$1,495: The Price Tag the EPA Put on Lead Poisoning Military Families
The Non-Financial Ledger: What $1,495 Cannot Cover
Lead does not announce itself. It has no smell. It leaves no visible stain on the hands of the child who touched the sanded baseboard. It builds silently in blood, crosses the brain barrier, and begins dismantling the architecture of a developing nervous system. By the time a pediatric blood test catches it, the damage is already done, and no amount of chelation therapy fully reverses what lead takes from a child’s cognition, attention, and emotional regulation.
The families who lived in or near 605 Scott Avenue in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were not random bystanders. Fort Leavenworth is one of the oldest active military installations in the United States. The people who live on post are military families: spouses managing households while a service member is deployed, children enrolled in base schools, infants in cribs. They trusted the federal government to maintain a safe environment. They trusted the contractors their government hired to follow the rules written specifically to protect them.
Those rules exist because Congress, in 1992, looked at decades of evidence that lead-based paint in older housing was poisoning American children and decided the federal government had to act. The rules that followed required any contractor working on pre-1978 housing to get certified, to contain lead dust and debris, to post warning signs so that nobody wandered into a contaminated work area, and to hand owners a pamphlet spelling out exactly what risks were present. These rules are not bureaucratic paperwork. They are the only thing standing between a renovation crew’s grinder and the lungs and hands of a three-year-old playing twenty feet away.
Swann Painting skipped all of it. No certification. No containment. No warning signs. No pamphlets. No records. The EPA inspector who showed up at Scott Avenue in October 2023 found violations and photographed them. The company had been doing paid work on housing old enough to guarantee the presence of lead paint, and it had taken none of the precautions the law required.
The betrayal here is layered. The families are betrayed by a contractor that cut corners. The contractor’s workers were also put at risk, because without containment protocols, the people doing the sanding and scraping breathe the dust, too. And the military families are betrayed a second time by the regulatory system that was supposed to hold the contractor accountable, because a $1,495 fine is not accountability. It is, at best, a nuisance. It is less than the cost of certifying a single employee under the very program Swann Painting refused to join. The message the settlement sends to every other uncertified contractor in the region is clear: get caught, pay about what you’d spend on a car repair, and move on.
“Lead does not announce itself. It has no smell. By the time a blood test catches it, the damage is already done — and the EPA settled the whole case for $1,495.”
Legal Receipts: What the Federal Order Actually Says
Every quote below comes verbatim from Docket No. TSCA-07-2024-0144, the Consent Agreement and Final Order filed September 19, 2024, with the EPA Region 7 Hearing Clerk.
“The EPA inspection revealed that Respondent failed to apply for and obtain EPA certification prior to commencing the renovation for compensation on the Properties.”
- This is the foundational violation. Federal law has required EPA certification for any firm doing paid renovation work on pre-1978 housing since 2008, and the underlying training requirements have been on the books since 1996. Swann Painting did not even apply.
- Performing uncertified lead-paint renovation on military housing is not a technicality. Certification exists because it requires firms to train workers in dust containment, work-area isolation, and cleaning verification. Without it, no one on the crew is trained to protect residents.
“The EPA inspection at 605 Scott Avenue, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, revealed that the Respondent failed to ensure that at the Property: (a) waste was contained from renovation activities to prevent the release of dust and debris before the waste was removed from the work area for storage and disposal… and (b) signs were posted clearly defining the work area and warning occupants and other persons not involved in renovation activities to remain outside of the work area.”
- No waste containment means lead dust generated by sanding and scraping was free to migrate: onto floors, into ventilation systems, and onto surfaces children touch and place in their mouths.
- No warning signs means no physical barrier of any kind prevented a child, a resident, or a maintenance worker from walking into an active lead-contamination zone.
- Inspectors documented both violations with photographic evidence at the Fort Leavenworth property, meaning this is not disputed by either party.
