San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
LEAD OVERSIGHT IN CALIFORNIA
Several agencies at the state and local levels in California are charged with protecting the public’s health from lead hazards through monitoring and enforcement. But in many cases, The Chronicle found, they have either failed to do so or been ineffective in doing so when dealing with indoor gun ranges, and often have not alerted other agencies to lead problems they discover.
CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
CDPH has two key divisions that deal with lead safety: the Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch. OLPPP tracks workers’ blood lead levels in industries that are required to test workers and provides education, and is required to refer workplaces where workers have blood lead levels “injurious to the health” of employees to Cal/OSHA. CLPPB is responsible for monitoring and preventing lead poisoning in people under 21.
DEPARTMENT OF TOXIC SUBSTANCES CONTROL
DTSC is tasked with tracing violations of hazardous waste laws, mostly in the outdoor environment, which includes lead emissions from indoor gun ranges.
DIVISION OF OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH
Cal/OSHA is charged with protecting worker safety in the state. It can set and enforce safety standards and issue permits, licenses and other forms of approval.
CERTIFIED UNIFIED PROGRAM AGENCIES
Since the 1980s, with the aim of avoiding duplicative regulatory action, the state of California has delegated some responsibility for environmental protection and enforcement to counties. But counties often lack the resources and expertise to effectively regulate polluters like indoor gun ranges.
REGIONAL AIR DISTRICTS
Air districts are charged with regulating airborne pollutants, including lead. But different air districts appear to have varied understanding of what role they can or should play regarding indoor gun ranges.
LOCAL PLANNING AUTHORITIES
Local planning departments and commissions are charged with approving proposed uses of facilities in their jurisdictions. Some have waived an environmental review dictated by state law for potentially hazardous operations by classifying indoor gun ranges as recreation or entertainment facilities, allowing ranges to open with inadequate ventilation systems.
In 2009, South San Francisco approved a major expansion of the gun range, including new classroom space. The city once again waived environmental review and imposed no ventilation requirements. In 2012, CDPH officials noted a buildup of lead in the added space, describing the area as having “no ventilation” and being “very dirty,” creating the potential for the ingestion of lead because of poor lead dust control.
In 2013, Remolona was given his “last chance” to make the range safe, documents show, after an in-depth inspection by Cal/OSHA showed that Jackson Arms appeared to be in worse shape than it was six years before.
“There is so much lead dust in there, that the photos are sparkly because the camera is focusing on the lead particles in air,” Cal/OSHA inspector Chris Kirkham told CDPH officials in an email obtained by The Chronicle. In a letter to Remolona following the inspection, Kirkham warned him that the violations could be categorized as “willful.”
Inspection findings “classified as ‘willful’ would involve penalties so high that they would likely threaten your ability to remain in business,” the letter read.
Documents show that the 2013 penalties imposed by Cal/ OSHA were discussed internally as a final warning. In an email to colleagues, Julie Pettijohn, an official with CDPH who was in frequent touch with Cal/OSHA’s Kirkham, said he’d told her that “after his work with JA (Jackson Arms), if he receives another complaint, he will go in and give willful violations. In essence, he said this was their (JA’s) last chance.”
But ultimately, the agency levied just $11,010 in fines, approximately a week’s worth of revenue for the busy range, according to former range employees. The facility continued operating without the necessary repairs. Over the next five years, CDPH data obtained by The Chronicle shows, 32 workers were lead-poisoned.
Garrett Brown, a former topranking Cal/OSHA official who left the agency in April 2021, said the minimal penalties for Jackson Arms were not appropriate. “If violations are willful, OSHA’s most serious category and usually for repeat offenders, that’s not something you can dial back,” he said.
“How did a decent inspection, resulting in seven citations requiring correction of unhealthy and illegal conditions, go nowhere? Why did workers continue to pay the price?” Brown asked.
In 2016, three CDPH officials visited the range. Remolona, documents show, again insisted that he could not afford to fix the ventilation system. A report of the visit says he also told them the interior of the range was usually cleaned up nightly by employees, but that “because so many of them are on medical removal protection he is doing the cleaning himself every other night.”
Medical removal protection is a federal standard set in the 1970s mandating that workers with a blood lead level exceeding 50 mcg/dL must be removed from exposure. That standard occurs fewer than a dozen times per year on average among California’s 17 million workers.
Former workers and patrons told The Chronicle that neither Remolona nor state regulators told them how bad the situation was at Jackson Arms.
