Dear Commissioner Thomas Frieden:
You have gotten off to a promising start in one of the City's toughest jobs, Commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Just look at your list of accomplishments so far.
You aggressively took on the battle to get New Yorkers to stop smoking -- advancing landmark prohibitions on smoking in restaurants and bars, boosting cigarette taxes and even distributing nicotine patches to help New Yorker's kick the habit.
You have been systematically building up New York City's disease surveillance system -- to insure that the city gets the earliest possible warning of infectious disease outbreaks and unthinkable medical emergencies.
And you have been quick to respond to any report suggesting that Severe Acute Respiratory Disease, or SARS, might be trying to secure a toehold in our city.
You have done all this while absorbing tough budget cuts at your agency, and as you work to complete a smooth merger of two former departments that now fall within your portfolio.
So it's understandable that you may just have been too busy to take on the important battle of protecting New York City children from lead poisoning.
But this issue too deserves your attention. And the time is now, I respectfully suggest, for you to make room on your overloaded priority list to come to the rescue of thousands of city youngsters who are unnecessarily suffering from the preventable health impacts of exposure to toxic lead in paint.
THE CHALLENGE OF TOXIC LEAD
As you know, more than 6,200 children with elevated lead levels were newly identified and reported to your department in 2000. Independent estimates suggest that the total number of city children with blood-levels about the 10 micrograms per deciliter threshold is probably double that amount. As has been well-established by the medical community for more than four decades, and as your department has long-acknowledged, elevated blood lead levels can "result in long-lasting neurological damages that may be associated with learning and behavioral problems and with lowered intelligence."
The problems of lead poisoning are not equally distributed across the city. Neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant/Crown Heights, East New York, Williamsburg/Bushwick and East Flatbush/Flatbush (in Brooklyn) and Jamaica and Southwest Queens (in Queens) have for years been disproportionately affected. About 95 percent of the lead-poisoned children identified in the department's 2001 annual report, Preventing Lead Poisoning In New York City, were Black, Hispanic or Asian.
No wonder then that a 1993 Mayor's Advisory Committee Report concluded that "[c]hildhood lead-paint poisoning may be the most significant environmental disease in New York City, in terms of the numbers of cases, the severity of the medical damage created, and the personal, social and economics costs it imposes."
In a recent profile of you, Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times noted that, like Mayor Bloomberg, you "live on the data... [and] believe in the numbers." So please take a look at the data and numbers concerning elevated lead levels in New York City, and tell us what you think.
Thankfully, the number of reported cases of lead poisoning has declined in recent years.
But isn't it a disgrace in 2003, in the greatest city in the nation, that thousands of children will suffer the intellectual and behavioral burdens from new exposures to long-lasting leaded paint in their apartments and homes?
And what about the latest data, just published in the medical journals?
Have you seen the April 17, 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which reports on a study of children in Rochester, New York -- finding that children suffer intellectual impairment even at blood-lead levels below 10 micrograms per deciliter? Another study, completed at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, also released last month, reached similar conclusions. An author of that study, Bruce Lanphear, concluded: 'There is no magic number for lead poisoning; the science shows that any lead exposure hurts fetuses and young children."
I'm sure your excellent staff can pull together all of the latest research data for you. They make a compelling case for further action by New York City to do everything that it can to end exposures to toxic lead in paint without further delay.
NEW YORK CITY'S ANEMIC LEAD LAW
Unfortunately, existing City law -- Local Law 38 --does not do what is necessary to reduce the lead threat to New York City youngsters.
In 1999, a divided City Council enacted a new lead law, weakening an earlier city statute. The 1999 law limited lead "hazards" to peeling paint, placed no duty on landlords to prevent poisoning from lead dust, contained week training and certification provisions, shifted the burden from landlords to tenants to know about lead hazards in the dwelling and set out extended time frames for enforcement of lead paint violations -- among numerous other gaps.
It was no surprise then that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told city officials in 2000 that the new law will probably result in additional cases of lead poisoning. "I believe that Local Law 38, as currently written, falls short of the protection that children deserve and need," said then EPA Regional Administrator Jeanne Fox. The law, she wrote, contained critical loopholes, such as the failure to require trained workers for lead abatement activities and the failure to mandate follow-up testing to insure that the lead abatement work was properly completed.
