Elimination of Childhood Lead Poisoning in Monroe County on Target for 2010

August 1, 2007

Author: Bryan D. Hetherington

The community-wide effort to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in Monroe County is showing great success.  Figures released by the Monroe County Department of Health show that the number of children poisoned 1 in the county has been reduced from just under 1,300 per year in 2000, to 571 in 2006.  This reduction puts Monroe County on target to end lead poisoning by 2010, the goal set at a community-wide lead summit in 2003. Attorneys from Empire Justice Center and Monroe Co. Legal Assistance Center, the Rochester Office of LawNY, have played key roles in the effort.

The effort began in 2000 with the formation of a community wide coalition to reduce lead poisoning.  A Rochester elementary school principal had discovered that 41% of incoming students in his inner city school were affected by lead poisoning.  He had built a community health center at the school and, working with a pediatrician from the health center, had discovered that lead poisoning reduces IQ and creates learning difficulties that make it much harder to learn to read.  Lead poisoning often causes easy distractibility and poor impulse control (so children act like they have ADHD), poor judgment and planning skills, as well as causing a host of life long health problems.  Children who are lead poisoned are eight times more likely to fail to graduate from high school than children who are not poisoned and controlling for socio-economic factors are 20% to 30% more likely to engage in juvenile crime than students who are not poisoned.

Empire Justice attorneys were asked to join the coalition because we had worked with the school principal on a committee following our special education reform lawsuit and he had come to recognize that the lead poisoning problem was not solvable without some real systems change advocacy.   The initial coalition consisted mainly of community activists and neighborhood leaders; physicians, and nurses; educators; environmental and public health scientists from the University of Rochester; city and county health and housing staff; lead risk assessors; some landlords and the attorneys from Empire Justice Center and Monroe County Legal Assistance.  The coalition incorporated and set up a governance system that ensured that important decisions required broad support from all constituencies to be approved.

It quickly became clear that the community was clueless about the extent of the lead poisoning problem and its harm to children.  There was a real belief among many that the problem had been solved in the 1960s.  The few community leaders who understood there was a problem, were pretty much unanimous in their belief that it was such a large and expensive problem to solve, that there was no point really trying.

The Coalition decided it needed to reverse these perceptions in order to succeed in changing policy. It received a grant from Kodak to hire a part time Communications Director to help change public understanding of this issue.  Past efforts had been focused on asking within the existing policy framework what could people of good will do to reduce the amount of poisoning.  The nation has a public health goal of ending lead poisoning by 2010 but no one locally was asking what it would actually take to do that.  The Coalition adopted as its goal ending lead poisoning in Monroe County by 2010.  Coalition volunteers then looked at what would have to happen in order to end lead poisoning by 2010.  It found that city, county, state and national policies needed to change and created a policy agenda.  It also recognized that two local policy changes would have the greatest effect on reducing the number of children poisoned.

The Coalition adopted as its goal ending lead poisoning in Monroe County by 2010.  Coalition volunteers then looked at what would have to happen in order to end lead poisoning by 2010.  If found that city, county, state and national policies needed to change and created a policy agenda

The Coalition adopted a primary prevention approach, that is, it sought policies that prevent poisoning in the first place.  It believed that the two most important changes in policy to reduce poisoning would be:

to add lead safety screening to the existing pre-move in inspections for families receiving public assistance where the landlord was seeking direct payment of the rent; and
a city ordinance requiring inspection of all rental housing, as part of the periodic Certificate of Occupancy process and on demand or complaint by tenants or others acting on behalf of the tenants.

Where lead poisoning is likely to occur is actually predictable.  Most homes built prior to 1960 contain some lead paint 2 , and most built before 1940 contain a good deal of it.  When those homes are well maintained lead poisoning is rare, and is usually the result of home renovations that were not done using lead safe work practices.  The vast majority of the housing stock in Rochester was built before 1940.  However, when Empire Justice Center  attorney Mike Hanley mapped 15 years of lead poisoning location data, it became clear that the poisoning was highly concentrated in the low income neighborhoods with deteriorating low income rental housing, not older neighborhoods with well maintained housing.
In order to build community understanding of the problem, its consequences and support for the goal of ending lead poisoning by 2010 in Monroe Co. and the actions needed to achieve the goal the Coalition and the United Way sponsored a lead poisoning prevention summit.  The 500 community and neighborhood leaders who attended the summit heard national and local experts discuss the problem and what it would take to solve it, attended workshops on specific topics, and were asked to make concrete public commitments of  what they or the organization they headed would do to end lead poisoning by 2010.  The County Executive committed to add lead inspection to the public assistance housing inspections and the Mayor committed to introducing a comprehensive lead poisoning prevention ordinance.

In the end more slowly than we hoped, both kept their word.  The Coalition had to draft amendments to the Mayor’s proposal to improve it, most of which ultimately passed at a very exciting Council meeting in December 2005, to be effective in July 2006.  The law is described in the City’s web site http://www.cityofrochester.gov/index.aspx?id=96.  Mike Hanley did exceptional work drafting most of the amendments and working with a small team of scientists and activists to try to keep council focused on the science and away from the scare tactics of the landlords. Since passage none of the negative results anticipated by the landlords have occurred.

Since passage, the Coalition has drafted a comprehensive community plan to get the rest of the way to zero by 2010.  Significant funding has been set aside by the Greater Rochester Health Foundation to assist over the next three years in funding activities under the plan.

Endnotes

1  Children with more than 10micro grams of lead per deciliter of blood (ug/dl), the level of concern set by the federal government.  Newer studies have shown significant negative effects on IQ below that level and no level of lead is believed to be safe.

2  The use of lead in paint was not banned in the United States until 1978, but lower amounts of lead were used in paints after 1940, since the lead was needed for the war.