“Respondent agrees that, in settlement of the claims alleged herein, Respondent shall pay a civil penalty of One Thousand Four Hundred and Ninety-Five Dollars ($1,495) based on a substantiated reduction applying the EPA’s Lead-Based Paint Graduated Penalty Approach Policy.”
- The law authorizes a maximum penalty of $48,512 per day, per violation for violations occurring after November 2, 2015. Seven violations were alleged across two properties. The statutory ceiling for this case, if fully enforced, could have run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- The EPA chose to apply its “Graduated Penalty Approach Policy” and arrived at $1,495 total. The document does not itemize how each reduction was calculated or what specific mitigating factors were applied beyond citing the policy name.
- “Substantiated reduction” is doing enormous work in that sentence. It is the phrase that transforms a potentially six-figure accountability moment into a bill smaller than a week’s payroll.
“This CAFO constitutes a ‘prior such violation’ as that term is used in EPA’s Interim Final Consolidated Enforcement Response and Penalty Policy… to determine Respondent’s ‘history of prior such violations’ under Section 16(a)(2)(B) of TSCA.”
- This clause means the settlement is permanently on Swann Painting’s enforcement record. If the EPA catches them violating RRP rules again, this case can be cited to justify escalated penalties.
- The practical weight of this provision depends entirely on whether the EPA ever inspects this contractor again, and whether future inspectors have access to this file. Neither outcome is guaranteed.
“[Respondent] neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations stated herein.”
- Standard settlement language. Swann Painting paid $1,495 without ever being required to state on the record that it contaminated a military housing worksite with uncontrolled lead dust. The company avoids any public admission of wrongdoing while closing its legal exposure for this incident.
- The EPA photographs still exist. The violations were observed in person and documented. The legal framework that allowed the company to deny nothing and pay almost nothing is the same framework applied to the most routine corporate settlements across every regulatory agency.
Societal Impact Mapping: Who Actually Pays
Public Health
The documented violations at Fort Leavenworth and Weston, Missouri represent the exact conditions that federal science and decades of pediatric research have proven cause preventable lead exposure.
- Lead dust generated by unsupervised sanding and scraping of pre-1978 paint surfaces is the single most common route of childhood lead poisoning in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established that no safe blood lead level exists in children; any detectable level correlates with reduced IQ, attention deficits, and increased risk of behavioral disorders.
- Without containment systems, lead-contaminated dust settles on horizontal surfaces throughout the renovation area, including floors, window sills, and outdoor soil. These surfaces are precisely where toddlers play and put their hands.
- Without warning signs, residents, postal workers, children returning home from school, and military personnel living in adjacent quarters had no way to know that an active hazard existed at 605 Scott Avenue.
- Swann Painting’s workers were also unprotected. The same absence of containment protocols that endangered residents meant the people doing the work were breathing lead dust with no documented safety oversight from a certified renovator.
- The “Renovate Right” pamphlet that Swann Painting failed to provide to property owners exists for one reason: to tell families what risks are present so they can make informed decisions about whether children or pregnant women should vacate the premises during renovation. Withholding it removes that decision from the family entirely.
Economic Inequality
The economics of this case punish the families who were exposed and reward the contractor who cut corners.
- A $1,495 fine for seven documented federal violations is a cost of doing business. At typical painting contractor billing rates, a single day of paid renovation work can easily gross more than the entire penalty assessed. Swann Painting’s financial incentive to skip certification and safety steps was never neutralized by this enforcement action.
- Military families living in on-post housing have limited housing choice. Unlike civilian renters in a private market, they cannot simply move to a different building without navigating a complex military housing allocation system. They are a captive tenant population.
- The cost of treating childhood lead poisoning falls on families, base medical facilities, and ultimately on the federal healthcare system, not on the contractor whose negligence caused the exposure. The contractor was fined $1,495. Lifetime costs of neurological damage from childhood lead poisoning can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per affected child.
