Rochester gets the lead out.

• Author: Greenbaum, Jon
• Position: Lead: The Poisoning Continues - New York's Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning

Just before the December 2005 holidays, in a packed city council chamber, the Rochester City Council passed landmark legislation designed to end childhood lead poisoning in Rochester by 2010. The city's legislation will now trigger testing for lead paint hazards by the county in subsidized housing. No other community in the nation has achieved more in lead poisoning prevention in its first attempt. The impressive effort leading up to that victory involved many integral parts--grassroots community members, major institutions, scientists, health professionals and progressive politicians.

The campaign's achievement is all the more notable because the city and county were compelled to work together. The coalition derived a good deal of its power from its attempt to be inclusive. The coalition's attempt to get a multiperspectival view of the issue meant that people were brought together who wouldn't ordinarily work together. Many people got a chance to walk through the public policy social change process from start to finish and see how the levers of power operate.

The Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning was formed in 1999 as Lead Free Rochester. Metro Justice joined the Coalition in 2002. The initial goal of the coalition was reflected in its name--making Rochester lead free. The coalition began an educational phase to explain the role lead poisoning plays in learning disabilities, loss of IQ, and delinquency and convinced the county to commission a study mapping lead poisoning in Monroe County. The coalition drove home the importance of primary prevention in stopping childhood lead poisoning.

Until City Council passed the legislation, we were treating the children of our community as human lead tests. Neither the city nor the county was looking for lead paint hazards and neither governmental body was obliged to take action until after a child was poisoned.

The coalition's stated goal meant removing lead from every home in the area. With the price tag for abatement around $40,000 per home, such an undertaking was not even vaguely politically feasible.

The coalition soon realized that it would have to define the issue more narrowly. Any social change movement has to effectively define a problem as an issue. The civil rights movement would have failed if people had stood in front of governmental buildings demanding the end of racism. Movement leaders shaped a strategy that first defined the issue as integrating schools. They then moved on to other Jim Crow laws, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1964. From there the movement took on affirmative action, redlining and continues...