Are Children Well-Protected From Toxins?

On days thick with factory fumes, Martha Escutia fielded desperate telephone calls from parents in her Assembly district about children with nosebleeds, children lethargic, children dizzy and nauseated.

Then she read a federal report urging local officials to protect the nation’s future by minimizing environmental health threats to children.

For Escutia, a Democratic assemblywoman and new mother herself, the two pleas fused into a powerful resolve. Figuring that the Bell industrial corridor children she represents were among the worst off, she last year proposed the Children’s Environmental Health Protection Act.

The furor she prompted with the measure--which is now headed to the Assembly floor for a second consecutive year--was unexpected.

After all, her legislation took a simple tack: Let’s set pollutant limits for air, water and food tailored for kids, not adults. And let’s also monitor air at schools and day care centers located near industry to make sure those children are OK.

“This bill is not voodoo magic,” Escutia said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a developing body means a developing immune system that just can’t process those toxins.”

State officials charged with protecting the environment say they already adequately shield children. They portray Escutia as well-meaning but misinformed.

The bill’s proponents, meanwhile, accuse them of protecting big business instead of public health.

“They are talking out of both sides of their mouths,” said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, senior lobbyist for the Sierra Club of California. “First we hear it’s duplicative, a waste of words, then we hear it’s going to cause a great kink in their works.”

In 1997, Escutia’s bill landed atop the Sierra Club’s priority list, but also on the “job killer” list compiled by business lobbies.

The bill requires the various state agencies that set allowable levels for toxins to adjust their standards based on any new research on the chemicals’ impact on children’s health. The standards are used to determine whether polluters are operating within legal limits.

Amendments have softened the bill. It no longer requires those agencies to perform new studies of their own, and the reviews do not have to occur immediately, but instead when the chemicals come up for their regular review--usually every five years.

Yet on the last day of the legislative session in September 1997, five of Escutia’s Assembly colleagues who had once supported a stronger version of the bill defected when she needed them most, killing the measure until this year.

Even now, as the bill works its way back to the Assembly floor, Escutia knows it faces almost certain gubernatorial veto. But she is hoping for a compromise and, falling short of that, she is banking on support next year from Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, should he be elected governor.

A History of Illnesses in Neighborhood

Escutia says she will not give up because of people like Joe Perales, who took on the formidable cause of ridding Southeast Los Angeles’ environment of toxins after his 14-year-old son, Alex, died in his arms last fall.

Alex attended Suva Street Intermediate School in Bell Gardens from 1992 to 1995, which, along with Suva Street Elementary School, presses up against two chrome-plating factories.

Perales, a printer by trade, was unaware of the school’s history until after Alex was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, then leukemia. A teacher clued him in about concerns at the schools.

In 1988, teachers became alarmed about the proliferation of miscarriages in their ranks--five in one year alone. The South Coast Air Quality Management District set up a special air sampling station and found “unacceptably high” levels of the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium being pumped out of the plating factories.

Despite the elevated cancer risk, the AQMD declared that there was “no emergency need for evacuation” of the schools or neighborhoods.

Months later, the AQMD declared that although the levels of the chemical were high, they were not high enough to cause miscarriages. Still, officials insisted that the companies cut back their emissions and suggested that miscarriages continue to be tracked.

But for Perales, Southeast L.A.--recently identified as one of the AQMD’s potential toxic hot spots--suddenly seemed full of poisons from many sources.

He wants to know whether the calculated risk has been set too high for a 9-year-old. Could the air at Suva Intermediate have caused Alex’s cancer? What about his daughter who cannot have children, his neighbor’s baby born without a brain, his grandson who grew up in the same neighborhood and has developed lymph node problems eerily reminiscent of Alex’s disease?

These are questions Perales knows he will never be able to answer. But learning the history of Suva Intermediate taught him not to trust anyone else to watch over his community’s children.

“I don’t want to point fingers, accuse anybody,” he said. “My concern is there’s a hole in the dike and the people underneath this dam are going to die unless we . . . do something.”

Current Risk Levels Based on Adults

Common ground in Escutia’s effort lies in the widespread agreement that children are particularly vulnerable to toxins. Their immune systems are not fully developed, they play outside more and they consume more water, food and air per pound than adults.

Most everyone agrees that there are gaps in scientific research related to children and toxins. The disagreement emerges over whether those gaps matter.

Much of the early opposition, including that of the Wilson administration, criticized Escutia for not relying on sound science.

