Mr. Ballanco is correct in saying that prescriptive legislative efforts seeking to restrict the amount of lead in plumbing products to a specific concentration, such as the 0.25 percent maximum in California AB 1953, have “no bearing on the amount of lead that will leach into the drinking water.” That is why PMI continues to believe that performance, as defined by NSF 61 -- not prescription, in the form of legislative mandates - is the best way to guarantee the quality and safety of faucets.
That is also why the members of PMI vigorously opposed AB 1953, actively and personally working against it until the day Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in September 2007. It is simply not true that “rather than fighting it, [the faucet manufacturers] decided to acquiesce with the legislation in the hopes of finding the necessary loopholes to comply.”