Bureaucratic missteps stymie California's biggest lead cleanup
LOS ANGELES - Officials have long known that children across a swath of southeast Los Angeles County are exposed to brain-damaging lead from two distinct sources: pollution from a now-shuttered battery-recycling plant and lead paint in the walls of their homes.
The state has begun cleaning soil contamination from yards near the Exide Technologies plant in California's biggest-ever lead cleanup. But bureaucratic mistakes and a lack of cooperation between state and local agencies have blocked efforts to fix lead house paint, state records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times and interviews show.
The result, officials acknowledge, is that children in the area remain at risk of lead poisoning.
Failures occurred at multiple levels. State agencies let scarce lead abatement money slip away and refused to tell local officials which homes were in need of remediation. And the county health department, now in line to receive millions to remove lead paint from hundreds of homes, has not repaired any homes using federal grant money awarded for that purpose more than a year ago.
California regulators in charge of the project have repeatedly warned that unaddressed paint could recontaminate the soil and undo the taxpayer-funded remediation. But years into the cleanup, authorities have fixed lead paint at only a tiny fraction of the 21,000 housing units in the area.
The state blamed inaction on limitations in its authority