Liza Normandy, who worked as a cashier, left the range in 2013, partly out of concern about elevated lead levels in her blood. Her doctor told her lead was present at 20 times what was normal for a typical adult and was the likely cause of her dangerously high blood pressure. She embarked on a career change, entering local politics, eventually becoming a City Council member and mayor in South San Francisco from 201318.
After reviewing records provided by The Chronicle, Normandy said she was “upset and baffled” by how two agencies charged with protecting workers and the public could have allowed the range to stay open.
“If Cal/OSHA had communicated the history and the extent of the problem, I could have done something about this as mayor,” she said.
State officials, though, were not alone in allowing the dangerous situation at Jackson Arms to persist. San Mateo County officials also took no action.
Under a state system called Certified Unified Program Agencies, or CUPA, San Mateo County’s Environmental Health Services department should have played a key role in ensuring that the gun range was safe. Under CUPA, the state Environmental Protection Agency delegates regulatory oversight of many hazardous wastes and materials to counties. San Mateo County’s website appears to acknowledge this, stating that permits are required of all hazardous-waste producers to ensure that “all hazardous wastes are properly handled, recycled, treated, stored and disposed of.” But documents show that the agency never inspected Jackson Arms.
One official, county hazardous waste coordinator Dan Rompf, once came close. In an April 2018 email to Remolona, Rompf said he’d spent time shooting at the range, and that he planned to stop by to “have a discussion about hazardous waste procedures and whether a permit is required for your facility.” But Rompf never filed an inspection report or required the company to file a hazardous waste plan.
At the time, The Chronicle found, Rompf, who earns over $170,000 in salary and benefits, was running a consulting business called Lifecycle EHS, which offered “complete site inspections and regulatory consultations” for businesses that deal with toxic substances, according to its website, which was taken down after The Chronicle raised questions about it.
An ethics expert and current and former state environmental regulators said they were troubled that the county would allow a regulator to take outside work they saw as a clear conflict of interest.
Ann Skeet, senior director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, called it “terrible judgment.” Hal Thomas, a former chief criminal investigator with the DTSC, said the potential conflict of interest was “symptomatic” of the state’s overreliance on county regulators to rein in bad actors when “counties often lack the budget, expertise and will to get the job done.”
Documents provided by San Mateo County showed that Rompf did obtain permission to start a consulting business and that he promised not to take any work within San Mateo County, but did not require additional reporting by Rompf to verify that he’d abided by the commitment.
Preston Merchant, a spokesperson for San Mateo County, said the county had failed to take stronger action against Jackson Arms because it had been awaiting guidance from the state, particularly from the DTSC, about standards for gun ranges.
“Historically, gun ranges have not been regulated for hazardous materials or hazardous waste generation statewide,” Merchant said in an email.
A spokesperson for DTSC, however, said the agency had not told San Mateo County to hold off on regulating gun ranges or that specific guidance from it was forthcoming.
Thomas told The Chronicle that Merchant’s statement did not make sense to him. “The state’s hazardous waste laws are clear,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a gas station or a gun range. It’s a crime to knowingly — or if you reasonably should have known — dispose of hazardous waste.”
Thomas said the regulatory system is “broken,” and the state’s policy of delegating environmental pollution cases to counties under the CUPA system needs to be revisited. “It’s always the same answer: This is the county’s territory,” Thomas said. “It’s a total cop-out.”
San Mateo County inspected Jackson Arms only after it closed in 2018, five years after Cal/OSHA’s last inspection. Reports describe the ventilation system as in deplorable condition, its ducts riddled with bullet holes.
Photographs from the inspection show a corroded exhaust fan on the roof caked with lead, and the roof itself covered with gray dust, which tests confirmed was lead in extremely high concentration.
Documents show that county regulators also discovered that lead from the range’s ventilation system had contaminated nearby Colma Creek. Although owner Remolona has admitted responsibility for the lead emissions, and San Mateo environmental health regulators have deemed remediation necessary, no cleanup of the creek or the surrounding area has begun since the range closed.
California statutes allow for both criminal and civil penalties when someone knowingly pollutes the environment with hazardous waste. While criminal prosecutions are rare, they do happen. In 2016, the owner of a Los Angeles-based scrap metal business was prosecuted for multiple felonies following a DTSC investigation. But despite years of failing to fix a ventilation system he was told on numerous occasions was inadequate, Remolona has faced no fines or criminal charges.
