Crossing county agency administrative borders and using GIS to effectively target high-risk dwellings for a lead abatement program: Riverside County, California

Exposure to lead-based paint remains a leading cause of childhood lead poisoning. Nationwide at least fifty million dwellings, mostly built prior to 1955, still contain dangerous lead-based paint. In Riverside County, CA there are many young children living in high-risk dwellings. The Office of Industrial Hygiene (OIH) in the Riverside County Public Health Department offers free lead assessment and free/low-cost construction services to remove lead from qualified dwellings. In order to qualify, the dwelling must be constructed before 1955 and inhabited by at least one child under five. The two primary hurdles have been to: 1) identify qualified dwellings, and 2) contact the owner, as many of these dwellings are occupied by tenants. To address these challenges, OIH requested geospatial data from Riverside County Transportation Land Management Agency, which manages parcel-level data. The data consisted of polygons for every parcel and two data tables containing property characteristics and owner contact information. These data were used to identify parcels with a dwelling built prior to 1955 and generate owner contact information. In order to target those dwellings inhabited by children under five, participant data from the Riverside County Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program was geocoded and then de-identified using a density analysis tool. Using a combination of data sources and GIS, OIH was able to identify clusters of low-income children living in dwellings manufactured prior to 1955. This is an excellent example of collaborating across agency boundaries to pool resources from non-traditional public health partners to effectively target interventions.