D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, has requested that a portion of the city budget be allocated to fund a study on the health hazards of World War I-era munitions in Spring Valley, according to Patrick Leibach, Cheh's legislative assistant.
Cheh directly contacted Mayor Adrian Fenty about her request for $750,000 to fund the study. However, due to tardiness in the budget process, it will be difficult to get the money into the budget for the next fiscal year, Leibach said.
Dan Noble, project manager for military munitions removal with the Army Corps of Engineers, said at a meeting earlier this month that members of the Restoration Advisory Board should pass a resolution commending Cheh for her budget request. He also urged the board to provide any additional support necessary.
"It's one thing to make a recommendation, but it's another thing to get money - the point being to try to assist her to go from a paper recommendation to some green dollars that we can actually spend and implement," Noble said.
Gregory Beumel, community co-chair on the RAB, said his committee has been active in pursuing this source of funding.
"We've been working with [Leibach], whether as a group or individual, contacting the mayor's office and asking that he include the funding in this year's budget," he said.
Beumel said $750,000 was not a lot of money for the D.C. government, which proposed a spending plan of $9.7 billion for fiscal 2008, according to the mayor's FY 2008 Proposed Budget and Financial Plan.
The study would elaborate on an earlier report from The Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The D.C. Health Department contracted Johns Hopkins last year to assess any risks for Spring Valley residents who had potentially been exposed to on-site World War I munitions, according to materials available at the meeting.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins deemed the $750,000 necessary to follow up on the recommendations listed in the first Spring Valley Public Health Scoping Study. The amount is three times more than was allocated for the original study.
Leibach listed another option if Cheh's request is not approved for the fiscal 2009 budget - if the city's chief financial officer determined in a supplemental budget that it has more money than originally believed.
The original study's results varied. Although the "community health status" of Spring Valley residents is similarly as high as that of residents in surrounding areas, rates of cancer known to be associated with arsenic exposure are slightly higher in Spring Valley than in nearby neighborhoods.
The Spring Valley site posed many challenges, including the poor documentation of buried materials and significant changes in landscape due to development on AU's campus and surrounding areas, according to the Johns Hopkins report.
Despite a lack of scientific literature on the detriments of chemical weapons exposure, the known health effects of chemicals tested for at the Spring Valley dig sites is similar to reported health disorders in the community. These health problems include cancers, neurological and blood disorders and skin conditions, according to the report.