California’s 35 local air quality districts also should play a crucial role in flagging faulty ventilation systems. According to the California Air Resources Board, each district “maintains its own individual permitting program to reduce emissions from stationary and area-wide
sources.”
But The Chronicle found that some air districts routinely fail to inspect ranges or require them to be licensed, even when it is clear that a gun range may be emitting toxic lead.
Airborne lead can be the most dangerous mode of lead contamination, public health experts say, because minuscule particles can easily lodge in the lungs, where they can wreak havoc on other organs, like the brain. Yet despite examples like Jackson Arms, a representative of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said it had no plans to inspect existing ranges or require them to be permitted.
“Our preliminary estimates show that for an indoor gun range equipped with an air filtration system, an Air District permit may be required if more than 44,000 rounds of smallcaliber ammunition are fired per day,” an agency spokesperson said in an email. “We believe the average number of rounds fired at a gun range is about 3,000 rounds per day.”
Peter Green, a UC Davis researcher who specializes in analyzing the spread of lead in urban environments, disputed the district’s logic in basing the safety level on the number of rounds fired.
“That calculation doesn’t make any practical sense,” said Green, a leading expert on airborne toxins. “They’re ignoring the real-world track record. It seems like the air district is assuming that filtration systems at gun ranges are perfectly calibrated — 99.9 percent effective. But all it takes is one loose screw on a piece of ducting and a whole lot of unfiltered air is being released.”
By contrast, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which covers a large swath of Southern California, told The Chronicle that ranges are “subject to permitting requirements due to the emissions of lead.”
Still SCAQMD, which allowed the Exide plant to contaminate a large swath of Los Angeles even though its airmonitoring program detected high levels of airborne lead emanating from the plant, has been opaque in responding to The Chronicle about a troubled facility in its district, the On Target indoor gun range in Laguna Niguel (Orange County).
An inspection by the DTSC found lead contamination on the building’s roof of over 250,000 micrograms per square foot, a level that made it nearly one-quarter lead. Tests of soil next to the gun range also showed clear lead contamination. The range was fined, and a DTSC spokesman told The Chronicle in early 2021 that the range had since worked with the local air district to repair its ventilation problems.
But the South Coast air district inspected the range only after it received questions from The Chronicle in late 2021, and has provided no specifics of its findings, saying that its investigation is “ongoing.”
Requiring air districts to permit and subject gun ranges to periodic inspections should be a “no-brainer,” Green of UC Davis said. “We make sure cars have pollution controls, and we inspect them every couple of years to make sure they are operating properly. Of course gun ranges should have, at a bare minimum, standards and regular inspections.”
As happened with Jackson Arms, new ranges often open in California without environmental or safety reviews, The Chronicle found.
In more than a half-dozen instances, local officials waived environmental review for new indoor ranges, sometimes by classifying them as recreational or entertainment facilities, or otherwise declaring them exempt from scrutiny required under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. Such waivers are problematic because the type of advanced HEPA filtration system recommended by experts can both protect the external environment and help eliminate airborne lead inside the range.
“It’s not exactly news that lead kills, or that it’s found in the soil near gun ranges,” Kathryn Phillips, former director of the California Sierra Club, said. “This kind of threat is exactly why we have CEQA protections, to keep contaminants like lead from harming people and the environment. To pretend that a gun range is somehow hermetically sealed is irresponsible.”
In 2017, the Planning Commission in the Sierra foothills city of Placerville (El Dorado County) waived a CEQA review for the Hangtown Range, labeling it an “entertainment” and “recreational” facility. Three years after it opened, Cal/ OSHA, following up on reports of lead-poisoned workers there, found hazardous levels of airborne lead inside the range and fined the facility $13,990, later reduced to $4,400.
Records obtained by The Chronicle show that Cal/OSHA reduced another fine of the range for exposing workers to unsafe levels of airborne lead from $6,300 to $2,400. The agency then marked the violation as “abated.” But in reality, as at Jackson Arms, Cal/OSHA failed to perform any follow-up tests or examine the ventilation system to make sure it was working properly. Instead it gave credit to owner Richard Rood for making “good faith efforts.”
The gun range is just 15 feet from Hangtown Creek, which empties into the American River, a drinking water source. Google satellite images taken in 2021 show black streaking near ventilation fans on the range’s roof. Jeff Van Slooten, a lead contamination cleanup expert, told The Chronicle the images appear consistent with lead streaking he has seen elsewhere.
“The only way to know would be to test,” Van Slooten said.
