She said the city health department only conducted one lead paint hazard inspection. ​“From 2016 to 2018, my son was being sickened the whole entire time,” she said. ​“He’s 5 years old now, and he cannot give you a full sentence.”

The city needs to be conducting more and more thorough inspections, she said, not fewer and for a more limited population of affected children. ​“You could try to stop another child from being like my son right now,” she said to the alders.

Rita Torres said that she panicked when she found out that her 1‑year-old son tested as having a blood lead level of 7 μg/dL several years ago. The doctor didn’t tell her much about what that number meant, she said, and the health department never sent out a lead inspector to let her know where the lead hazards were located.

She said she moved to Mexico for a few months, where her son’s blood lead levels dropped, and then returned to New Haven, only to find herself back in a lead hazardous apartment and her son’s levels back on the rise. ​“I urge you guys, instead of trying to make things a little more lenient,” she said, ​“I think we need to enforce what we have now.”

Alongside those mothers were two healthcare practitioners who testified there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood, and that the city should recognize that 5 μg/dL is the threshold at which the medical and public health community believes that children begin to be most detrimentally affected.

“No lead level is safe for anyone,” said Yale New Haven Hospital pediatrician Marjorie Rosenthal, ​“especially those with developing brains.” Children’s IQs begin to drop dramatically once they hit a blood lead level of 5 μg/dL, she said, with every incremental increase resulting in a statistical association with further falls in IQ and reading and math abilities.

Amanda DeCew, a nurse practitioner at Fair Haven Community Healthcare and a member of the city’s Lead Paint Advisory Committee, reiterated that ​“all lead levels are concerning. I don’t want lead in my kids, and I don’t want lead in my patients.”

In reading through the proposed ordinance amendment and talking with Hamilton one on one earlier this week, she said, she did not find answers to questions that her patients ask her about the city’s policies around lead toxicity on a nearly daily basis.

“‘How soon is someone going to come out and investigate my home’” for lead paint hazards? she said. “‘How soon will the landlord be required to act?’ Those are the questions that I’ve heard from my patients” and that are left out of the ordinance amendment.

The only member of the public to testify in support of the proposed legislation was Yale social scientist Ian Skoggard, who said that he is well read on the latest medical literature about child lead poisoning. From his perspective, the new law would better protect local children than the current one, he said.

“It’s become a bit of a political football in this election season,” he added, alluding to mayoral challenger Justin Elicker’s foregrounding of child lead poisoning concerns in his successful campaign to defeat incumbent Mayor Toni Harp in this week’s Democratic mayoral primary. ​“It’s time for everyone to get together.”

At the end of the hearing, Hamilton said that she was most struck by how many of the mothers who testified on Thursday night were participants in the Section 8 federal housing subsidy program for low-income tenants. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is ultimately responsible for the lead-safety of those residences, she said. Why aren’t the feds being held to account?

She also applauded legal aid for helping bring the public health issue of child elevated blood lead levels to the public’s concern in such a prominent and visible way. ​“I’m actually excited that legal aid was able to organize and bring this issue to the forefront,” she said.

Previous lead coverage:
• Lead Paint Legal Tab Tops $118K
• City Plan Passes On Lead Law
• City Loses Again On Lead
• Judge Denies City’s Motion To Dismiss Lead Suit
• City, Legal Aid Clash In Court On Lead
• New Lead Proposal ​“Eviscerates” Mandate
• Lead Cleanup Pricetag: $91M?
• Lead Panel’s Advice Rejected
• Lead Paint Chief Retires
• Lead Paint Fight Rejoined
• Harp Switches Gears On Lead
• Motion Accuses City Of Contempt
• City Loses Again On Lead
• Briefs Debate ​“Lead Poisoning”
• New Haven: Another Flint?
• Harp Administration Admits Relaxing Lead Standard To Save $$
• Class-Action Suit Slams City On Lead
• City, Legal Aid Clash On Lead Paint
• Legal Aid To City: Get Moving On Lead Paint Law
• 100+ Tenants Caught In Lead Limbo
• 2 Agencies, 2 Tacks On Lead Paint
• Chapel Apartments Get 3rd Lead Order
• Lead Sends Family Packing
• Health Officials Grilled On Lead Plans
• Judge Threatens To Find City In Contempt
• Same Mandy House Cited Twice For Lead Paint
• Lead $ Search Advances
• 3 Landlords Hit With New Lead Orders
• Another Judge Rips City On Lead
• Judge To City: Get Moving On Lead
• Health Department Seeks Another $4.1M For Lead Abatement
• City-OK’d Lead Fixes Fail Independent Inspection
• Judge: City Dragged Feet On Lead
• 2nd Kid Poisoned After City Ordered Repairs
• Judge: City Must Pay
• City Sued Over Handling Of Lead Poisonings
• City’s Lead Inspection Goes On Trial
• Eviction Withdrawn On Technicality
• 2nd Child Poisoned; Where’s The City?
• Carpenter With Poisoned Kid Tries A Fix
• High Lead Levels Stall Eviction
• 460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years
• Bid-Rigging Claimed In Lead Cleanup
• Judge Orders Total Lead Paint Clean-Up
• Legal Aid Takes City To Task On Lead