City of Asbury Park signs “Model Lead-Safe City” agreement with NJ Public Advocate

Mayor Sanders and Advocate Chen Announce aggressive actions to prevent childhood lead poisoning

ASBURY PARK –The City of Asbury Park today joined the growing list of New Jersey cities to sign an agreement with the New Jersey Public Advocate to aggressively respond to and prevent the problem of childhood lead poisoning.

New Jersey Public Advocate Ronald K. Chen and Mayor Kevin G. Sanders signed an agreement designating Asbury Park as the State’s ninth “Model Lead-Safe City.”

 “The City of Asbury Park has taken this serious health issue head on and they are to be congratulated,” said Chen, who unveiled a report last April that showed that thousands of children in New Jersey are poisoned in their homes every year due to exposure to deteriorating lead-based paint. “They already have a number of progressive policies in place and this agreement augments those policies and goes even further in identifying and preventing childhood lead poisoning.”

“I am particularly gratified by the City’s effort to outreach Spanish- and Creole-speaking neighborhoods, so that they might understand the dangers posed by lead paint in the City’s aging housing stock,” said Chen.

According to the Public Advocate’s report, the childhood lead poisoning problem was determined to be particularly acute in the State’s cities. Lead poisoning can cause irreversible, life-long harm including neurological and behavioral problems and, in extreme cases, even death. In response to the report, Governor Jon S. Corzine has signed an executive order requiring state departments to tighten their lead poisoning prevention activities.

Under the Model Lead-Safe City agreement signed today, city officials committed to take steps to:

• designate Hazel Samuels Lead-Safe City Coordinator who will head up all efforts related to responding to and preventing lead poisoning;
• distribute lead poisoning educational materials through city public and private schools;
• will work with community-based organizations to have key educational materials translated into Spanish and Creole and will work to create a system of peer education and support among Spanish and Creole speaking families;
• identify areas in the City where children have elevated blood levels or are not being tested and initiate corrective actions for the safety of all children living in Asbury Park. The City will also focus on testing more pregnant women;
• make a concerted effort to identify toys or candies, specifically candies  from Mexico, that contain unacceptably high levels of lead and will locate specialty stores that sell the targeted products and provide incentives for them to destroy this merchandise;
  
  
• develop an up-to-date list of lead-safe properties and will work with CBOs and cooperating landlords to secure permanent and temporary relocation housing for families with lead-poisoned children.

Because New Jersey has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, lead poisoning remains a challenging public health concern. Asbury Park, in particular, is most vulnerable because of the number of pre-1950 housing units in the City. Household paint contained extremely high levels of lead pigments before 1950.  Approximately 65% of Asbury Park’s housing stock was built before 1950, and almost 92% was built before 1978, the year that lead-based paint was completely banned.

The New Jersey Department of the Public Advocate conducted a field investigation in late 2007 in five of the New Jersey cities with the highest concentration of lead-poisoned children: Trenton, Camden, Newark, East Orange and Irvington. Together, these five cities accounted for 31 percent of all reported lead poisonings in New Jersey in FY 2005.

At each of the 104 addresses inspected, one or more children had already been lead poisoned within the past 10 years, and thus were or should have been inspected. Additionally, approximately one-third of the homes had already undergone an abatement. 

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