The Evidence Trail: What the EPA Found

On March 20, 2023, EPA inspectors walked into Doerr Siding & Remodeling’s offices at 603 Pinecrest Drive in East Peoria, Illinois, and asked for something simple: records proving the company followed lead-safe work practice rules on the renovation jobs it had completed in the prior three years. The company handed over contracts. That was it. No checklists, no training certificates, no proof of any kind that workers protected themselves or the people living in those homes.

Those contracts were enough to build the case. They showed 18 separate renovation projects at homes built as far back as 1887, in Peoria, East Peoria, Pekin, and Washington, Illinois. Every single one of those homes qualifies under federal law as “target housing” because they were built before 1978, the year lead-based paint was banned for residential use. Every single one of those jobs disturbed painted surfaces. And on every single one of those jobs, Doerr had no valid certification, sent in workers with no certified lead-safe training, and never told homeowners they had a right to know about the lead hazard they were living inside.

The EPA’s enforcement document breaks this down into four categories of violations, each applied across all 18 jobs, adding up to 73 total counts. The math is methodical and damning.

Every Job. Every Home. Every Family.

The 18 properties span more than three decades of work, from a home built in 1887 on Washington Street in Pekin, to a 1977 build in Peoria. These are not abandoned buildings. These are lived-in homes where real families hired a contractor they trusted to do the job right. The federal government’s own documents name each one.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Measure

The Families Who Never Got a Warning

Federal law requires that before a contractor touches a wall, a window frame, or a piece of siding on a pre-1978 home, they hand the homeowner an EPA-approved pamphlet about lead hazards. That pamphlet is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the only tool the law gives regular people to understand that the dust being generated in their home during renovation could permanently damage a child’s brain. Doerr Siding & Remodeling denied that information to the owners of all 18 properties it worked on.

Those families hired a contractor they believed was operating legally. They let workers into their homes. They may have kept their kids home from school during a weekend job, or cracked a window to deal with dust, or swept up debris with a broom, not knowing that lead dust requires specific containment and cleanup procedures to be safe. The company’s failure to inform them was not an oversight; it was a systematic pattern across four years of jobs.

At a home on Washington Street in Pekin built in 1887, workers ripped off the old slate siding. That house is 137 years old. Lead-based paint was used as a standard building material for most of those years. A home that old, undergoing that kind of exterior demolition, could generate dangerous levels of lead dust in a single afternoon of work. The family at that address received no pamphlet, no warning, and no certified supervision of any kind.

The Workers Inside the Hazard Zone

The violations here extend to Doerr’s own workers. Federal regulations exist not only to protect the people living in homes being renovated, but to protect the workers doing the renovating. Certified lead-safe renovation training teaches workers how to contain dust, how to protect themselves from inhaling or ingesting lead particles, and how to clean up properly after the job. Doerr Siding sent workers into job sites where they were tearing out windows, ripping off decades-old siding, and gutting kitchens, without ensuring any of them had that training.

Across 18 job sites spanning multiple years, the EPA confirmed that Doerr failed to assign a certified renovator to any of the projects, and failed to ensure that any of the workers performing renovation activities were either certified or trained by someone who was. The workers on these jobs were exposed to a hazard their employer had a legal duty to prepare them for, and that duty was ignored completely.

Lead poisoning in adults causes high blood pressure, nerve damage, kidney damage, and cognitive decline. The workers who swung hammers, pulled nails, and hauled old siding at these 18 addresses were the most directly exposed people of all. They are entirely absent from the financial settlement. They received no compensation, no acknowledgment, and no guarantee of monitoring for health effects.

A Certification System That Means Nothing If Nobody Checks

Doerr Siding held a valid EPA firm certification as far back as May 21, 2010. They knew the rules existed. They knew certification was required. They let that certification lapse in June 2015 and kept working anyway, for nine years, across city after city in central Illinois. The system failed here because enforcement depends almost entirely on inspections, which are rare. The EPA didn’t show up at Doerr’s door until March 2023, nearly eight years after the certification expired.

The community damage here is layered. Every home Doerr worked on during those nine years represents a family that may have been exposed to lead hazards through improper renovation practices, with no way of knowing it happened. Lead dust is invisible. Lead poisoning in children produces symptoms, including learning disabilities, reduced IQ, hyperactivity, and hearing problems, that parents often attribute to other causes. The link between a renovation that happened years ago and a child’s declining school performance is almost impossible to prove in a doctor’s office. The harm lands invisibly and lasts for decades.

The Timeline: A Decade of Disregard

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Federal Document

These are verbatim statements from the EPA’s Consent Agreement and Final Order. They require no commentary. Read them and ask yourself who was protecting these families.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: A Poison With No Antidote

Lead poisoning has no cure. Once it enters a child’s bloodstream and crosses into the brain, the damage it causes, including IQ loss, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, and behavior problems, is permanent. The federal government stated this explicitly in the law underpinning this entire enforcement action. Doerr Siding & Remodeling operated in violation of that law across 18 homes, many housing families with children, from 2019 to 2024.

The regulation Doerr violated exists precisely because renovation dust in pre-1978 homes is the single most common pathway for childhood lead poisoning in the United States. Removing old siding, yanking out windows, and tearing up kitchens in homes built before lead paint was banned are among the highest-risk renovation activities that exist. Without containment, cleaning protocols, and certified supervision, lead dust generated during these jobs can settle into carpets, window sills, and soil, where it persists for years and continues to expose children long after the contractors have gone home.

The EPA document records a job at 1315 E Hines Ave in Peoria, a home built in 1925, where Doerr replaced twenty-six windows. A hundred-year-old home, twenty-six window removals, and not a single certified worker on site. That job alone could have contaminated an entire house with lead dust. The family living there has no way of knowing what happened to the air they breathed that week.

Economic Inequality: The Penalty That Protects the Guilty

The EPA is legally authorized to assess up to $48,512 per violation per day. Against 73 violations, even a single day’s maximum penalty would produce a fine of over $3.5 billion (more money than most people will see across ten lifetimes). Instead, the agency settled for $27,645.83 (roughly what a minimum-wage worker earns in a year of full-time labor), and it reduced the penalty specifically because Doerr Siding filed a documented inability-to-pay claim.

The structure of this penalty system consistently protects small corporations that claim poverty while absorbing the cost of the harm they caused. The families in those 18 homes cannot file an inability-to-pay claim if their child develops a learning disability. They cannot negotiate a reduced consequence for the lead dust that settled into their carpets. The asymmetry is total: the company that broke the law gets a payment plan and a discount; the people harmed by the law-breaking get nothing from this settlement at all.

This enforcement action also explicitly states that paying the penalty and complying with this agreement “resolves only Respondent’s liability under Section 16(a) of TSCA for federal civil penalties for the violations alleged.” The homeowners and workers affected by these renovations have no remedy built into this document. The EPA closes its file; the families carry whatever came with the dust.