Tonya Skinner wanted to provide a safe environment for her grandchildren. So in 2021, when she heard about a free Dallas program to remove dangerous lead paint from her home, she jumped at the chance.
Three years later, she is among dozens of residents, many of whom live in southern Dallas, who are still waiting.
Despite receiving millions of dollars in federal funding, the city of Dallas has failed to administer the program to remove lead from residents’ houses, a Dallas Morning News investigation found. Exposure to lead can lead to health problems, especially for young children.
In its 2018 application to the U.S. government, the Dallas housing department said 38,935 homes were eligible for lead abatement, and the department’s goal was to abate lead in 330 homes.
The city promoted the program on its social media accounts, delivered fliers in ZIP codes 75210 and 75215, and provided an insert in residents’ water bills. More than 90 residents asked for help. Only 53 houses were inspected, and only four received lead abatement.
The city spent about $400,000 from the grant, while about $1.8 million remained unused, according to a financial report submitted to the federal government earlier this year. The city returned most of the funds, leaving multiple residents exposed to the effects of lead.
The federal grant was intended to target homes built before 1978, primarily homes with children under the age of 6, because their health is particularly vulnerable to lead exposure.
The city said it wanted to test 180 children for lead levels in their blood. Only 27 children were tested.
The housing department told residents the program was closed due to a lack of certified lead abatement contractors. The city gave The News a different explanation: The program required a standalone approach to administering the grant, which required additional staff time and program requirements.
According to residents who applied for the program, the city has not been transparent about how the program was executed, what went wrong and how the federal money was distributed.
Skinner, 55, who has chronic venous insufficiency in her legs, said, “I’m really disappointed. They left me on my own. Always telling me to wait for the help that never came.”
Loucious Miller, 66, criticized the quality of the work done on his home, labeling the program a “scam.”
“They didn’t do a good job. I don’t understand why they treated me this way,” said Miller, who is disabled. “I was in tears, questioning why I was being ignored despite qualifying for the help.”
The News contacted Dallas’ 14 city council members and the city’s housing officials. None provided a detailed explanation of how the program was carried out.
Mayor Eric Johnson did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email.
The News made multiple records requests seeking information on how the city spent the money. The city has not released the information, citing more than 80 hours of work, at a cost of about $6,000, to find and redact the records.
City officials have refused to speak about why the program was not fully executed as proposed on their federal application.
Cynthia Rogers-Ellickson, interim director of the Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization department, and Thor Erickson, the department’s assistant director, did not respond to 10 emailed requests for interviews since February. They did not respond to voicemails or requests conveyed through the city’s communications department.
Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert was contacted for comment. Elizabeth Saab, who is chief of strategy, engagement and alignment and who provides communications support to Tolbert, requested supporting documents from the investigation.
After receiving the documents, she said via email, “Dallas housing department says the grant contract ended in December 2023 and HUD closed the contract. Additionally, because the grant was cumbersome to administer, Housing was not able to draw down all of the available funds — which is the heart of the issue as to why the city was unable to follow up.”
The city of Dallas’ communications department said via email, “The initial thought for the program was to pair up with the city’s existing home repair program, but due to the additional criteria required to administer this program, the initial plan could not be carried out.”
The communications department did not specify which criteria it was referring to.
“The Healthy Homes Lead Reduction Program was designed to prevent childhood lead poisoning and thus has specific eligibility requirements in addition to the presence of lead hazards that required a standalone approach to administer this grant that required additional staff time and program requirements,” the communications department said.
The city’s failure to execute the program has drawn criticism from advocates for environmental justice.
“The city is just not ready to execute these types of programs. It’s a joke. Not delivering is a way not to build trust with the community and [to leave] residents exposed to lead,” said Caleb Roberts, director of Downwinders at Risk, a local grassroots organization that advocates for clean air and other environmental issues.
The risks of lead exposure
No level of lead exposure is safe for humans.
Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health and result in damage to the brain and nervous system, slowed growth and development, learning and behavioral problems and hearing and speech problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lead can be found in all parts of the environment: air, soil, water and inside homes. Much of the exposure comes from activities related to industrial facilities and past use of lead-based paint in homes built before 1978. According to the city of Dallas, there are about 38,985 homes built before 1978 that likely contain lead-based paint.
“Lead is a big issue, and it’s more likely to occur in homes that are occupied by families with really low incomes,” said Ben Martin, research director with Texas Housers, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing for low-income families.
“We also see that there’s a snowball effect of exposure to lead often associated with poor health, education issues and run-ins with the criminal justice system,” said Martin.
Lead and lead compounds have been used in a wide variety of products such as ceramics, pipes and plumbing materials, solder, gasoline, batteries, ammunition and cosmetics.
