Surprise: EPA Renovation, Repair, and Painting Rule Adds Cost, Does Little
New EPA regulations on lead paint in homes — first promulgated in April 2008 and just made effective — apply to all homes, child care facilities, and schools built before 1978 unless testing establishes that the structure is free of lead paint.
According to the best estimates I can find, there are 72 to 80 million children aged 18 and under in the United States. Children under 6 are most vulnerable to the consequences of lead poisoning, defined as lead levels greater than 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, “the level at which CDC recommends public health actions be initiated.”
According to the CDC, the greatest source of the elevated lead levels is lead-based paint and lead contaminated dust. The problem was recognized in 1978, when the use of lead in paints was banned for housing use in the U.S. The CDC contends: “All houses built before 1978 are likely to contain some lead-based paint.” The CDC estimates that paint has deteriorated in 24 million U.S housing units, of which 4 million “are homes to one or more young children.”
Yet the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) claims: “Only 24 percent of homes built between 1961 and 1978 used lead paint.”
The EPA reports that the new regulations affect about 38 million homes and apartments, or 40 percent of the existing housing stock in the country. But NAHB Environmental Communications Director Calli Schmidt, in private correspondence with me, said the EPA’s lower total cost figures are based on the existence of an opt-out provision, which the EPA is removing. As the health consequences of lead toxicity are most serious with pregnant women and children under 6, the original draft regulations allowed a provision for homeowners who had no such residents living in their dwellings.
Indeed, according to Schmidt, the new regulations will cover “all 79 million homes built before 1978.”
If that is the case, about 80 percent of U.S. housing stock will be affected.
I remember when the lead paint problem first hit the news. They showed pictures on TV of kids sitting in rundown tenement hallways munching away on chips of paint that were coming off the walls. I also remember my father completely renovating our 1920s house without face protectors or any modern safety gadgets. I am sure I inhaled some dust from the sanding of old wordwork and plaster walls that were removed. I can’t remember eating the stuff. But then again, my exposures were temporary because old paint was sealed by new latex paint appplied by my parents. I also remember talking to the owner of a rundown inner city apartment building who had given up on repainting the hallways because the new paint job was marked up and ruined in no time by the unsupervised kids of the residents. This seems to be a problem that could be better addressed at the level of basic information and personal responsibility.
Where’s the Hot-Line # I have some contractors using Illegals working on Lead Paint Houses that need to be reported.Ahhhh EPA you just empowered up with a way to get rid of contractors using ILLEGALS!!!
Fraudulent testing and non-compliance are wonderful things, especially when Big Government over-reaches and has no power to enforce.
Ever seen EPA Cops? Me neither.
It is time to shut epa down.
I don’t see how there can be complaints about the usefulness of new bureaucratic regulations in light of the expansion of the civil service with its high wages and benefits and the stimulation of the paper industry. The author overlooks the silver lining in the clouds.
EPA is creating another branch of the underground economy.
Invite your contractor over, have some burgers and beers and you and your “friend ” just fixed that leaky roof.
In the eyes of most liberals, there is no such thing as an acceptable risk.
Spending unlimited amounts of other people’s money may not improve the problem targeted, but it does allow the liberal to feel good about themselves.
As a realtor with 30 years experience, I was once involved in a land sale requiring soil testing which had come back with slight negative indications that a small amount of petroleum based product, equivalent probably to about a gallon, had been leaked and then ran through the first three feet of subsoil and all over the place over the shale below — the kind of thing that would happen if someone was careless cleaning car parts in one corner of the property (which might reasonably have happened since the property was unfenced from the car repair place next door). A big international outfit wanted to test, retest and remediate at a cost nearly of CDN$1,000,000. A Professional Engineer was found with a more reasonable attitude and a price merely of several thousand dollars. After lunch, he acknowledged that the available soil tests, numerous previous reports were thorough and concluded that since the use of the property was going to be institutional not residential, the risk of human contamination was negligible after soil had been moved around anyway in the course of construction.
Did I mention that that the land was only worth CDN$300,000 or so and change?
In my experience, the kind of regulation discussed in this article is merely an excuse for licensed scamming by those with the requisite government approvals enforced by the big stick of government. Everyone loses: workers seeking employment in construction & renovation; builders, developers, property owners, and most of all local governments who find themselves with many otherwise suitable portions of undeveloped — and therefore untaxed land at highest and best use — because the costs of redevelopment are beyond the economic threshold of the marketplace.
The true purpose of govt is to transfer wealth from those who work for a living, to those who vote for a living.
I am so sorry that what you say seems to be the new truth.
Take a look at how many certificates, licenses, permits, registrations, medalions, etc a cab driver and his vehicle need in NYC.
Commercial Realtor nailed it. It’s all a game, dog eat dog, deals and schemes, winners and losers, payoffs and paybacks, smart and stupid, fools and saints, the government has all the money and only the strong survive. How’s your game today?
The EPA is just another fraud the government is scaming us with. If people knew the cost of it all they would be blown away !! The EPA does little to protect us.
