Community to County Legislature: "Protect Our Children from Lead Poisoning!"

Community members send message to legislature.

It was standing room only. Dozens and dozens of people jammed into the hot county legislative chambers Tuesday night to urge county legislators to protect our children from lead poisoning.

Over thirty people addressed the county legislature, most of them speaking on the lead issue. We heard from teachers, parents, grandparents and residents. People talked about how we can save the county money by preventing lead poisoning. We heard from the Landlord Association who agreed that testing for lead should be mandatory. People talked about the need to act as a community. They talked about the need for our community to protect our children- ALL of our children.

Wayne Zyra, the President of the Monroe County Legislature had to bang his gavel and ask the crowd to be quiet and stop applauding.

The issue was all over the news cycle on Tuesday- on Rnews (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5) every hour, Channel 10 (1 | 2), Channel 13 (1 | 2) and on the front page of the D&C and on WXXI (1 | 2) the following day.

People made their voices heard.

Then, in the middle of the legislative session, Todd Bullard, a county legislator from
Rochester, called for the legislature to suspend rules to consider his resolution to make lead testing mandatory for all county subsidized housing. This is exactly what we were asking for. Bullard had proposed the resolution previously but President Wayne Zyra had dismissed his resolution as redundant. There was discussion over Roberts Rules of debating a call to suspend rules but President Zyra called for a vote. The vote split on party lines. There are more Republican legislators so the motion was defeated.

Each and every Republican in the
County Legislature voted against discussing Bullard's resolution to mandate that county subsidized housing be lead-safe. They didn't even allow a debate on the issue. One Republican legislator said that they needed to study the issue further.

In September Metro Justice will be going door to door in the districts of those Republican legislators who voted against mandatory testing for lead to talk to their constituents to let them know how their legislators voted on this issue and to ask them to write letters to their legislators urging them to protect our children from lead poisoning.

Call Metro Justice at 325-2560 to volunteer to go door to door.

Metro Justice is asking that people come out for at least one Saturday morning in September to go door to door. Metro Justice says that
Monroe County residents have to hold the legislators accountable on lead poisoning.