The EPA Lead Rule - Renovation, Repair, and Painting

The EPA recently passed new rules on remodeling homes built before 1978. Until October 1, 2010, the EPA will enforce violations of the Renovation, Repair, and Painting Rule's certification requirement. This Renovation, Repair, and Painting Rule has existed since 2008, but this is an update with a new caveat: certification. Contractors and profession remodelers must go through a training course in order to obtain a certificate that says the recipient knows how to set the project up, do the work, and then remove tools, staging, etc, in the safest way. Although this new requirement of the Lead Rule minds the harm lead can do, there remains concern over the feasbility of taking these classes to be certified.

The harm is mainly done to children under the age of six and pregnant women during any home improvement, including window removal and window installation. Contractors must submit an application and then pay a fee. The workers performing the work in the company must go through a training course given by EPA-accredited professionals to learn lead-safe practices under the Renovation, Repair, and Painting Rule. Training must be completed by December 31 of this year to prevent incurring any fines.

A big development in this is that a provision has been revoked from the rule acknowledged in a July 6, 2010 press release given by the EPA. This provision says that the homeowners can no longer opt-out of the rule. Homeowners used to be able to disallow the rules from taking place based on their assessment, but this agency is gone. The AAMA came out and said that this development is a huge blow to the industry, and in fact it is. The home improvement industry has been declining for a while now, and companies are struggling to maintain a level of business that they had been operating on for years.

Certified contractors giving quotes to homeowners that have not heard about the new rule or removal of the opt-out clause may not be so well received because costs have been invariably rising for window dealers and window contractors. Also, awareness of this rule is mostly important in the world of dealers and contractors in a different way: if there is a project underway that does not comply with the rule, the result can be significant, up to a $37,500 per day violation fee, as well as certification revocation. Incarceration is a reality in the case of criminal offenses. Prices are rising while the vitality of our economy is not, and homeowners, dealers, contractors, and remodelers all need to be aware of this reality, however ill received.

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