Marxism at its best. The very people who will be effected to most is the ones who certainly can’t afford to pay the additional costs.
Letting our civil servants pass the day watching porn isn’t such a bad idea after all. Look what happens when they stop having a circle jerk.
This is a big burden on those of us wanting to remodel our 1970′s homes. I will do the demolition myself and save any conractor/painter the hassel of “disturbing” more than six square feet of wall space (as specified in the new regs). Then we can all evade the EPA and stay legal. (The people can outfox the bureaucrats, but why should we have to?)
Please tell me how to get a copy of the regulations concerning housing built
before 1970. My local government can not tell me where to find these, just the fine ( they believe starting at $37,000) if I use a contractor without a
certificate.
Thank you,
S
There is a lot of very important and up-to-the-minute information available at http://www.renovatorrules.com.
This is ridiculous. First, a simple lead test kit costs a measly 5-bucks. If you see a pink color on the swab, then you have a lead problem or are pregnant with twins.
But seriously, I WAS a contractor and was blown out of business by the EPA/OSHA.
I started a large older building and tested it for lead. The owners said it had been completely scraped and sanded clean in the mid-70s.
The EPA showed-up after a jealous competitor called them because he didn;t get the bid and they PICKED UP A DIRTY PAINT CHIP on the ground that had obviously been there for years. They got the “code pink” and then set about raping me for the next year. The mandatory meetings, hearings reviews and emplyee testing KILLED my business. How can a building that was “completely stripped” 30 years ago be contaminated???
Anyway, I fired everyone and became a landscaper at a hotel. I fought my fine done to $4,000. This was for ONE HOURs worth of work performed prior to their arrival. The original fine was closer to $20K!
This is WHY corporations and even small businesses head offshore or to Mex or Canada. The EPA/OSHA make it impossible to be competitive against illegals with no insurance and no MSDS sheets, schooling, testing for lead, etc.
I read in Monday’s WSJ (05/10/10) that formerly contaminated land was being bought by a company constructing ‘wind farms’ Since the land was often much cheaper, it enabled them to construct the farms at a much lower cost.
New development of technology/business that didn’t exist when EPA was formed should be considered. However, EPA is probably just a bunch of bloated bureaucrats.
Once again, facts do not get in the way of the Democrats (and many so-called Republicans) socialist agendas.
I live in a house that was built in 1931. It is in a neighborhood that was built out before 1940. May of these houses were retrofitted decades ago with Asbestos siding and shingles. Some may have been once painted with lead based paint.
My neighbor’s house was built in 1929 by his father. He grew up there. He is almost 80 and in bad health. I was considering buying his house some time in the future to repair and sell. But, not now. Can’t afford the risk of running afoul of government gone wild.
I am sure that if you peel away the asbestos siding, you might find some lead based paint. With both asbestos and lead paint, how much would it cost to remove same?
This EPA rule would make real estate investment too risky – no limit to the penalties and costs that the EPA could assess.
In my city, the Building Permits are thrown away after five years so how does one determine when their house was built?
Under these rules, buying houses would be suicidal.
That is why I spanked my kids. It is proven healthy. If they had to stand in the corner for a “time out” my goodness. They would be licking all that lead paint.
having worked at a large telecom for 30 plus years (as my father). We worked with lead cables and lead dust on a regular basis. We just drank milk or had a milkshake to bond with the lead and cleanse our bodies. Worked about 99% of the time, countless blood tests showed no heavy metals in my system (I also have organic brain syndrome another story). Only know of one person who died a painful death of lead related to cancer. Long live the nanny state.
Part of the issue is the EPA is lowering exposure limits to ensure continuing employment; theirs, not ours. The limits are now so low that the U.S. government should be evacuating large parts of Southern Missouri and Arkansas. The indoor exposure limits are lower than the natural background lead level outside. The net result is is that any company that can conceivably move their business out of the country to escape oppressive EPA regulations has done so. Now, they’re coming after us.
In 1982 I poisoned my family with lead because I was remodeling the house we were living in. The first doctor we consulted didn’t recognize the symptions. We were fortunate that our daughter’s pediatrician recognized the symptoms of lead poisoning and started treating the whole family right away. Yes a primary purpose for the law is protecting children, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that adults can also be affected.
The new law doesn’t require lead be abated. It requires anyone working on a building for hire use “lead safe work practices” for the work that they are doing if the building was built before 1978 and has lead based paint. Using an EPA approved spot test kit to test for lead in paint isn’t expensive. If there’s no lead, no problem. If there is lead then the contractor shouldn’t be doing things that will cause the lead to be released as dust.
There are simple and low cost methods to keep lead levels low and prevent its release when rennovation work is performed. For now I expect there will continue to be a lot of criticism about the new law – and I will be one of the first to admit that it has flaws, but the information that contractors are being taught with regards to controlling the release of lead is sound. The training materials are posted at the EPAs website and can be downloaded for free: http://www.epa.gov/lead/pubs/renovation.htm#contractors
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