Lead Paint and Asbestos in Older Greeley Homes

Most dumpster-rental websites in America put lead paint and asbestos on a footnote page and hope nobody asks. On this site they belong near the front, and the reason is a single number from the Census.

The median Greeley home was built in 1985. Roughly 46 percent of the city’s housing predates 1980. About 17 percent of it was built before 1960, and 7.2 percent in 1939 or earlier. Nearly 29 percent of Greeley’s entire housing stock went up between 1960 and 1979 — the ranch belt, houses now hitting sixty years old, on their second or third owner, ready for the kitchen, the bathrooms, the roof and the basement.

Greeley is an old city sitting in a very new county. Weld County as a whole has been building hard for twenty-five years; Greeley’s core has not. So the two federal and state rules that attach to old buildings — the EPA’s lead renovation rule and Colorado’s asbestos regulation — are not exotic here. They are ordinary Tuesday.

This article explains what triggers each one, who holds which piece of paper, which agency answers the phone, and what all of that means for the container in your driveway. It is not legal advice and it is not a substitute for a certified inspector.

Two rules, two agencies, two different dates

People run these together and they should not be. They are separate programs with separate triggers, separate regulators and separate cut-off years.

• Lead paint — a federal rule, administered by the US EPA, keyed to housing built before 1978. It is a rule about who does the work and how.
• Asbestos — a Colorado rule, administered by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division, with an exemption for buildings built after 12 October 1988. It is a rule about air, and it comes with notice periods, fees and permits.

Note the ten-year gap between the two dates. A 1983 Greeley house is past the lead trigger and squarely inside the asbestos window. A 1971 house is inside both. And the median Greeley home — 1985 — sits on the wrong side of the asbestos date by three years.

Lead: the 1978 line, and Colorado is not the agency

Here is the piece almost nobody in Colorado knows until they need it. Colorado is not an EPA-authorized state for the Renovation, Repair and Painting program. A number of states run their own version of the rule under EPA authorization. Colorado does not. Firms working here certify with the EPA directly.

That has a practical consequence: when you go looking for the rule, you are looking at a federal program, and the authority is epa.gov, not a state web page. Do not expect a Colorado agency to hold the certification record.

The trigger, in plain terms: the rule reaches compensated renovation, repair or painting that disturbs painted surfaces in housing or child-occupied facilities built before 1978. Paid work. Painted surfaces. Pre-1978 building. All three, and you are inside it.

What the rule requires is that the firm performing the renovation is certified, that the people doing the work are trained, and that the job follows the program’s work practices — containment of the work area, dust control, specific cleaning, and verification at the end. That certification belongs to the renovation firm — the contractor disturbing the paint. If you are hiring somebody to remodel a pre-1978 Greeley house, ask them for it before the first cut, not after.

A homeowner doing the work themselves in their own home is not a firm being compensated, and the rule is written around paid work. That does not make the dust harmless. It only means the paperwork sits somewhere different.

What the lead rule actually changes on the ground

The practical effect on a Greeley job is not paperwork. It is method, and method costs time.

Containment means plastic, sealed openings and a controlled work area. Dust control rules out the fast, dirty methods that a 1960s house otherwise invites — open dry sanding of painted trim, uncontrolled power planing, heat guns run hot. Cleaning at the end is specific rather than general. And a job that would have been three days of demolition becomes three days of demolition inside a plastic room.

For us that shows up in one place: the container sits longer. A remodel done under lead-safe work practices generates the same volume of debris over a longer stretch, and it usually goes into the box in controlled batches rather than in one afternoon of throwing. That is worth saying out loud when you book, because it changes what the right arrangement looks like.

Asbestos in Colorado is an air quality matter

This surprises people, and it explains the whole structure of the rule. In Colorado, asbestos is not regulated as a waste problem in the first instance. It is regulated as an air pollution problem, under CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B, by the department’s Air Pollution Control Division. The concern is fiber released into the air during the work, which is why the rule is about notice, method and containment rather than about which landfill takes the bag.

