re: #87 wrenchwench

I said “what looks like callous…” because it looks like it to me. You are providing no evidence that what is being required now is “the n’th degree”. I don’t expect “common sense” from the ill informed, and if a contractor has to take a class to be properly informed, I don’t see that as onerous.

I don’t think you would actually be callous if you were provided information that you believed which indicated children were being harmed. But you are asking me to side with the anti-regulators based on nothing.

If you read what I said earlier you would see that it is onerous and it seems obvious to me that you have no understanding of what is involved in home renovation from the contractor side.

Children are harmed, still, by lead paint and there are plenty of code regulations to inspect for that danger in old buildings, but this is a very specific extension that IMHO does nothing except load another expensive layer on the economy, and put people out of work, or make them more vulnerable to unlicensed contractors.

I did a quick search, but the archive full version requires payment. All I got for free, from October 2010 were these contractor comments, which don’t detail the overhead costs involved:

“The liabilities are just too huge,” said [Steve Gleaton], noting the potential for lawsuits if a single rule is not followed during lead abatement. “The potential risk to me and my company, it’s not worth it.”

“It’s driving the work to the unlicensed sector,” said Jonathan Greaves, of Greaves Construction Inc. in Tampa. “It scares the bejeebers out of me.”

And here is a link that details the regulations more, since you trivialize what I say:

EPA regulations

This is a potential boon to lawyers and nobody else. If somehow it hasn’t been a crisis worth major regulation since 1978, why now?