With such concerns in mind, a diverse coalition of health groups, children's' organizations and environmental activists got together with the new City Council to reform the weakened statute. Leading the charge have been the N.Y. Coalition to End Lead Poisoning, NYPIRG and West Harlem Environmental Action. The city's medical community, spearheaded by long-time lead clinician Dr. John Rosen and others, has also made its voice heard in support of a strengthened lead paint law.
The result is Intro. 101, the N.Y. City Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. Introduced last year by Councilmember Bill Perkins and his colleagues, this statute has more than 30 co-sponsors. It would close more than two dozen gaps in the existing lead law -- expanding the definition of "lead hazards" to any condition that causes exposure to lead from lead-contaminated dust, requiring landlords to prevent (and expeditiously correct) such hazards, and mandating safe work-practices during lead clean-ups, among other things.
As you know, this legislation has been bogged down in the City Council for more than a year.
Do you think that the lengthy delay that has prevented even a vote by the full Council on this bill has anything to do with the significant campaign contributions that some in the real estate industry have made to key City Council members? A March 2003 report by Common Cause found that a group of council members received $160,000 from real estate organizations that oppose the new lead legislation.
I'm sure you agree that this isn't a great way to make health policy.
HERE'S WHERE YOU CAN HELP
After much delay, a hearing on Intro 101 is now expected to be held in June. It is the perfect time for you to wade in on this issue.
I know how busy you will be over the next few months -- with budget issues, SARS, West Nile virus, AIDS and so forth.
And everyone fighting for a tougher lead paint law is aware of the significant efforts already underway in your department to reduce childhood lead poisoning.
But I urge you to please take a close look at this legislation.
From everything I can tell, the medical community is strongly in favor of Intro. 101. But you are the city's top doctor. And the lead legislation is an issue that cries out for your attention.
If you or your staff have technical questions or suggested revisions, please share them now with Councilmember Perkins and the bill's other key sponsors.
And if, as I hope you are supportive of the bill, please make the time in your schedule to put the power of your position behind this legislation.
The crises and challenges you are facing and are likely to face over the course of your tenure are enormous. So is your potential to do great things for this city. Passage of Intro. 101 and the elimination of lead poisoning here deserve to be on the list of significant health advances that you and Mayor Bloomberg helped to orchestrate.
Sincerely,
Eric A. Goldstein
Eric Goldstein is co-director of the urban program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The East River is not really a river. Technically, it is a tidal strait, connecting New York Harbor with Long Island Sound. At a bend in this non-river are a couple of Bronx neighborhoods that have been treated as non-entities, subjected to a century of industrialization and two generations of waterfront abuse and neglect -- Port Morris and Hunts Point. They have the distinction of being the waterfront neighborhoods with the least amount of waterfront access of any in New York City.
“With only a tiny sliver of waterfront land set aside for the public,” says Paul Lipson, executive director of The Point Community Development Corporation, “the 11,000 residents and 16,000 workers who share the peninsula have virtually no space at the water's edge for recreation, relaxation, or exercise.”
The waterfront of these communities stretches 3.5 miles between the Harlem River Rail Yards to the south and the Hunts Point Terminal Market to the east. To the north along the Bronx River sits the Sheridan Expressway, which blocks access to the Bronx River.
The whole area is probably one of the few in the city where there are more solid waste handling facilities than bodegas. It has the largest food distribution center in the nation, which brings in so many trucks that the communities suffer among the highest asthma rates in the city.
There are currently some $500 million worth of city projects slated for the area, though it is difficult to see how they would result in any meaningful gains for the residents-- the projects include improving the truck market , bringing in the Fulton Fish Market, and expanding the Hunts Point Sewage treatment plant.
A highly organized and energetic community as lives here, though, can not just throw off sparks but make potentially incredible things happen. Why expect anything less? This is the community that gave New York salsa music, and was home to one of the first amusement parks in the city.
THE FISH MARKET
The relocation of the Fulton Fish Market from Lower Manhattan to Hunts Point has raised the concerns of local residents, advocacy groups and elected officials alike. Congressman Jose Serrano, for instance, has drawn attention to the likely air quality impacts of moving the truck-based seafood market into a community that suffers from high volumes of truck traffic already. Nearly a half century ago, the city relocated the Washington Market (the major produce market) from Lower Manhattan to create the Hunts Point Cooperative Market. This facility now handles approximately one-half of the food consumed in the entire metropolitan region each day.
