City

Common Council proposes new lead ordinance

Corey Henry | Photo Editor

Mandatory dust wipe tests would add about 10 to 15 minutes to each home inspection.

Syracuse’s Common Council is seeking public input this month on a proposed ordinance to prevent lead paint exposure.

The drafted ordinance would require city inspectors to test all properties for lead hazards and cite existing lead paint as a code violation. Exposed lead paint is currently not considered a code violation in Syracuse.

The federal government banned the commercial use of lead paint in 1978. Nearly 91% of homes in Syracuse were built prior to 1980, according to the U.S. Census.

Lead paint is harmful to pregnant women and children, who can ingest lead through dust and paint chips in older homes, said Councilor Joe Driscoll, of the 5th district.

“In the past, the way we’ve dealt with lead is once the child is poisoned, we move reactively,” Driscoll said. “With the enforcement, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get into the interiors, do these dust wipes and test for the presence of lead before the child is poisoned.”



After conducting a Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement to assess any environmental and social burdens associated with the ordinance, the council has now entered a 30-day public feedback period. The city will host its first public hearing Wednesday.

The council will assess the community’s input and make any necessary revisions before voting on the new legislation, Driscoll said.

The current ordinance draft proposes fines for landlords who fail to remove lead from their property after multiple lead tests, he said. The fines increase exponentially each time a landlord fails to respond to the threat of lead exposure, he said.

Driscoll said he expects some landlords to oppose the legislation given the time and costs involved with fully extracting lead from homes.

Dust wipe tests — a method for testing homes for lead — could also add 10 to 15 minutes to each home inspection, Driscoll said.

“We want to let landlords know that we are their partner,” Driscoll said. “And we’re trying to help and develop legislation that creates penalties and consequences for those landlords that neglect their duty as a property owner.”

Lead paint hazards were found in 211 county properties, according to a 2018 report from the Onondaga County Health Department. That same year, 10.4% of tested children in Syracuse had a blood-lead level of more than five micrograms per deciliter, according to the data.

No medicine can completely rid the body of lead, said Travis Hobart, medical director of the Central/Eastern New York Lead Poisoning Resource Center at Upstate Medical University.

Most kids who have lead poisoning show no symptoms, Hobart said. Some symptoms that do manifest, such as abdominal pain or constipation, can be mistaken as typical childhood conditions, he said.

New York state law requires all children to be tested for lead poisoning when they are one and two years of age. Children could live with high levels of lead in their body and never realize it if they are not tested, Hobart said.

“That’s again why we place such an importance on what we would call primary prevention in public health,” Hobart said. “Getting these houses tested before a kid is ever exposed and making sure the houses are safe for kids before they ever live there.”

Sandra Lane, a Syracuse University professor of public health and anthropology, conducted a study in 2008 that determined lead poisoning costs the city half a million dollars a year. The study factored in the cost of Medicaid, special education and youth criminal justice.

“There are other problems in Syracuse and lead is not the only one,” Lane said. “But if we fix this, that’s a really huge step.”





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