The program’s origins
The story of Dallas’ failed lead abatement program begins in May 2018, when Dallas’ Housing Department applied to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control and Healthy Homes Supplemental grant programs.
In December 2018, HUD announced Dallas, Waco and Longview would receive their first lead hazard control grants from a $139 million fund aimed at reducing lead exposure in children nationwide.
Dallas’ federal grant amounted to $2.3 million. The city’s application outlined a comprehensive plan to tackle lead-based paint hazards in homes built before 1978. To qualify, homes must have at least one child under the age of 6 residing or spending a significant amount of time there, and homeowners must earn at or below 80% of the area’s median income.
The efforts to test for lead levels in children were to occur in collaboration with the Children’s Health System of Dallas, a partnership highlighted in application documents made public through a records request.
The city applied for a grant of almost $4 million from HUD and ended up receiving about half the requested amount, according to the grant application.
In May 2019, the grant funding became available. In August 2020, the grant funding was formally introduced to the Dallas City Council’s Quality of Life committee.
It’s not clear why it took a year for the program to launch. Available records did not shed light on reasons for the delay, and city officials will not comment on the overall process.
In April 2021, members of the council’s Housing and Homeless Solutions committee requested a comprehensive program overview.
In May 2021, Eric Anthony Johnson, then the city’s chief of economic development and neighborhood services, issued a memo to the mayor and city council with the program’s process updates.
According to the memo, the Dallas housing department had processed 17 applications and conducted lead-based paint inspections on eight homes.
Between March and September 2021, the city allocated $6,800 for lead testing in 27 children, according to an invoice from UrgentCare2go, a contractor the city used for testing.
In May 2022, during a Housing and Homelessness Solutions committee meeting, council member Cara Mendelsohn from District 12 asked about updates on the grant’s utilization and program outcomes.
“There seem to be a lot of programs and not a lot of homes being repaired, and I wanted to know specifically on the lead-based paint program, how many homes have been remediated since we got the grant and how much we spent on administration,” said Mendelsohn during the meeting.
Housing department staff said while 10 homes had been inspected for lead, the city had not removed lead from any houses.
In 2022, Johnson resigned to take a nonprofit job in Minneapolis.
Johnson said via email, “I have nothing to add to the story. I would recommend contacting the city manager’s office for comment.”
Federal authorities
In 2023, the housing department completed work on four houses. But city officials reported zero units in the Healthy Homes Grants Management System, said Yolanda Brown, the division manager of HUD’s Lead and Healthy Homes program.
“We were never, ever able to get them all the way started. They had major staff turnover and just one of the issues would have been a contractor issue: They couldn’t get contractors into their program,” said Brown, who is based in Washington, D.C.
HUD provides city staff members with training to find contractors and promote and manage the program. Nevertheless, cities must find and hire certified contractors for both interior and exterior lead hazard assessments.
To aid Dallas, HUD created a partnership between Dallas’ and Fort Worth’s housing departments. Fort Worth has managed its program and received grants multiple times since 2005.
The pandemic posed additional challenges, affecting contractor availability, community engagement and home access for all cities that received the grant, according to Jonnette Hawkins Simmons, HUD’s director of the grant services division.
“We’ve met with them [Dallas’ housing department] before and we took them around and showed them a few of the properties that we completed,” said Maria Corrales, the housing program supervisor for Fort Worth.
The cities of Waco and Fort Worth demonstrated greater success in their programs despite dealing with the effects of the pandemic. Fort Worth’s numbers dropped about 40% in 2020 when it completed 45 homes compared to 75 the previous year.
In 2023, Fort Worth completed 66 units.
Waco, which received $3.8 million in grant funding, completed 36 units, with a goal of 147.
Galen Price, director of Waco’s housing and community development, said it was difficult to hire certified contractors due to the city’s location. However, Price said the city managed to hire two contractors from the Dallas-Fort Worth area and one from Abilene.
Dallas residents’ stories
The city of Dallas’ program was closed in October 2023, according to the final report the city sent to HUD. Residents whose homes have high lead levels were notified by letter about the closure after waiting years for the lead removal process.
Tonya Skinner was one of the residents who qualified. In October 2021, she had her two grandchildren and her home tested for lead. For almost two years, she did not hear back from the city about when they would work on her house.
Skinner moved all her belongings out of her bedroom and living room as the city inspector told her to. She kept calling the housing department for updates on the program. She kept asking when contractors would come to her home and begin the lead removal.
In November 2023, she received a letter from the city. The letter, shared with The News, said her application had been canceled, and the program was closed due to a shortage of certified lead contractors.
“I want someone to come and get the work done. I don’t want my grandkids, who have asthma, to be exposed,” she said.
