The city of San Francisco and Santa Clara County filed an emergency lawsuit requesting the California Supreme Court block a $2 billion initiative supported by two paint companies from appearing on the November ballot.
The initiative, supported by Sherwin Williams and Conagra Grocery Products, would provide a $2 billion taxpayer-paid state bond to finance the remediation of lead paint in houses and schools throughout the state.
The initiative would also free the two firms from a court judgment which required them to pay an estimated $409 million to $730 million for removing lead paint hazards in houses built before 1951 throughout the state.
CBS San Francisco reports: The lawsuit claims the measure must be barred from the ballot because it concerns more than one subject, in violation of a state constitutional rule, and is misleading, in that it hides the elimination of the paint makers’ liability.
“The initiative attempts to trick the public into eliminating the manufacturers’ liability through a deceptive provision that does not even hint at the existence of the manufacturers’ liability and that is buried within a measure that bills itself exclusively as providing funding for remediation,” the lawsuit alleges.
In 2014, the companies were ordered to pay $1.15 billion to address the lead hazards built before 1980. The decision was changed to houses built before 1951 last year. NL Industries, one of the firms named previously in the suit, reached a $60 million settlement with the state in May.
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