Letter About Regulation's Impact on the Poor to Congressman John Yarmuth

 

6/9/2010

Congressman John Yarmuth

435 Cannon House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-5401   FAX 202-225-5776

re:  EPA’s RPP rule and governmental responsibility to inform the public

Dear Congressman Yarmuth,

      As a man who at least appears to be interested in the plight of the poor in this country I’d like to bring a recent EPA regulation to your attention.  Let me say first that I am no opponent of the EPA and consider myself to be an environmentalist and occasional activist.  I am also in favor of lead abatement but would like to express a worry I have about the RRP rule and government’s general attitude towards the poor.

      The new RRP rule contains maximum penalties per day of over $37,000 for non-compliance.  I don’t have the time to read the entire regulation and though I worked as a typist for a major law review while in college, reading legalese is not an easy or enjoyable task.  Imagine that task laid on the average painter.  You may have met one at some point, you know, didn’t graduate from high school, literally scraping by?  These rules require that a painting (or any other) contractor  go through an 8 hour certification course that, if I’m not mistaken, requires a bit of math to be able to work on any building built before 1978.  Has anyone at the EPA actually met a painter?  How do they expect that old black man down the street that paints houses with his brain damaged son and an ex-con that can’t get any other work to a) know anything about this new rule and b) to be able to afford the $250+ per worker and actually be able to pass certification? 

      Let me start with a.  Despite my education and experience I had no idea that starting 5/22/2010 I could be in legal and financial jeopardy if I painted a house built before 1978 until a chance statement from a real estate agent of one of my clients.  I found out by accident.  Does the government believe that ordinary people have legal advisors?  As an artist and musician contracting to be able to afford to make art and music my income is probably the same as the hypothetical painter above and I can’t even afford to get someone else to do my taxes, much less keep an attorney on retainer to inform me of changes to federal regulations that criminalize my livelihood.   I expect my government to inform me of minor details like this.  I’m a licensed contractor, you’d think my representative or city hall or someone could send me a postcard telling me that to continue to work on homes built before 1978 (I haven’t worked on anything newer than 1950 in years) I have to get certified for lead abatement or risk enormous fines.  Or how about at least requiring postings at places that sell paint and hardware?  Is it wrong to expect part of the job of government to be educating people that if they do the same thing they did last year they could be bankrupted?

      Now to b.  Passing certification will be no problem for me (though $250 out of my pocket always hurts) as I already know most of what I need to know and I have a bit of mathematics and test taking skill.[1]  But for many people that can barely get by, both the cost and the difficulty will be too great a hurdle to clear.  There is, as always, little or no consideration of the least amongst us when these decisions are made and the largest burden falls on their shoulders.  When you make $500/week for six months of the year painting houses, $250 is a huge amount of money.[2]  These EPA regulations have put an awful lot of poor, defenseless people in the position of being unwitting criminals.  Was there ever a thought of these people or how to help them deal with this?  I’m pretty sure there wasn’t.  For some reason when people envision “contractors” it’s some middle class man with thirty uniformed workers under him wearing a hard hat and driving a brand new truck when in fact the majority of us are doing this hard, dirty, underpaid work because there is nothing else they can do.  Most of these people are the kind of people we as a country continue to fail every single day.

      Perhaps I’ve been walking around in a haze since this bill passed in 2008 and just missed all the signs, e-mails, postcards, etc. that were put in my face and I just didn’t see them.  I wonder how many of the hundreds of thousands of small contractors in this country know nothing about this rule.  Perhaps you could have a member of your staff find out for me how much the EPA budgeted for enforcement of this rule as opposed to how much they budgeted for informing and aiding the contractors it affects. 

Sincerely,

Alan Miller

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[1] I am an artist and musician that does contracting to afford making art and music.  I have a B.A. from Tulane.

[2] But then again, allowing utility companies to add on flat fees is a disproportionate burden (like if the Louisville Water Co. were to add .25 per 1000 gallons to the cost of water they would probably get more money for repairing our water system but instead they hit everyone with an extra $56/mo so the million gallon a month manufacturing plant pays $56/mo towards this just like me that uses around 1000 gallons a year), just as flat fees for all governmental services is a disproportionate tax on the poor, etc. seems to be the way American government works these days.  And how American business works as well between the virtual use of slave labor for production outside the country to our usurous credit system for that matter.