May 27
2025
City inaction on lead endangers federal funding
- Share on
Lead hazard remediation training at Environmental Education Associates. Photo by Andrew McLellan.
The City of Buffalo has spent only a quarter of the $2 million in federal funds it has received to abate lead hazards in houses and apartments. Now, the program is coming to an end with less than two months to commit the remaining money before it has to be returned to the federal government.
The Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, which administers the grant, set a goal of remediating 110 residences when it received the funds in 2021. Four years later, only 18 units have been abated.
The city last year received a one-year extension for the program from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Funds needed to be committed by July 4. BURA applied for another extension for this year but was denied, according to the agency’s senior director Hope Young-Watkins.
“As a result, BURA will no longer administer the Lead Hazard Reduction Program,” she told Investigative Post in a statement.
“We remain committed to serving those currently in our program pipeline. It is our expectation to continue servicing applicants who can be contracted by July 2025 and completed by November 2025.”
The city’s failure to spend the funds was criticized by Andrea Ó Súilleabháin, executive director of the Partnership for the Public Good.
“This is another outrageous sign that lead exposure and children with lead poisoning are not priorities in Buffalo City Hall,” she said. “This HUD program was a solid opportunity to remediate 110 properties to protect children in those properties, and it was not prioritized, so they have achieved hardly any of it.”
A history of failure
The need for lead intervention in Buffalo is dire.
Five of the 10 ZIP codes in the state with the highest rates of child lead poisoning are in Buffalo. Three of those ZIP codes are in the state’s top five.
Every year, approximately 450 children under the age of six in Buffalo are diagnosed with elevated blood lead levels, with children living in predominantly Black neighborhoods 12 times as likely to be poisoned by lead than children living in white neighborhoods.
Lead-poisoned children suffer neurological damage, learning disabilities, attention disorders, hearing and speech problems, decreased IQ and a decreased lifespan.
This isn’t the first time the city has failed to make use of federal dollars to deal with its lead poisoning problem.
HUD in 1995 granted the city $3.7 million to create a program that would remove lead paint from 300 homes over the next three years.
By 1998, the city had spent only $1 million and remediated just three houses. Syracuse in the same time period remediated 40 homes.
HUD extended the timeframe for Buffalo’s grant, but the program continued to flounder. In 2001 HUD inspected 153 houses the city claimed to have made lead-safe and found work at more than a quarter of them was incomplete. The first 11 houses HUD inspected still had high lead levels.
The agency froze the program’s funding and forced the city to return the $1.4 million left in the grant.
Contributing to the program’s failure was the city’s use of the money to train minority-owned contractors to do the work, rather than using existing companies with experience and the certifications required by HUD. That aspect of the program became mired in allegations of patronage and mismanagement.
The FBI and HUD’s inspector general launched investigations, but the U.S. Attorney’s office in 2002 determined there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
The city otherwise has had a spotty record dealing with lead paint. During the administration of Mayor Byron Brown, City Hall was slow to adopt measures to address the problem. Last year, the Partnership for the Public Good and other community groups sued the city, claiming it wasn't enforcing law requiring inspection of rental properties for possible lead contamination. A judge dismissed the lawsuit.
City cites challenges
The current program offers up to $20,000 to help homeowners remediate lead hazards in their properties. Owners of rental units who apply for the funding must have tenants who meet income eligibility requirements and have a child under the age of 6 who lives in or regularly visits the property.
Of the $2 million available, only $479,481 has been spent to date.
“Due to multiple factors, there were challenges at the inception of the program, which have now been addressed,” Young-Watkins said.
Those initial challenges included a rollout of the program during the COVID-19 pandemic, when social distancing prevented city inspectors from assessing lead hazards in homes.
There were also geographical limitations that left most city residents ineligible. In its first three years, the program was limited to four census tracts (37, 38, 61 and 171) in the Upper West Side and Schiller Park neighborhoods. Those areas have some of the highest concentrations of elevated blood lead levels in children, according to county health data.
“We encouraged them to try and broaden those areas and expand the program to the whole City of Buffalo, because we were getting phone calls of interest from other neighborhoods,” said Jennifer Carman, director of housing and community development at Heart of the City Neighborhoods, one of four organizations that administer the grant funds on behalf of BURA.
The lead hazard reduction program was expanded citywide in early 2024. Carman said she’s seen an uptick in homeowner applications. That was one of several revisions HUD allowed the city to make to the program to increase eligibility and participation.
BURA officials took a resulting larger pool of eligible applicants as a sign that the program would receive another lifeline.
“Unfortunately, we were recently notified by HUD that no further extensions of this grant would be permitted,” Young-Watkins said.
Disagreement regarding contractors
City officials said a lack of qualified contractors contributed to the program’s shortcomings. But some lead abatement professionals argue that there are plenty of qualified contractors to do the work.
“To date, we have trained over 750 individuals to be renovators,” said Andrew McLellan, owner and founder of Environmental Education Associates.
McLellan’s company has for over two decades been training and certifying municipal inspectors and private contractors.
The Environmental Protection Agency lists over 800 certified lead renovation, repair and painting firms within 100 miles of the City of Buffalo.
McLellan called the program’s end “disappointing” but “not unexpected.”
“You’ve got to think about the human cost of that, because the program is specifically designed for houses where lead hazards have been identified where children live,” he said.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomAlthough many contractors meet the qualifications to do lead abatement work, McLellan noted that a lot of them may find the private sector more appealing.
“The amount of effort that you have to put in can be discouraging for the guys that could do it, because they can just go do private renovations and they get 25 or 50 percent down. They do the work, and they get the cash at the end of the job, whereas you're doing the government's work, you’ve got to file all this paperwork and you’ve got to wait to get paid,” he said.
Contractors are also required to work with the agencies that administer the grant money on BURA’s behalf — Heart of the City Neighborhood, Matt Urban Center, University District Community Development Association and Old First Ward Community Association.
“People can get discouraged to meet their qualifications. It's not impossible. I think it boils down to the will to do it,” McLellan said.
Federal cuts in funding
Elon Musk's federal Department of Government Efficiency in February reported in an internal memo plans to cut half of HUD’s staff, while the President Donal Trump’s partial budget released earlier this month proposes reducing Lead Hazard Reduction Grant funding by $296 million in the next fiscal year. This follows a 31 percent cut Congress made last March to lead hazard reduction grants.
BURA informed the administering agencies on May 12 that the grant program would be terminated.
“We're definitely disappointed,” Carman said. “It was a program that was really targeting lead paint, and while other home repair programs can target lead paint, having this one that can directly assist tenant-occupied units was really helpful in the city here.”
BURA officials said they now plan to focus on working with the county to address lead hazards.
“Recognizing the ongoing need for lead hazard reduction across the city, BURA has coordinated with Erie County, which continues to operate the Erie County Lead Safe Program,” Young-Watkins said.
