Some fought lead cleanups

Two staffers felt system rewarded landlords for poisoning children

Some city staffers fought using federal money to clean up the homes of leadpoisoned Milwaukee children, newly released records show.

The documents, which were obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel through an open records request, reveal at least two Milwaukee Health Department staffers wanted to punish property owners where lead-poisoned children were living.

The personnel investigations into Lisa Lien and Richard Gaeta accuse both longtime agency staffers of essentially trying to punish those homeowners by avoiding using federal money to pay for removing lead hazards from their homes, the records show.

“Both Mr. Gaeta and Ms. Lien stated during their interviews something to the effect of, ‘Why should we reward landlords who have poisoned children?’” the personnel investigation into Gaeta says.

It adds that both “believed the key to the reduction in the prevalence” of children with elevated blood lead levels was to focus on homes without leadpoisoned children living in them.

Lien, then the city’s home environmental health manager, previously received a 10-day suspension last year. Both Lien and Gaeta were placed on paid administrative leave in March. Lien recently resigned.

Gaeta, the city’s environmental health field supervisor, was fired.

Gaeta, who is appealing his termination, says he is being used as a scapegoat.

In a Sept. 4 appeal, Gaeta accuses City of Milwaukee officials of “knowingly” failing to provide the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program with “adequate staffing and support.”

“Mr. Gaeta is a scapegoat for the wellpublicized, well-documented mismanagement of the Health Department by politically appointed officials with no lead abatement experience,” the appeal states. “The reactionary purging of CLPPP of lifelong public servants and experts like Mr. Gaeta simply provides political cover at the expense of problem solving capacity.”

Lien and Gaeta are among a handful of health agency staffers who have faced discipline in recent months as the city grapples with a breakdown of its programs aimed at preventing lead poisoning.

The crisis forced former Health

Commissioner Bevan Baker to resign in January.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced this week that he plans to devote $20 million in next year’s budget to addressing lead hazards, including sources such as paint and pipes.

While both Lien and Gaeta have sited staffing issues as a key source of department problems, their personnel investigations focused largely on problems with how programs were being run.

The investigation into Gaeta says some lead program staffers were “frustrated by, and in some cases, traumatized by the approach of not funding units in which a child” with lead-poisoning lived.

It adds that there was a perception that Section 8 housing units could not receive lead abatement funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The investigation report also details problems with how the city worked with contractors hired to remove lead hazards from homes.

Contractors also faced losing $250 from every “clearance wipe failure,” a fee that the report says was not authorized by the city.

Health department data found contractors were charged about $18,000 in “dust wipe failure fees” dating back to mid-2015, the investigation said.

Almost all the money has since been reimbursed to those contractors.

Gaeta was also criticized in the personnel investigation for his conduct during a site visit from HUD in February 2018, where an official with the federal agency visited a property with Gaeta where lead hazards were not being contained.

That official later expressed “shock” that Gaeta “displayed virtually no reaction to the lack of containment” and failed to intervene, the investigation says.

Gaeta later told an investigator that it wasn’t his job to stop the contractor, according to the report.