- The EPA’s “Graduated Penalty Approach Policy,” which produced this settlement, is designed in part to account for a small business’s ability to pay. The policy has a legitimate rationale for very small operators. But the effect is that firms which deliberately skip expensive compliance steps, such as EPA certification training, get the same financial leniency as firms that made honest errors. The structure rewards non-compliance as a cost-cutting strategy.
- Legitimate certified painting contractors who invest in EPA training, recordkeeping, and proper containment equipment compete for the same contracts as uncertified firms. A $1,495 penalty for a competitor that bypassed all those costs does not level the playing field. It tilts it further toward whoever is willing to cut the most corners.
The “Cost of a Life” Metric
Total civil penalty paid by E&J Painting d/b/a Swann Painting for seven documented violations of federal lead-paint renovation law at two pre-1978 properties, including military housing at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The maximum authorized penalty for this case, if the EPA had applied the statutory ceiling across every violation on a single day, would have been $339,584. The actual penalty was 0.44% of that figure.
What Now? Don’t Let This Be the Last Word
The people with authority to change how the EPA calculates lead-paint penalties, and the people who can pressure them, are identifiable. Here is where to direct your energy.
The Officials Who Signed This Order
- David Cozad, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 7, signed the consent agreement on September 18, 2024. His division sets enforcement priorities for Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska.
- Anna Landis, Office of Regional Counsel, EPA Region 7, negotiated and signed the settlement. She is the attorney of record at landis.anna@epa.gov.
- Karina Borromeo, Regional Judicial Officer, EPA Region 7, ratified the final order on September 19, 2024. Judicial officers operate within the administrative law framework and cannot be pressured like elected officials, but their rulings are public record.
- Ed Pruitt, listed on the Certificate of Service as the respondent’s representative at E&J Painting, LLC d/b/a Swann Painting, 410 South 7th Street, Leavenworth, Kansas 66048.
Watchlist: Agencies That Have Authority Here
- EPA Region 7 (Lenexa, Kansas): The primary regulatory body that investigated and settled this case. Region 7 covers Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska. Its Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division handles RRP violations.
- EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (Washington, D.C.): The national office that sets penalty calculation policies, including the Lead-Based Paint Graduated Penalty Approach Policy used to arrive at $1,495. Policy changes here would change outcomes everywhere.
- Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): HUD maintains separate lead-paint safety regulations for federally assisted and public housing, including on-post military family housing managed under privatized housing programs.
- Department of Defense / Army (Fort Leavenworth): The property at 605 Scott Avenue is on a federal military installation. The Army controls housing standards and contractor selection at Fort Leavenworth and has independent authority to bar contractors from future work on post.
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): OSHA’s Lead Standard (29 C.F.R. 1926.62) governs lead exposure for construction workers. The workers performing uncertified renovation at these sites were themselves exposed without documented safety oversight.
What You Can Do Right Now
- Contact EPA Region 7 directly and ask how its Lead-Based Paint Graduated Penalty Approach Policy is applied, what factors produce a $1,495 settlement from a $48,512/day maximum, and whether the calculation methodology is publicly available for each case. The public has a right to this information.
- If you live in military housing, especially in pre-1978 structures, you can request information about any renovation contractors working on your property, including their EPA certification status, through the installation’s Directorate of Public Works or housing office. Certification is a public, searchable record on EPA’s RRP database.
- Connect with the National Center for Healthy Housing (nchh.org) or your local healthy homes coalition. These organizations provide direct support to families dealing with lead exposure, run community testing programs, and advocate for stronger federal enforcement of RRP rules.
- Share this case with your local city council representative, state environmental agency, and any military family advocacy groups in your area. Local pressure on housing contractors and local government inspection programs often accomplishes more, faster, than waiting for federal enforcement to catch up.
- Check the EPA RRP firm certification database at epa.gov before any contractor works on pre-1978 housing near you. Certification is free to verify and takes sixty seconds. Swann Painting’s own settlement now establishes their enforcement history in that record system.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
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