Indiana’s legislature unanimously passed SEA-5 in March 2024, establishing steps by which drinking water utilities can replace customer-owned portions of lead service lines (LSL) without the owner’s consent. The provisions are designed to overcome what has become a major challenge facing utilities as they strive to eliminate LSLs in their service area in a cost-effective manner—cooperation of customers.
Successfully reducing children’s exposure to lead requires collaboration between all stakeholders: private and public; health, environmental, and housing; and federal, state, and local. Collaboration is particularly important when it comes to sharing data that helps identify homes that have already exposed children to lead so that the causes and underlying issues can be addressed.
A new Washington State law, passed unanimously by the legislature and signed by Governor Inslee, prohibits manufacturers from making, selling, offering for sale, or distributing for sale or use in the State, any metal cookware with a component containing more than five parts per million (ppm) of lead by the end of 2025.
EPA ordered a property owner of an apartment complex in a renovated old factory in Connecticut to assess and clean up lead-based paint hazards after the agency determined the hazards “may present an imminent and substantial endangerment” to tenants. The agency acted pursuant to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) as a backstop when the local health department lacked authority to address units where no young children lived.
State maps of lead hazards help people visually understand the risks for their state or their community. When they are interactive, they serve as useful means to access detailed information about those risks.
This is the first time HUD has proposed a formula approach, saying it will “allow more efficient distribution of funding to the highest need communities, streamline the selection and award of grants for communities facing large lead paint problems.” The balance will be competitive and “open to a broader range of States, Native American Tribes, and communities with pre-1978 rental housing.”
With a powerful speech in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power called for a global effort to eliminate toxic lead from consumer goods, stating that “[l]ead poisoning claims a staggering 1.6 million lives each year. That’s more than the deaths caused by malaria and HIV/AIDS combined.”
Congress cut HUD’s FY24 appropriations for its Lead Hazard Reduction Grant Program by 31%, from $290 to $200 million for FY24…Making matters worse, Congress also took back $65 million appropriated in FY22 for this program that HUD had until September 30, 2024, to obligate by issuing grants to communities to clean up lead-based paint hazards.
IRS concludes that “the replacement of lead service lines under the programs described above does not result in income to the residential property owners under § 61 of the Internal Revenue Code.” The property owners’ financial need is not a factor.
Codex’s standards have a global impact because they are referenced in a World Trade Organization agreement. Therefore, although Codex standards are voluntary, food and food ingredients traded between countries are expected to comply with Codex standards.