The division’s asbestos line is 720-507-5136, and CDPHE is at cdphe.colorado.gov.

The single-family trigger levels

For a single-family residential dwelling, the regulated thresholds are:

• 32 square feet of asbestos-containing material on a surface, or
• 50 linear feet of it on pipes, or
• the volume of a 55-gallon drum.

Hit any one of those and the work is a regulated abatement project. Below them, the rule does not treat it as a regulated project — which is not the same thing as saying the material is safe or that you should attack it with a pry bar.

The exemption date, and why Greeley’s median year matters

There is an exemption for buildings built after 12 October 1988. A house that went up after that date is outside the regulation.

Now put that next to Greeley’s housing profile. Median year built 1985. Roughly 46 percent built before 1980. In a city like this, the exemption is the exception rather than the rule — which is precisely the opposite of how it works out in the new subdivisions along the interstate.

Ten working days, and it will reorder your schedule

This is the part that catches people, and it is the single most useful sentence in this article: a regulated asbestos project requires ten working days’ notification to the state. Ten working days is two calendar weeks, and it also applies to any demolition, whether or not asbestos is found.

The published fees on the state’s side are a $60 notice and a $180 permit for a single-family residential project. Those are state fees, not City of Greeley fees, and they are modest. The cost is the calendar, not the money.

A certified inspection is part of the picture too — the state expects the material to be identified by somebody qualified to identify it, with sampling and a laboratory, before the work is planned around it.

Where this genuinely applies in Greeley

Two answers: the documented old neighborhoods, and the far larger, less glamorous ranch belt.

Glenmere. The best-documented old-housing neighborhood in the city. Glenmere grew out of the Fairacres Subdivision, developed by Frank M. Weller, a Greeley lumber dealer who arrived from Ord, Nebraska in 1919 and whose own mansion was built in 1940. Glenmere Park is described by the City’s own tourism service as surrounded by historic homes, with ponds and mature trees. A 1919-to-1940 subdivision is pre-1978 and pre-1988 by a wide margin.

The Monroe Avenue Historic District. Greeley’s first local historic district, designated 13 December 1999. The City publishes its boundary as “9th Ave. from 11th St. to 16th St., roughly” — the district carries the Monroe Avenue name while its published boundary runs along 9th Avenue, and we publish it the way the City writes it. Monroe Avenue is old housing by definition.

Downtown. The Downtown Greeley Historic District was designated 25 November 2002, with a published boundary of “7th to 10th Streets between 8th and 9th Avenues, and including the Weld County Courthouse, Lincoln Park and Greeley High School.” See downtown Greeley.

And then the part that is not a historic district at all. Nearly three houses in ten in this city were built between 1960 and 1979. They are all over the older half of Greeley, they are nobody’s idea of a landmark, and they are exactly the vintage for vinyl floor tile, sheet flooring, ceiling texture, pipe and duct wrap and old joint compound. The ordinary ranch is where most of this work actually happens.

If your property is designated on Greeley’s local historic register or sits inside one of the two districts, there may be City review attached to exterior work or demolition. We could not establish what triggers that review or how the process runs, so we are not going to describe it. Call Greeley 311 on (970) 351-5311 and ask before you plan the exterior. Historic Greeley Inc. is the local preservation nonprofit, on (970) 302-8368.

Only a test tells you. Nothing else does.

We are not going to publish a list that lets you diagnose your own house from a web page, because that is how people talk themselves out of testing. The honest position is short:

• Age is a flag, not an answer. A pre-1978 house may have lead paint under later coats. A pre-1989 house may contain asbestos in several materials. Neither is certain and neither is visible.
• Sampling and a laboratory are the only way to know. For asbestos, Colorado expects a certified inspection. For lead, testing methods are set out in the EPA program.
• The materials that matter are usually the boring ones — floors, ceilings, pipe insulation, adhesives, exterior siding. Not the ones people expect.

Test before you demolish, not after. Once it is broken up and in a pile, your options narrow and your costs go up.