The city’s investment in Hunts Point also has the potential to build community amenities into this series of public works such as the “South Bronx Greenway” which will connect the Bronx River and Randall’s Island, which, just off the southern tip of the Bronx peninsula, is emerging as the Central Park of the East River. According to Omar Freilla of the Sustainable South Bronx, the city is on the right track.
“We now have official buy-in from the city,” said Freilla, “which is critical because they are the largest landowner on the peninsula. At the Fish Market site they have reserved 50 feet at the waterside as an esplanade.” How the water’s edge of this project is designed, noted Freilla, will impact the actual width of the eventual Greenway. A vertical bulkhead reconstruction, for instance, could accommodate the entire 50-foot width. But if there is a “rip-rap” edge (typically composed of large rocks or boulders in a gradual downward slope from land to the river bed, then the Greenway could be significantly smaller. Use of a rip-rap edge, in fact, would also interfere with the opportunity to use the waterfront to move freight in that a boat coming in for a pick-up or drop-off might essentially run aground on the rocky slope.
Is there a chance that the fish market might enhance the emissions reduction infrastructure already in the neighborhood? Maybe, but it is still too soon to know.
“It would be difficult,” said Gerry Bogacz of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, the regional coordinated transportation planning agency for downstate New York which is studying a possible freight ferry for Hunts Point. “The shippers involved are based all over the region and country. It is therefore hard (impossible?) to impose emissions reduction measures on their vehicles.”
But to clean up the air it is not as if the community is starting from zero, notes Bogacz. “There have been efforts, which we've been part of, to [provide incentives to] Bronx shippers to consider alternative fuels. The truck electrification pilot seems to be one of the most promising steps for the market.”
WHERE IS OLMSTED WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
Frederick Law Olmsted supposedly took the lessons he learned from creating Central Park and applied them in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and what he viewed as his greatest innovation had nothing to do with the park itself, but with the parkways leading to the park – Eastern Parkway, and then Ocean Parkway, which connects to Coney Island.
In the 130 years since Prospect Park was created, we still have not demonstrated that we can create the connectivity to parks that we need to. The construction of Hudson River Park shows what happens when designers don’t deal with the access issues related to getting across highways, and the planned development of Brooklyn Bridge Park shows that access issues do not solve themselves. What the South Bronx may need most is a connection to Randall’s Island to help create the feeling that you are a part of something, rather than just stuck in the middle of a neighborhood characterized by dead-end streets.
This year, the reauthorization of the federal Transportation Bill known as TEA-21 creates a great opportunity for all of these transportation innovations and investments to get the funding they deserve: clean fuels, water transit, bikeways and greenways. There is perhaps no better way to honor the memory of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose landmark legislation 12 years ago woke us up from the “highway haze” that ruled transportation policy since the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
Growing up on 42nd Street young Moynihan was 12 years old before he knew the Hudson River flowed just a few blocks west of his apartment. Let’s hope 60 years after Moynihan’s awakening to the Hudson that today’s generation of city leaders, civil servants and urban planners can make these connections through the great wall along the waterfront of the Bronx. Thousands of 12-year-olds must live along this stretch of waterfront suffering the same detachment. Whether aspiring salsa musician or eventual senator, or simply would-be recreational rower, the East River belongs to all of them.
To read more about the South Bronx - and to contribute your own news and views, as well as reports of potholes - go to the South Bronx Gazette, the second of our Community Gazettes.
One year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg's surprise proposal to eliminate the household recycling of metals, glass and plastics, the city's recycling program refuses to surrender.
In fact, recycling and solid waste experts are now cautiously optimistic regarding the future of this highly visible trash disposal strategy. They point to the ongoing successes of paper recycling, to a new offer that would pay the city for recycling all of the plastics and metals it collects, and to determined legislators on the City Council who have defended and advanced recycling as part of a rational long-term solid waste strategy for New York City.
To be sure, the city still confronts the daunting fiscal challenges that prompted the Bloomberg administration to seek cuts in funding for recycling last spring. The Department of Sanitation remains ambivalent in its support for recycling and waste prevention. And regular changes regarding what materials the city collects for recycling have left many New Yorkers confused about exactly what is and what is not part of the city's recycling program today. (Currently, paper and metal are still part of the program; glass and plastic are not.)
Still, what is remarkable, according to some waste experts and fiscal watchdogs, is that the long-term economic viability of recycling is becoming clearer -- even as the city faces perhaps its most serious budget problems in a generation.