To this day, she keeps the green folder the city gave her with all her paperwork, including the health assessment that shows where higher levels of lead are present in her home.
“The city owes the public and these households an explanation of what happened,” said Martin with Texas Housers. “It’s a big red flag that this much money was put into a program that appears to have served few households, and it ended up forfeiting money.”
Zabrina Chism heard about the lead abatement program from her neighbor and decided to apply. She qualified because of her low income, her disability and the fact that her home was built before 1978.
In July 2023, Chism received approval for about $25,000 in funding. This grant was to cover contractor services for her home. The lead inspections revealed high levels of lead both inside and outside, notably in the bedroom paint and on the exterior windows.
“I told the [city inspector], ‘If I would have been living in Highland Park, I think I probably would have got a better service,’” said Chism, 54, from her living room, with red carpet and photos of her children and grandchildren that decorated the walls.
Despite recognizing her home’s interior as a risk area for lead, the promised remediation work was only completed on the exterior, she said. Her bedroom was one of the areas where lead remediation was supposed to take place, but contractors did not work in her room, Chism said.
Chism said she was frustrated when contractors failed to reinstall black wires from her satellite dish after removing them for exterior painting and when her back door was partially painted.
Chism said she faced significant challenges due to poor communication with both the city’s housing department and the contractors assigned to her home.
Loucious Miller, the resident with a disability, was told that as part of the lead abatement, new windows would be installed in his home and about $5,000 would be used to redo his bathroom, he said.
He was told that a new subfloor, baseboard and toilet would be installed. Miller said the toilet the contractors installed did not look like a new one. In less than a year, cracks appeared on his floor.
The Environmental Protection Agency has a lead-certified contractor locator website to find professionals in the area who can perform lead abatement. In Dallas, more than a dozen are available, according to the site.
One of the lead-certified contractors working for the city of Dallas was GTO 1 Construction, based in Fort Worth. The company performed work on both Chism’s and Miller’s homes, according to work orders provided to The News.
Javier Villagomez, the owner of GTO 1 Construction, told The News his company worked on several homes for the Dallas housing department. But he was told in January by someone in the housing department that the program was not working for the city and that the city would not be doing any more homes.
Villagomez did not return three calls and voicemail messages to follow up on the residents’ complaints about the work done on their homes.
Chism and Miller, residents whose homes were under city-contracted work, told The News the remediation process was not only time-consuming due to extensive paperwork but also hampered by poor communication with city housing inspectors.
Miller, whose home was allocated nearly $12,000 for lead removal, expressed doubts that the full amount was used as intended. His concern extended to the health risks posed by potentially unresolved lead hazards, especially given his health conditions and the time his grandchildren spend in his home.
The city’s program guidelines said the city would not cover reimbursement costs during lead abatement. However, one of Miller’s work orders shared with The News included a $1,000 allocation for hotel expenses. He said he spent that amount while contractors removed lead from his home for a week. He said he was never reimbursed.
Residents cite a lack of transparency
The News contacted Dallas’ 14 city council members. Only three responded.
“My questions around this program have been documented at meetings — all money for admin was spent before any clients were assisted,” Cara Mendelsohn said via email.
Adam Bazaldua, the council member from District 7 where several residents applied for the program, said via email that he supported the housing department’s administration of the grant. He said he still advocates for more funding from the general budget for the department to have more flexibility in how to distribute the help to residents.
“Though the outcome of this program was different than we all anticipated, the Housing and Revitalization Department worked diligently to ensure that the Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes Grant was administered to as many families as possible that met HUD’s requirements,” Bazaldua said.
District 4 council member Carolyn King Arnold, who represents Skinner and the majority of the applicants, said the officials at the housing department were better suited to provide detailed information about the program. But she was interested in getting in touch with her constituents and learning about what happened.
“The question [how the program was executed] is for us [city council members] and we will have to look into it,” said King Arnold via phone call. “If the program is no longer funded, and we don’t have another source of funding, then we’re still in a box.”
Jesse Moreno, District 2 council member and chair of the Housing and Homelessness committee, did not respond to multiple emails, phone calls and text messages for requests for comment.
Council members Paula Blackmon, Jaynie Schultz and Paul Ridley said they had no comment. The rest of the city council members did not respond to requests for comment.
Dallas residents Chism, Miller and Skinner are seeking an apology from the city, urging those responsible to acknowledge their oversight and fulfill their commitments.
All they want is to have a lead-free home for their grandchildren’s safety.
“I’m concerned about the lead in the house because when they initially came out, they told me where and what was contaminated,” said Chism. “So you bring me right back into the house with the same contaminations that you did not remove.”
Digital archivist Jennifer Brancato contributed to this report.
