Make City Agencies Accountable for Protecting Children’s Health

Aaron Peskin, Supervisor
City Hall, Room 243
1 Carlton Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102

Re:  Protecting Children from Environmental Hazards in San Francisco

Dear Aaron,

The purpose of this letter is to follow up on the September 12 hearing with several recommenda-tions for the “next steps” needed in the City’s efforts to protect children from lead hazards in San Francisco.  While preventing lead poisoning is the focus of this letter, the Healthy Children Organizing Project’s goal is to protect the City’s children from exposures to the numerous toxic chemicals in their environment. Making public facilities lead-safe will help protect children from other environmental hazards and is another significant reason why HCOP wants the City to help in this effort.

Based on my analysis of the agencies’ responses and lack of responses to the Department of Public Health [Department] and the Board of Supervisors [Board], I think there are several things the Board can do to encourage City agencies to comply with the lead poisoning prevention legislation: 

[1] continue to urge the agencies to work with the Children’s Environmental Health Promotion [CEHP] program to fulfill their mandates;
[2] help institutionalize the process needed for them to fully implement the legislation; and,
[3] provide funding where necessary and appropriate to help agencies implement the legislation.

Making public facilities environmentally healthy and helping caregivers learn how to protect children from environmental hazards is an important part of the Family Support Network’s and the Board’s efforts to support the remaining families in San Francisco.

The process for institutionalizing each agency’s efforts needs to change from the current one that relies on the Department of Public Health to issue a periodic report and me to facilitate a hearing before the Board. In that regard, the Mayor can issue an executive order asking each agency to comply with the Department of Public Health’s current recommendations and provide yearly work plans and evaluations of their efforts. The work plans can be integrated into each agency’s regular performance management process and evaluated internally as well as by the Mayor, the Controller and the Board.

With respect to the condition of public facilities, the Housing Authority’s and the School District’s facilities are the ones most likely to expose young children to environmental hazards. The District chose not to respond to the Department of Public Health or the Board of Supervisors, in spite of many requests to do so. Most of the District’s schools are older, and the older schools reportedly contain a number of environmental hazards, including but not limited to lead hazards. We don’t know what the current conditions are in the Housing Authority’s older properties, but our work with the City’s Asthma Task Force indicates there may be significant problems there too.

While the School District [District] and the Housing Authority are not City agencies, children’s health doesn’t recognize political boundaries, and the City can’t afford to do so either. Lead poisoning caused by the condition of their facilities affects the health and well being of the children and their families and communities in San Francisco. It makes City agencies’ and CBOs’ efforts to provide effective family and children services and support more difficult and costly. As those children grow into adulthood, lead poisoning is associated with behaviors that are challenging to their communities and several City agencies whose budgets are already strained.  It is also associated with a number of serious adult diseases that must be paid for and treated.  All of these problems and costs are preventable. The District and the Housing Authority need to make their facilities lead-safe now and keep them lead-safe in the future, and we need to help them do it in any way we can. I look forward to a discussion with you and the Mayor’s Office about what can be done to improve the condition of the older facilities for which both of those agencies are responsible as soon as possible.

In general, several agencies are doing good jobs and deserve to be commended, e.g the Department of Public Health, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, the Recreation and Parks Department and the Department of Public Works. We support the Recreation and Parks Department’s request for additional funding.  In addition, we recommend looking more closely at what the agencies that fund family and children’s services are doing and can do to help fund and encourage education and prevention efforts.  The relatively new First Five Commission should have been added to the Report, and your question about the extent of its support to protect children from lead hazards was appropriate. The Human Services Agency responded appropriately concerning problems it is having sustaining the program and how it will try to overcome those problems. Those efforts need to be monitored. We wish the Library had been as forthcoming, and we recommend further efforts to require a response from it to the Department’s recommendations.  The Library needs to fully implement an effective, long-term program to educate caregivers about how to prevent childhood lead poisoning.  All of these recommendations can be integrated into each agency’s management performance process and reviewed by the Board during yearly budget hearings.

I look forward to the meeting with the CEHP and you to consider: [1] creating incentives for property owners to make their properties lead-safe, [2] inspecting tenant occupied housing periodically for lead hazards, and [3] whatever else the CEHP recommends.

I also look forward to your response to this letter.