BACKGROUND
While recycling has been around New York City in one form or another for decades, a landmark l989 mandatory recycling law, initiated by the New York City Council, triggered an increased emphasis on this solid waste strategy during the 1990s. When the recycling law was enacted, then City Council chief Peter Vallone called it "one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the history of the city."
The l989 statute required the Department of Sanitation to meet annual recycling tonnage requirements that were designed to boost recycling over the next five years. And in the summer of 1989, the department launched what would soon become the first citywide curbside collection of recyclables in New York history.
From less than one percent in the late l980s, recycling in New York City climbed to roughly 20 percent of the city's total residential waste stream by mid-2002. And the 1989 statute (and follow-up state court orders) required the sanitation department to achieve further incremental increases in citywide recycling collections.
In February 2002, however, the Bloomberg administration proposed to "suspend" the recycling of metals, plastic and glass. With the city facing a serious budget shortfall, sanitation department officials forecast that such recycling cuts would result in annual savings of $51 million, due in large part to the reduced number of waste collection trucks that would be needed, they said, under the proposed cutbacks. But recycling advocates questioned the validity of the city's estimated cost savings. And former Sanitation Commissioner Brendan Sexton warned at the time that "halting recycling now is likely to cause irreparable harm to a program that took many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build up."
The City Council, which had long recognized the environmental benefits and political popularity of recycling, stepped up to help save the program. Under the leadership of Solid Waste Committee Chairman Michael McMahon, and in response to vigorous advocacy from environmental and civic organizations, the council brokered a final budget agreement that retained recycling of metals, while suspending recycling of plastics for one year and glass for two years.
The June 2002 compromise worked out by Chairman McMahon and his council colleagues was especially important, say recycling advocates, because it kept alive the separate collection of metals, and set a schedule for the reintroduction of plastic and glass recycling. (As was true of the original Bloomberg administration plan, the final budget deal also preserved the city's successful paper recycling program.)
As a result of the budget agreement announced last summer, the sanitation department ended recycling pick-ups of plastics and glass on July 1st of last year, and returned to collecting those materials as part of the department's regular trash pick-ups.
MOMENTUM SHIFTS BACK TO RECYCLING
Despite last year's cutbacks to the city's recycling program, solid waste experts, public officials and environmental advocates say that recycling is about to experience another one of its 11th hour come-backs. Ironically, the primary reason for their cautious optimism is the increasing cost-effectiveness of recycling when compared to out-of-state waste export to landfills or incinerators.
The Department of Sanitation "justified its decision to suspend glass and plastic recycling on the expectation that the city would save tens of millions of dollars each year," Comptroller William C. Thompson recently wrote. "It is now abundantly clear that merely recycling metal and exporting glass and plastic as waste is more expensive than recycling all of these materials."
According to the Comptroller, with recent new bids for exporting waste from Brooklyn ranging from $75 to $82 per ton and assuming the sanitation department chooses the lowest bidder, the citywide average waste export costs will rise from $66 to $69 per ton. In Queens, the average cost of waste export is $71 a ton. In comparison, the city has recently received a bid to recycle metal, glass and plastics for $70 a ton. Moreover, the export of waste from Queens requires the city’s sanitation trucks to haul the waste to New Jersey, whereas the reinstatement of full-scale recycling would allow Queens to recycle metal, glass and plastic at a facility within that borough, reducing the department’s transportation costs.
Former New York City sanitation department waste expert Benjamin Miller agrees with such economic analyses. "It is utterly predictable that we'd go back to recycling," he maintains.
"The graph lines for [how much the city pays for waste] export are going straight up and the costs for recycling are coming down," according to Benjamin Miller,author of the book "Fat of the Land," which traces the history of solid waste disposal in New York City over the past 200 years.
The costs for collecting and disposing of city wastes have soared, says Miller, by 60 percent since 1996, when New York began to phase out waste disposal at its Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Independent experts predict another 60 percent increase by 2010 in the cost for collection and waste export. This is largely due, Miller believes, to the fact that the city is now totally dependent on a handful of large national waste industry haulers to dispose of its non-recycled trash.
"Expect the costs of waste export to go up, up, up" under the current approach, warns Miller.
