City’s Lead Inspection Goes On Trial

The city said a family could move a poisoned child back into a West River apartment.

A judge ruled otherwise — after hearing the city lead-paint inspector get grilled on the stand.

That happened in Superior Court Judge Anthony Avallone’s housing courtroom.

It was the latest episode in a saga involving two families whose children have elevated lead levels, a saga that has put New Haven’s enforcement of lead paint law itself on trial.

Under cross-examination Thursday, a veteran city lead inspector admitted that she signed off on a property she had previously identified as contaminated without closely examining every area that needed to be abated. To date New Haven’s health department has refused to speak publicly in response to criticism that it has been lax in enforcing the law, or even to describe what work it is doing; Thursday’s court hearing forced one of its representatives to answer questions in public.

The inspector, Glenda Buenaventura, admitted that potential oversight at the tail end of the latest hearing in the third-floor housing court at the Connecticut Superior Court building at 121 Elm St. involving a dispute between a West River landlord and a young family of tenants he had tried to evict from the home’s first floor unit.

Buenaventura, who has served as a lead inspector for the city’s Health Department for 14 years, was cross-examined for nearly 40 minutes by Amy Marx, an attorney at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA). Marx represents the defendants, tenants Maajid Muhammad, his wife Raihana Akhbar, and their four young children, against landlord Abdullah Soliman, who has been represented by Ori Spiegel of New Haven’s Lawrence Levinson Law Office.

Soliman had initially sought to evict Muhammad and his family from the three-bedroom, ground-floor apartment at 75 Sherman Ave. because of their failure to pay their $1,200 monthly rent in February 2018. Muhammad argued that he had stopped paying because of the poor conditions of the apartment, including the presence of hazardous lead paint that may have lead to his 1‑year-old child testing in December 2017 with an elevated blood lead level of 11 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL). Muhammad presented as evidence the results of a city lead inspection report from April 16 by Glenda Buenaventura revealing high lead levels on the walls, doors, windows and exterior paneling of the building.

On April 27, Judge Avallone ruled that Soliman had to hire a contractor to complete a lead abatement of the unit, and that he had to put up Muhammed and his family in an area hotel in the interim.

On May 9, Soliman withdrew his eviction after Marx filed a motion to dismiss the case because of the landlord’s equivocation when he initially presented the family with the order to move out.

With the eviction dismissed, the two parties gathered again in housing court on Thursday to handle what on the surface appeared to be a simple procedural matter. Judge Avallone had ordered Muhammad to pay his $1,200 due for April rent to the court, instead of to Soliman, while the eviction case was under deliberation. Thursday’s hearing, in theory, was just supposed to be about how that $1,200 was to be disbursed: entirely to the tenant, entirely to the landlord, or split between the two.

But Marx was not content with simply arguing over the disbursement of April rent. She remained concerned about the thoroughness of the abatement work that Soliman had paid for and that the city, on May 18, signed off on.

On May 18, Buenaventura sent a letter to Soliman confirming that she had re-inspected the property on May 16, and that everything looked good.

“I have determined that the order letter to abate lead from this premise dated April 16, 2018 has been met with compliance,” she wrote. She wrote that the initial lead inspection report identifying the high levels of lead throughout the apartment would be removed from the city’s land records, and attached a three page lead dust wipe analysis report indicating that the abatement work had not produced hazardous levels of dust.

Marx said in court on Thursday that she had visited 75 Sherman Ave. on Wednesday, May 23, five days after Buenaventura sent her letter confirming the completion of the lead abatement. She said that she found a contractor at work repaving the driveway and addressing the contaminated soil around the house, but that she had found an unsettling persistence of flaked and chipping paint, particularly on the house’s exterior.

“The exterior is crumbling, decrepit, and in outright awful shape,” she told the court on Thursday. And then she introduced nearly 30 photographs to prove her point.

As she introduced the photographs, Marx questioned Alden Pinkham, a NHLAA intern who had accompanied Marx to 75 Sherman Ave.

Working her way through long shots and close ups of the front, back and sides of the buildings, Marx used her questioning of Pinkham to zero in on flaking and chipped paint on a number of windowsills on the side of the building as well as on the exterior wall paneling by the back porch. All of these locations, Marx noted, had been identified as containing dangerously high lead paint levels in Buenaventura’s original April 16 report.

Marx and Pinkham had brought with them to 75 Sherman Ave. an EPA-sanctioned home lead paint test kit that they had purchased at a nearby hardware store. Marx passed a photograph to Pinkham that showed a chipped section of the side wall anchored by a bright pink smear.

