We Need To Get The Lead Out!

By Betty Jean Grant

Betty Jean Grant

The health care community has been talking about the danger of lead in our bodies, especially our children's body, at least since this writer was a ķid, in the 1950s. During this time, the mineral known as lead seemed to be in a lot of the products we used, played with or cooked with. Lead was a part of the paint we used to decorate the walls of our houses, in the pots we cooked our food, the toys we bought our children and even in the plumbing pipes that carried drinking water into our homes.

I don't really know what year it was found out that the toys that we played with and sometimes put into little mouths or the paint chips and flakes that fell or were gnawed by toddlers from windowsills were doing more than making a few of the children sick. The sweet taste of the lead acted like an addiction for the nutritious food that was missing from the diets of many of families who resided in low-income communities. Also, we have known for decades that lead poisoning has caused many illnesses in young children that include low birth weight, mental retardation, digestive and neurological disorders, cognitive impairment and more.

Almost 30 years ago, the city of Buffalo received a multi-million dollar grant to help eradicate the danger of lead from our housing stock by remediating affected houses in certain zip codes, especially on the east side of Buffalo. That particular project was not too successful, due to the fact that it was not properly managed and too much of the funding was used for case management salaries and not an aggressive program of making the house lead free. A large portion of the grant was sent back, and the city did not get another grant until a few years later.

Fast forward to this year, 2025, and we have history sort of repeating itself. Several years ago, Buffalo was awarded a $2 million dollar grant to remediate some of our older housing stock that still had a lead problem. The grant had to be awarded to qualified, lead abatement contractors no later than July 2025. One of our newspapers just reported that the city was only able to award $700,000 but had $300,000 that was in the pipeline to be handed out. Alas, that means that half of the grant, one million dollars, must be returned to the federal government!

This writer shall not assign blame here because I don't know who was at fault, but a city as poor as Buffalo cannot afford to just lose a million dollars in our bid to rid our community of lead. But I will feel a lot better if Erie County would take over the lead abatement initiative for Buffalo. The county is our lead agency for most issues pertaining to our health and well-being. It should be an easy lift for them to take charge of the City of Buffalo's house remediation and lead abatement programs.