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Sullivan County awarded $1.7M lead-based paint reduction grant

By Patrick Adrian [email protected]
NEWPORT — A $1.7 million federal grant to Sullivan County will equip local communities with the resources desperately needed to help homeowners remove hazardous lead paint from their homes.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced on Friday that Sullivan County was awarded $1.7 million in funds through the Lead Based Paint Hazard Reduction Grant Program to identify and mitigate dangerous lead contamination from low-income homes.

Sullivan County was among 44 government agencies in 23 states to receive a HUD grant, which awarded $165 million in total funds nationwide. Two other New Hampshire recipients were the city of Nashua, which was awarded $5.7 million, and the New Hampshire Housing Authority, which received $4.7 million.

“This will be an opportunity for people to really address some of the longstanding issues with lead-based paint that they otherwise would not have the resources to address,” said Claremont Mayor Charlene Lovett, a member of the Claremont Lead Action Team that pursued this grant in partnership with the county.

The Claremont Lead Action Team is a collaboration of community stakeholders, including city, school and county officials and representatives from housing and public health organizations, including Southwestern Community Services and Valley Regional Hospital.

The group formed in 2016 to tackle the problem of childhood lead-poisoning through community education, state policy advocacy and the safe removal of lead-based paints from the housing stock.

“Eighty-four percent of our housing stock in Claremont was built pre-1973 [prior to the federal ban of lead-based paints],” Lovett told the Eagle Times on Tuesday. “Overall, the state’s portion of pre-1978 housing is 62%. It’s a big problem.”

Lead-based paint is a major cause of childhood lead poisoning in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). In addition to paint chips, which young children are prone to consume, “paint dust” released into the air from renovation projects can be ingested through breathing or settle into the soil.

Children under 6 are considered the most vulnerable to the effects of lead because their brains are still in their fastest period of growth, the CDC states. Lead is especially detrimental to the human nervous system and can result in lifelong learning disabilities and behavioral impairments.

“Our first principle is to be proactive,” said Claremont Lead Action Team member Don Derrick. “To get people to make their houses lead safe before they [cause harm].”

But removing lead-based paints safely from homes can be an expensive endeavor. Federal regulations require professional contracts to be properly certified and licensed and the average removal project costs upwards to about $10,000, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website.

After several years of researching funding sources, the Claremont Lead Action Team concluded that obtaining a HUD grant was the only means to bring the group’s mission to fruition.

“We kept running into dead ends,” Derrick said. “We learned if you want to do anything significant, you need to work through HUD.”

Sullivan County applied for the grant because it would receive more consideration than a grassroots group, according to Lovett.

The grant award includes $400,000 to cover administrative costs to manage the fund. Derrick said the group will spend the first half of 2021 to hire a project manager and hazard assessor, who will oversee the dispersal of funds for projects county-wide.

The group also plans to hold educational meetings with Sullivan communities about how the program will work.

“This is a huge win for the county to be awarded this grant,” Lovett said. “We can make a huge difference so far as mitigating lead hazards in homes.”

Equally encouraging to Lovett has been the growth in public awareness and buy-in to the effort to tackle childhood lead poisoning.

In 2016, Claremont was one of the first New Hampshire communities to encourage universal lead testing for children in the city, two years before the state’s passage of SB247 in 2018, which recommended universal lead-testing for children ages one and two and lowered the blood-level threshold to notify parents of possible lead poisoning from 7.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

With the passage of SB247, voluntary testing of children in Claremont has increased from 3% of 1-year-olds and 27% of 2-year-olds before 2018 to 55% of one year-olds and 41% of 2-year-olds.

“We could not have accomplished what we have without a team-based approach and public awareness,” Lovett said. “And we are leading the state in what we are accomplishing.”

Lovett is also encouraged by some improvement in the city’s number of positive cases, though the Claremont group’s goal is for testing participation to reach at least 85%.

Between 2010 and 2015, 194 children in Claremont exceeded the blood-level threshold for lead. In 2018, 21 children in Claremont tested positive, though it is also important to note the higher percentage of children tested and the lower lead level threshold.

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