“That chunk of paint was missing when we arrived,” Pinkham testified. She said that after she and Marx had applied the lead test kit to the chipped area, it had turned bright red, indicating the presence of lead paint.

Marx also passed along to Pinkham a small plastic bag containing four inch-wide paint chips, also smeared red. Pinkham testified that she and Marx had collected those paint chips from where they were lying on the back porch a step from the back door. She said they turned from light green, the color of the wall paneling’s paint, to bright red after they applied the lead test kid.

Spiegel, representing Soliman, asked Pinkham if she had ever conducted a lead test before, or if she had any certification of training in the matter. No, Pinkham said. She had just followed the instructions on the back of the kit.

Green Chips On The Floor

Judge Avallone then asked Marx to call to the stand Buenaventura, who had been patiently waiting in the audience section of the empty court room as the hearing progressed from the morning to the early afternoon.

Marx launched into her cross-examination, checking her and Pinkham’s photographs and observations of 75 Sherman Ave. against Buenaventura’s memory and the Health Department case file that Buenaventura had been compelled to bring by Marx’s subpoena.

Buenaventura explained that, as one of the city’s three lead inspectors, she averages around 100 home lead inspections each year. She conducts lead inspections for homes where children have tested as having high blood lead levels, and also conducts lead and asbestos inspections for abandoned properties. She helps write lead abatement plans with contractors, and then follows up to inspect the work after the contractor has finished.

Her routine post-abatement inspection, she said, involves collecting three lead dust wipe samples per affected area, whether it be floor, windowsill, or well, and sending those wipes to a lab for analysis.

“When the results come back,” she said, ​“the unit is considered clear.”

Assistant Corporation Counsel Roderick Williams, who also appeared in court on Thursday in response to Marx’s subpoena of relevant city health records through the Corporation Counsel and Health Department offices, asked Buenaventura what else she does during her post-abatement inspections besides the lead wipe analysis.

Buenaventura said she takes her initial lead level report and the lead abatement plan that she has worked with a contractor to develop, and then does a visual check to see if the areas of concern have been abated. In the case of the ground-floor unit of 75 Sherman Ave., Buenaventura said, the Hamden contractor Oliver Painting & Construction had promised to use a liquid encapsulant to abate the interior and exterior areas of concern. In addition to scraping and disposing of the paint and outright replacement of the affected areas, Buenaventura said, encapsulant when applied to a smoothed, intact painted surface was a perfectly acceptable way to abate a lead paint hazard.

“Can you tell visually that the [encapsulant] is acceptable?” Williams asked.

Buenaventura said she could, because she usually visits a property multiple times as it is being abated. In this case, she visited 75 Sherman Ave. on May 9, May 10, May 14, and May 16 and saw buckets of liquid encapsulant on site. When the contractors finished their work on May 16, she took the clearance dust wipe samples and sent them to the lab.

Williams asked if she had seen any imperfect or substandard abatement during her inspections. She said she had not. Spiegel asked if the lead hazard in the home had been abated to such a level that it was safe for Muhammad and his family to move back into the property. Buenaventura said that the dust lead levels were indeed safe. She did not comment on the lead paint levels.

Then Marx began her cross-examination. She asked Buenaventura about how she inspected the exterior of the building during her post-abatement inspection. Buenaventura said she walked around the building with her initial lead paint report and with the abatement plan, and she made checkmarks and notes on what had been fixed.

Marx noted that not every component had a checkmark next to it. Buenaventura replied that when she does her visual analysis, she does not always put a checkmark next to every contaminated area, even if she has reviewed it and even photographed it.

“If there were green chips on the floor,” Marx asked about the paint chips she and Pinkham had found on the back porch, ​“where could they have come from?”

“When I did my inspection,” Buenaventura replied, ​“there were no paint chips on the floor.”

Marx asked Buenaventura if she visually inspected all four windows on the north side of the building.

“I looked at one of them,” Buenaventura said. She said all of the windows had the same characteristics, and that she did not examine each one in detail because the house was so big.

“Does this look like it was properly abated?” Marx asked, passing to Buenaventura one of the pictures she had taken of chipped and flaking paint on the building’s exterior.

“No,” Buenaventura said.

Marx repeated the exercise for a number of windows on either side of the building. Buenaventura said that the chipping she saw in Marx’s photographs did not strike her as properly abated. She said if she saw the conditions Marx was presenting, she would have ordered the contractor to fix them.