What goes in the container, and what never does

This is where a roll-off fits into the picture, and the line is clean.

Regulated asbestos-containing material does not go in our container. Abated asbestos is a regulated waste stream with its own packaging, labeling and disposal chain, handled by the abatement contractor to a facility that accepts it. Do not put it in a roll-off, do not put it in bags in a roll-off, and do not let anyone tell you it will be fine underneath the rest of the load. If asbestos is part of your project, that part leaves the site separately.

Liquid paint never goes in a container either — lead or not. Cans of paint, stain, thinner, solvent and stripper go to Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley, on (970) 400-2217, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is free to every Weld County resident, with limits of 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, no leaking containers and no plastic bags. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there. Being a county seat has real advantages and this is one of them.

A painted door is building debris. A can of paint is hazardous waste. That distinction does most of the work in practice.

Everything else — the general demolition debris a renovation produces once the regulated material has been dealt with properly — is an ordinary container load. Tell us what the job is before we deliver. Where the material has an unusual route, we would rather sort it out on the phone than at the gate.

Sequencing an old-house job in Greeley

Put the pieces in order and the schedule almost writes itself.

1. Inspect first. Certified asbestos inspection, lead assessment where the age calls for it. Before design, not after demolition starts.
2. Notify. If the project is regulated, the ten working days start running. Two calendar weeks, and nothing about the rest of the job goes faster because you are impatient.
3. Abate. The regulated material leaves the site through the abatement contractor’s own chain, not through a roll-off.
4. Then demolish, and then bring in the container. This is the step people invert. A box delivered on day one of a four-week regulated project sits empty for a fortnight in your driveway, in the weather, taking up the parking.
5. Hazardous household material separately, to 1311 North 17th Avenue, on the days it is open.

Call us with the shape of the schedule rather than a date, and we will fit the container to the part of the job it is actually for.

The container rules that apply regardless

• Five feet from anything combustible. Greeley adopted the 2021 International Fire Code at Greeley Municipal Code § 22-454, effective 1 January 2023, with no amendment to Section 304. Under Section 304.3 a dumpster must not be stored inside a building or placed within five feet of a combustible wall, and every roll-off we place is far over the size threshold in that section — so the five-foot rule applies to all of them. Greeley Fire Prevention Bureau: (970) 350-9510.
• In the street, the City permits it and names it. The City’s own permitting guidance states that “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881, 2835 W. 10th Street. The permit guide has the detail.
• The debris is the property’s responsibility. Greeley Municipal Code § 12-269(b) requires refuse and debris left by demolition or repair of a building to be removed following substantial completion. Leaving it is a code problem.
• Old driveways take the load badly. A container on a 1960s driveway is a different question from one on a 2015 driveway. Our driveway protection guide covers what we put under the wheels and rails.

The full code picture is on Greeley’s municipal code, and the City’s own site is greeleyco.gov.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you whether your house has lead paint or asbestos. Nobody can do that from an address and a build year. A certified inspector with samples and a lab can.

We will not tell you a shortcut around a ten-working-day notice. There is not one that we know of, and a firm that offers you one is telling you something about itself.

We will not describe Greeley’s historic design review process, because we could not establish it. Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311.

The short version

• Built before 1978? Lead rule territory. Federal, EPA, and Colorado is not the authorizing agency — contractors certify with the EPA directly.
• Built before 13 October 1988? Asbestos territory. CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B, an air quality rule. 720-507-5136.
• Triggers: 32 square feet, 50 linear feet, or a 55-gallon drum. Ten working days’ notice, and any demolition needs notice regardless.
• Regulated asbestos never goes in a roll-off. Liquid paint and solvents go to 1311 N 17th Avenue, (970) 400-2217.
• Test first, notify, abate, demolish, then fill the box.

For the container side of an old-house project, call (970) 888-6911 and tell us the year the house was built along with the address. In Greeley that year tells us more than almost anything else you could say. See also demolition debris, residential containers, the sizing guide and the Colorado materials guide.