NEAR the end of yesterday’s emotional City Council hearing on lead poisoning, Kathy Cudahy, the legislative counsel to the speaker, was standing in the back of the chamber.
“We are going to have to re-group,” Speaker Peter Vallone’s top negotiator on the lead bill was saying. “There will not be a vote tomorrow. We have to go back to the drawing boards and draft amendments that take the members’ comments into account.”
Last Friday, it looked like the fix was in for the landlords to weaken the laws protecting children from the hazards of lead paint.
Vallone’s staff was negotiating with landlords and the mayor’s office. The pro-tenant members of the council had been frozen out of the process. The advocates for kids were waiting around to get a meeting with Vallone’s staff.
Jurisdiction for the bill had been switched from pro-tenant Stanley Michels’ committee to pro-landlord Archie Spigner’s committee.
Guillermo Linares, a strong advocate for poor children, told me he had been tossed off Spigner’s committee against his will. “Evicted,” was the word he used. This seemed to give Vallone and the landlord lobby a safe majority for mischief.
Vallone says Linares left the committee without objection to become chair of a land-use subcommittee.
Vallone’s aides were planning a hearing yesterday, a committee vote today and final passage next Tuesday – unprecedented haste for a major matter of controversy. Usually, there are several months of hearings to get the public’s input. But when the hearing began yesterday, there was the stunning surprise of democracy and real emotions in the room.
This new lead bill was so bad, even council party-liners were stirring, and thinking independent thoughts.
June Eisland of The Bronx is usually predictable to vote with Vallone.
But yesterday, she was asking sharp questions about how this new, hastily drafted bill would impact on co-op boards. Kathy Cudahy admitted to me afterward, “I hadn’t thought about Eisland’s questions. It will take a few days to translate them into amendments.”
Harlem’s Bill Perkins spoke passionately about the child of his aide, a youngster who has a severe case of lead poisoning.
Then the council’s newest member, Michael Nelson of Brooklyn, spoke. He said he would vote against this bill.
Suddenly, the landlord lobbyists, Tony Ricci and John Doyle, looked ill. The script was being torn up. The landlords had overplayed their hand. This bill wasn’t even close to a compromise. It was a capitulation.
Vallone’s bill would give landlords close to a year to remove lead paint from apartments. It would free landlords from legal liability for poisoning kids. Vallone’s bill would even drop the use of an inexpensive scientific test to see if invisible lead dust remains after repairs are made.
City Comptroller Alan Hevesi proposed the whole issue be postponed until the fall, and that negotiations for a compromise begin without an artificial deadline.
The lawyers representing lead-poisoned kids in the chamber immediately agreed.
But the mayor is still refusing to extend the deadline, according to Vallone. What seemed inexplicable was that Vallone was negotiating this bill with Giuliani, not with the black and Latino members of the council, who represent 90 percent of the city’s 30,000 poisoned kids.
Several council members suspect Vallone was trying to make a secret deal with the mayor to get a quick non-partisan election inserted into the new city Charter.
The real politics of lead began yesterday after the public hearing was adjourned.
The landlord lobby still wants to pass this bad bill next week, ignoring the advocates’ offer to lift a court-imposed deadline.
But late yesterday, Vallone’s press spokesman told me: “There will not be a vote on Tuesday. Amendments will be drafted based on today’s hearing. Maybe it will be put on the agenda for this Friday.”
This means the bill might not come up for a vote next Tuesday. It would take a two-thirds vote of the council to put it on the agenda on such short notice.
And there does not seem to be near two-thirds of the council prepared to toady to the landlord lobby.
Stan Michels’ superior bill has 35 sponsors (out of 51 members), and still seems like the best starting place for a real compromise that protects poor kids and also recognizes that it is not practical to remove all lead paint from all apartments.
Last night, Vallone’s staff was up late trying to craft amendments to meet the new objections.
But as long as Vallone attempts to include the mayor’s desires in the legislation, it’s hard to imagine a compromise that will satisfy Michels, Eisland and Bill Perkins, who said, “This bill is dangerous to children.”