After months of pressure from state legislators and public health advocates, major paint manufacturers have withdrawn an initiative that would have appeared on California's November ballot.
The decision avoids a fight in the fall, when voters would have decided whether Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra would be on the hook for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up lead paint in homes. The initiative would have blunted a state appeals court ruling that made the companies liable for the cleanup. In its place, taxpayers would have funded a $2 billion loan to finance cleanup of lead-based and other hazardous paint.
"This is a victory for all Californians," Democratic state Assemblyman Rob Bonta said in a statement. "We pushed back against the lead paint industry and won."
Paint companies had spent $2.8 million as of March on collecting the more than 365,880 signatures needed to qualify the measure for the ballot. They also ran a social media campaign to pressure lawmakers to give the companies relief from the court decision.
Lawmakers reacted with fury to the initiative after the companies introduced it in the fall, arguing that it was an abuse of the initiative process. In March, half a dozen legislators wrote bills aimed at penalizing the companies beyond the appeals court ruling. Legislators agreed to put on hold three pieces of legislation after the paint companies took back their initiative.
"I want to be clear that our work is not over," Democratic state Assemblywoman Monique Limon said. "We continue to be committed to find long-term solutions to lead-based paint."
A state court is still calculating how much Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra will be forced to pay to clean up lead in homes built before 1951 in Los Angeles and nine other counties and cities that sued. The companies are still hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in their favor.