At a recent City Council budget hearing, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty had little choice but to concede that at least the vast bulk of last year's projected savings from cuts to recycling were never actually realized. Under vigorous questioning by City Councilmember David Yassky, Commissioner Doherty acknowledged that most of the projected savings from reduced recycling pick-ups were simply transferred to sanitation department waste collection operations, where hundreds of additional truck shifts were added to handle the increase in plastics and glass (which were now being discarded with regular waste).
As the hearing proceeded, a group of students visited the council chamber to see city government in action. Councilmember Yassky welcomed the students and noted: "I do have to caution them that they should not take their lessons in math from the Department of Sanitation."
RECYCLING IS BECOMING CHEAPER THAN WASTE EXPORT
Meanwhile, the fiscal outlook is improving for that portion of the waste stream that is or could be recycled.
Newspapers, magazines, cardboard, junk mail, and other paper products make up the single largest portion of the city's residential waste stream. And for this commodity, the economic benefits of recycling are readily apparent.
New York City is paid for every ton of paper it delivers to recyclers. For example, the Visy Paper Recycling Plant on Staten Island takes about a third of the city's recycled paper waste from the Department of Sanitation. The Visy plant de-inks these paper products and turns them into paper used to make corrogated boxes and other products. On average, the city is paid $7 a ton for paper sent to Visy and other paper recyclers. In contrast to paying $66 or more per ton for trash export, New York City benefits economically from every ton of paper it recycles.
Unfortunately, as a result of public confusion following the suspension of plastic and glass recycling last summer, paper recycling rates in New York have declined by about 12 percent. This problem, experts agree, is reversible with stepped up efforts to educate the public on the specifics of the city's recycling program and the fiscal advantages of paper recycling.
Metals have historically been among the most profitable materials to recycle, both here in New York and elsewhere. As with other recyclables, the markets for metals often fluctuate. Since last summer, New York City has been receiving as much as $30 a ton for the metals it collects for recycling.
The market for plastics has historically been more problematic. But this winter, New York received surprisingly good news when a family-owned New Jersey recycling company bid on a combined contract to recycle the city's metals and plastics.
The New Jersey company, Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, submitted a bid that proposed to pay the sanitation department $5.10 a ton for metals and plastics. (This bid stands in contrast with those from primarily large waste management haulers, whose bids require the city to pay $66 a ton or more for the bidder to take New York's metals and plastics for recycling.)
The Department of Sanitation has not yet officially accepted the New Jersey company bid to handle city metals and plastics recyclables. But given the financial benefits to the city of accepting this offer, solid waste experts believe the contract will be awarded shortly -- with citywide collection of plastics to resume this summer.
CHALLENGES REMAIN
There is no longer much doubt that recycling makes environmental sense, that it preserves natural resources, and that it could provide additional opportunities for local jobs, when compared to garbage export. But recycling advocates say that the city must still reform and enhance its system for collecting recyclables. And pressures to find cheaper ways of disposing of the 11,000 or so tons a day of trash that the sanitation department is responsible for will continue to dominate solid waste discussions for the foreseeable future.
"Despite the positive economic news on recycling of paper, metals and plastics, for New York City's recycling program to be fully successful will require both a stronger city commitment to make recycling work and implemention of new approaches to make the program even more cost-effective," says Mark Izeman, an attorney and waste specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (where I work).
With such concerns in mind, the Mayor's Office and the City Council have jointly released a task force report on the city's recycling program. Although the report is only six pages long, it offers several recommendations that could help foster the continuing growth of cost-effective recycling. For example, it recommends restoration of plastics recycling on July 1st (based upon the favorable bid from the New Jersey recycling firm). It calls for an analysis of "single-stream" collection (in which all recyclables are placed in one receptacle) and for consideration of "pay-as-you-throw" systems (a revenue neutral trash collection approach designed to encourage maximum recycling). And it calls upon the State Legislature to expand the "bottle bill" (so that the five cent deposits would cover non-carbonated beverages) and to return unredeemed beverage deposits to the municipality in which the original purchase occurred (to provide a big, new revenue stream for the city's recycling program).
These and other reform proposals will also be the subject of a comprehensive recycling report, scheduled for release by a coalition of the city's leading environmental and waste organizations in early May.
These are challenging times for the New York City Department of Sanitation, which under the city's new budget proposal is facing lay-offs of hundreds of employees. Fortunately, recycling, which has long been championed because of its wide-ranging environmental benefits, may soon prove to also be one of the most cost-effective weapons in the city's waste disposal arsenal.
Eric Goldstein is co-director of the urban program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.