“There are already laws on the books to protect those sensitive populations,” said Sean Walsh, spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson. “It sets up another layer of bureaucracy.”

So Escutia brought in the experts--from both sides--to testify at a June committee hearing.

The opposition said that current risk levels are based on adults--usually animal studies extrapolated for healthy adult males--but then modified to protect sensitive populations, including the elderly, the asthmatic and children. They say Escutia’s proposal reiterates what they are doing and would cost millions.

That’s because it would force state regulators to prove they are protecting children, according to Chris Reynolds, lobbyist for the California Environmental Protection Agency. “It implies that even though you’ve shown us evidence that you’ve done it, we want you to do something.”

In a moment worthy of Perry Mason, Escutia brought in San Rafael toxicologist Alvin Greenberg, a private consultant who in 1996 had served on a Cal-EPA advisory panel on chemical exposure in toxic hot spots. Greenberg said the panel recommended that cancer risks from certain chemicals passed through breast milk be set six times higher than for adults because of the potential for infant exposure.

Greenberg is hardly naive about politics. He has a long-standing relationship with the state, beginning as a health administrator under Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown and continuing through paid contracts and volunteer advisory positions.

But even he was surprised at what happened next.

“When the final draft came out a couple weeks later, I saw they had completely taken out the number ‘six,’ ” Greenberg said. “I called up the staff and said, ‘Hey, what happened?’ They said, ‘Hey, the [Cal EPA] director wouldn’t let it go out.’ ”

According to Reynolds, it was state scientists, not the director, who determined that the sixfold recommendation did not belong in that particular document. The number may be included in new risk assessment guidelines now under review, Reynolds added.

“It was far from ignored or suppressed,” he said.

But Greenberg and others say the unwillingness to adopt tough risk assessment guidelines shows why the Escutia legislation is so badly needed. They worry that California is slipping from its position as the nation’s premier environmental watchdog.

‘Environmental Justice’ Bills Have Been Vetoed

Under the Wilson administration “a chemical is innocent until proven guilty, instead of the other way around,” Greenberg said.

Escutia faces an uphill battle. Other bills based on so-called environmental justice--a belief that the inner-city has been a victim of eco-racism--have died on the governor’s desk. Two recent ones would have required local planners to take into account the location and quantity of polluting factories.

“The thing that is most poignant to me right now is in this current year you have the presidency coming out with a children’s health initiative, but when we start talking about minority children and urban poor communities, then everybody kind of shies away from it,” said Carlos Porras, Southern California director for Communities for a Better Environment.

California would not even be taking the lead on children’s environmental health if it approved Escutia’s plan, Porras said. The federal activity on behalf of children began in 1993, when President Clinton pushed for regulations that reduce the use of high-risk pesticides and increase research into children’s exposure to pesticides in food.

Legislator Vows to Continue Fight

In the 1996 report on children’s environmental health that caught Escutia’s eye, the U.S. EPA’s top administrator encouraged local advocacy: “We call on national, state and local policy makers . . . to take action to protect our nation’s future by protecting our children.”

Nonetheless, last year Escutia’s bill faltered on the brink of passage.

It had been approved by the Assembly and Senate with relative ease. Along the way, Escutia had agreed to amendments that she knew weakened the bill, but also made it more palatable to special interests.

Pesticides in food had been covered by the federal legislation, so that was deleted. Gone too was the provision that had most alarmed industry--it would have required factories and refineries near schools to reduce their emissions.

Only three schools were to have air sampling sites as a demonstration project--one urban, one suburban, one rural.

But by the time the bill returned to the Assembly last September for a final vote on amendments, the winds had changed. Five of the members who had voted for the stronger bill--including two Democrats from agricultural areas--declined to vote on the weaker one. It lost by four votes.

Some insiders accuse the administration of engineering the bill’s failure and Walsh, Wilson’s spokesman, does not deny it.

“We feel it’s better to deal with bad bills in the Legislature than on the governor’s desk,” he said.

Living up to her reputation as a scrappy fighter, Escutia shrugged it all off. She revived the bill through the conference committee process, where differences can be ironed out, and expects to return it to the Assembly this month. If it does not pass this year, she reasons, then maybe next. If not this governor, then maybe his successor.

“People actually thought, ‘She got whacked last year, she will not be back,’ ” Escutia said. “Well, I’m back. I’m very tenacious about this stuff.”