“That’s so close up,” Buenaventura said about one of the photographs. ​“I wouldn’t have seen that.” She said it’s a big house, and she did not look as closely as Marx’s camera allowed her to see. Marx replied that the chipped paint on the side paneling was at least an inch wide, and visible to the eye.

Marx asked Buenaventura to confirm that she had only checked one of the windows in detail in her post-abatement review.

“Right,” Buenaventura said.

At 3:30, Avallone ordered a recess and took Marx, Spiegel, and Williams into his chambers for a private discussion.

Back To Village Suites

After the recess, Avallone ordered that the case be continued for another two weeks, and that Soliman continue to foot the bill for Muhammad and his family to stay at the New Haven Village Suites in Long Wharf. Earlier in the day, Spiegel said that Soliman had already paid upwards of $15,000 on the abatement and hotel costs since the judge had initially heard the case at the end of April. Nevertheless, Avallone ruled that the case should continue for another two weeks and that the unit was not yet safe for Muhammad and his family to return to.

“It’s pretty frustrating,” Muhammad said after the hearing. He said he and his wife and four children have been living in an efficiency unit at the hotel for nearly a month, and that space was so tight that he could not breathe without someone else in the room hearing him. He said his kids have slept on the bed and he has taken the couch. He also said that he is fasting now that Ramidan has started.

But, he said, he would rather stay in the hotel than move back into a dangerous apartment.

“If I’d have moved back in, I’d have reexposed my children to lead,” he said.

He questioned the thoroughness of Oliver Painting’s abatement work and Buenaventura’s post-abatement inspection. ​“If I did something for 14 years,” he said. ​“I’d be a pro. I wouldn’t miss a window.”

After the hearing, Marx said she took no pleasure in grilling an individual inspector who has clearly devoted a lot of time and effort to her job. She said the responsibility for these situations fundamentally lies with the failure of city Health Department policies and procedures regarding lead inspection and post-abatement reviews. She said this case bears an uncannily similar trajectory to that of Jacob Guaman, who revealed a high blood lead level in 2016 after the city signed off on the lead abatement work done to his family’s apartment nearly a decade earlier.

“We are extraordinarily frustrated that in case after case we find situations in which children are in dangerous situations due to what appear to be failures in the Health Department’s policies and procedures,” she said. ​“In each occasion, we attempt to reach out to the Health Department to see what we can do to work collaboratively to address the deficiencies. In each occasion, the Health Department completely rebuffs our outreach and insists that what it’s doing is fully compliant with the law.” In this case, she said, the court has thrown the adequacy of that work into question.

After the hearing, Glenda Buenaventura declined to comment for this article.

The city also released a report two weeks ago announcing that the second floor apartment at 75 Sherman Ave. also has dangerously high levels of exposed lead paint. In a May 14 letter to Soliman, the Health Department wrote that a May 9 inspection by Buenaventura found toxic levels of lead throughout the upstairs unit, which is occupied by Jennifer Williams and her 2‑year-old child Elijah Hall. Hall has tested for an elevated blood lead level of seven mg/dL.

“Said inspection revealed the presence of toxic levels of lead in paint (intact and defective),” the letter read, ​“i.e., paint containing more than 0.50 percent lead by dry weight…or lead at or above 1.0 milligrams per square centimeter of surface.”

The inspection found a kitchen door casing with a lead level of 15.6, a living room window bottom frame with a lead level of 18.1 , and a bedroom baseboard with a lead level of 19.2.

The report orders Soliman to commence the abatement of the hazardous areas of the unit within seven days from receipt of the Health Department’s letter. It orders for the abatement work to be completed within 30 days from receipt of the letter, and indicates that a reinspection will be made at the time the work is done.

“The last couple weeks have been draining,” Williams told the Independent. She said Buenaventura had come by to let her know that there was lead in the apartment, but had not pointed out the most dangerous areas.

She said her son Elijah has recently had trouble singing, one of his favorite activities. She said representatives from the Birth to Three social service agency that works with developmentally disabled children came by her apartment, assessed Elijah, and determined that he has two developmental delays.

Since 2013, the city’s Health Department has opened 1,183 new lead poisoning cases, according to state and city records analyzed by the Independent. Four-hundred-sixty children have been reported sick due to lead poisoning in the past two years.

Lead’s effects on children are irreversible, and even moderate levels of exposure (e.g. 10 – 25 mg/dL) can result in long-term impacts on IQ and memory and can result in permanent hyperactivity disorders and learning disabilities.

Previous coverage:

• 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