House bill would hurt efforts to remediate lead hazards in Louisville

by Tom FitzGerald, Kentucky Lantern
February 26, 2025

In Metro Louisville, after extensive input from the public, including landlords and health officials, Metro Council adopted an ordinance in 2022 that took effect in December 2024, requiring residential rental properties be screened for lead hazard and that identified hazards be corrected. The ordinance creates a registry of residential rental properties and their compliance status. Based on the age of the residential unit, a lead hazard screening and control would be required in one, two, or three years.

Lead poisoning is one of the most pernicious and avoidable of child health hazards. Yet opponents of the Louisville ordinance requiring residential rental properties be screened for lead hazard and the hazards corrected before leasing them, have found an apparently sympathetic ear in the sponsors of House Bill 173, a bill that would preempt any local government from maintaining a registry of residential rental properties for any purpose, including lead hazard assessment and correction.

The intent of HB 173 seems clear – local government should not be allowed to require a landlord holding out rental property for human habitation, to assess and correct lead hazards, and to list the property and its compliance status on a registry.

Although banned for residential use in 1978, EPA estimates that some 31 million pre-1978 houses still contain lead-based paint, and 3.8 million of them have one or more children under the age of 6 living in them.  Lead-contaminated dust is one of the most common causes of elevated blood lead levels in kids and commonly occurs when lead-based paint deteriorates or is disturbed. Due to normal behaviors such as crawling and hand-to-mouth activities, young children are particularly at risk of higher exposure to ingesting lead-containing dust. Lead exposure can pose a significant health and safety threat to children and can cause irreversible and life-long health effects, including behavioral problems, lower IQ, slowed growth and more. There is no safe level of exposure to lead, and no beneficial, therapeutic, or non-consequential level of lead in a child, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes.  And the effects of lead poisoning on children are irreversible.  Once measurable blood lead levels are detected, the injury has already occurred.

Lead was banned in paint in 1978, yet 47 years later, we are still grappling with the legacy of the harm to children from its past use in residential housing. In Metro Louisville alone, it is reported that 10,000 children tested positive for elevated blood lead levels from 2005-2021.

Every single day that passes where a rental property contains a lead hazard that has not been detected and corrected (both of which can be accomplished at reasonable cost in most cases), we are risking further exposure of children, including infants, to the easily preventable yet irreversible health hazards of lead poisoning.

No one holding out pre-1978 properties for residential rental should be allowed to ignore the potential risk of lead-based paint hazards. No child should be exposed to the risk of a life of diminished health and opportunity from lead hazards.  The Kentucky House of Representatives appears poised to move forward a bill to preempt the local registry unless the ordinance is weakened this week. The threat of preemption appears to be working, since on Thursday evening Metro Council will consider an ordinance to eliminate the requirement that owners proactively test and remedy lead hazards in all residential rental units.  For fear of preemption, some in Metro Council appear ready to acquiesce, using the anemic argument that “something is better than nothing.”  Assessment and correction of lead hazards in pre-1978 private residential rental units would be required under the revised ordinance only after a code enforcement inspection detects potential lead hazard.

Let us be clear here. “Something,” in this case, is not a responsible compromise. Agreeing to allow more lead poisoning of kids by letting residential landlords off the hook for testing and correcting lead hazards in all pre-1978 rental units in a timely manner; and instead requiring assessment and correction only after a complaint or where a test shows that child to have been damaged by lead poisoning, is indefensible.  It is not a compromise. It is a capitulation under duress to which neither the General Assembly nor the Metro Council should be party.  Kentucky’s kids deserve better.

The majority in our state legislature claim to favor local control.  After working with local governments for 45 years, on hazardous waste, air quality, solid waste management, planning and zoning, and other issues affecting public health and quality of life, I believe that local officials are closest to the community, and are usually best suited to craft strategies to improve and protect public health and quality of life. During my 45 years as a lobbyist, I testified before numerous legislative committees, and helped to author reforms in solid and hazardous waste, mining regulation, and utility regulation.  During that time, the importance of local authority in matters of public health and quality of life, was usually respected.

Yet the General Assembly has in recent years all too often become the focus of special interests who, because they haven’t gotten their way on a local issue, seek to embroil the General Assembly in overriding or preempting local control as a tool to gain what could not be won locally in arguments on the merits. 

After countless hours of effort, involving a broad range of interests, Louisville’s government adopted a reasoned and balanced ordinance to address the tragic legacy of lead-based paint poisoning in our community’s private rental housing, and to give effect to what basic humanity and justice demands – you shouldn’t take money for renting living space without identifying and remedying hazards, and you shouldn’t either knowingly or as a matter of convenient ignorance, expose children to lead hazards and a lifetime of negative health outcomes.

If there is a concern regarding cost, an ordinance could impose reasonable upper bound limits on remediation and require notice to tenants of any risks remaining.  If the concern is one of “private property rights,” then don’t hold your private property out as fit for public habitation for compensation, without first determining it to be safe.

If successful in using the threat of state preemption as a tool to weaken public protection in this case, there will be no end to future efforts by special interests to preempt reasonable local government efforts to protect public health.  If a local government acts arbitrarily in a matter of public health regulation, the courts are always open to review that claim. But where a local community, after extensive input from all parties, crafts an ordinance to require reasonable actions in pre-1978 rental housing to detect and correct avoidable lead health hazard to kids, the General Assembly should respect that judgment, and make clear that it will not be party to any effort to undercut local government efforts to protect the health of kids, including from lead hazards in rental property.

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