But Blair Robertson, a spokesperson for the California Water Board, which is tasked with making sure waterways are free from health and environmental threats, told The Chronicle that “there are no plans to conduct testing near the Hangtown Range in the immediate future.”
Robertson said the water board is focused on threats from outdoor ranges, because “when shooting ranges are situated indoors, spent ammunition is not exposed to precipitation or surface runoff and therefore doesn’t pose the same threat to water quality as it would if it were outdoors.”
In another instance, the planning board in Dublin waived environmental review for a large new range called Guns, Fishing and Other Stuff that opened in 2015. Just weeks after the range opened, records show, workers noticed that the ventilation system was spreading what turned out to be leadtainted smoke. One worker alerted Cal/OSHA.
Cal/OSHA inspected the range and issued a fine of $20,600. But records and interviews with former employees show that the agency allowed employees to continue to work in the hazardous conditions.
Ashley Baxter, a college student and avid shooter who worked at the range’s gun store, said she started experiencing headaches while other workers had symptoms like nosebleeds. “We would say to each other, ‘Wow, the range is busy today; you can really smell it.’ I had no idea we were getting lead-poisoned.”
Cal/OSHA had Baxter and other workers wear monitors at work to measure airborne lead. The monitors, an inspection report shows, determined that workers were exposed to lead levels far exceeding state and federal limits.
Cal/OSHA regulations state that workers must be informed of such results. But Baxter continued to work in the store for months before the ventilation system was fixed, Cal/OSHA records show, and Baxter says she was never told of the danger. “What if I had been pregnant?” she said.
Brandon Brinkman, a former Marine who worked as a range manager at Guns, Fishing and Other Stuff, says he became so badly lead-poisoned he had to stop working until his blood lead levels decreased a month after testing.
“I have a pretty high tolerance for risk,” Brinkman said. “I thought any gun range in the Bay Area would be overregulated if anything.” Frustrated, Brinkman says he left the range in 2016 and has since moved to Texas, working in the security industry. He still frequents gun ranges. “Ironically,” he said, “they feel a lot safer here when it comes to lead safety protocols than I experienced in California.”
None of the public health and safety agencies presented with the findings of The Chronicle/ USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s reporting suggested any specific reforms to indoor gun range oversight.
Legislative action, experts said, is one route to better regulation.
In 2019, after the discovery of what one expert described as a lead nightmare at the Target Masters West range in Milpitas, Newsom signed legislation mandating that Cal/OSHA conduct inspections of any businesses where employees are known to have been leadpoisoned.
The legislation, authored by Assembly Member Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, increased lead-related inspections by Cal/ OSHA from none in 2019 to 27 in 2020. The majority of inspections occurred in battery recycling operations and gun ranges. Last year, 41 businesses were referred to Cal/OSHA, stemming from 159 poisoning cases, according to CDPH. Nine of the employers were gun ranges.
In 2020, Assembly Member Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, whose district includes the site of the former Jackson Arms range, introduced legislation that would require indoor gun ranges to use only lead-free bullets. Such bullets are about 50% more expensive than conventional bullets, but the price would likely drop if California and other states created more of a market for them.
But after the National Rifle Association and other gun rights organizations targeted Mullin’s bill, he withdrew it. A staffer for Mullin, Meegen Murray, told The Chronicle that “with COVID going on, this just wasn’t the right time for this fight.”
Gabriel Fillipelli, an Earth sciences professor at the University of Indiana who studies the impacts of lead contamination at gun ranges, said changes must be made, calling the issues that The Chronicle identified in California “deadly serious.”
“In the short run, there needs to be focus on improving ventilation systems,” he said, “but the real focus should be on creating a lead-free environment. Alternative ammunition like copper bullets perform just as well as lead bullets at gun ranges.”
California could also adopt universal standards for lead safety at ranges. At present, there are no statewide standards even for basic safety measures like adequate ventilation systems or showers for workers so they don’t track lead home.
“That is long overdue,” longtime Cal/OSHA official Garrett Brown said. “Indoor gun ranges have been a big problem in California for a very long time.”
Allayaud of the Environmental Working Group, who worked with Kalra to pass the 2019 legislation, expressed frustration at the continuing problems at gun ranges.
“If Cal/OSHA learns about a ventilation system that is poisoning workers, they need to tell the DTSC to make sure lead isn’t also being illicitly released into the environment. Air districts need to be instructed that this is a real problem and to stop being in denial,” he said. “We need real enforcement, with fines, and for unsafe gun ranges to be brought into compliance or shut down before more people are harmed.”