The reports this weekend that lead levels at some sinks and drinking fountains at many of our city’s elementary schools are slightly in excess of federal standards could not have come at a better time, for Mayor Bloomberg is girding for his fight with the City Council over tort reform. Scheduled for tomorrow at 10 a.m. is a hearing before the City Council regarding two bills that the mayor and his corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, will be pushing as the city faces a multi-billion dollar budget deficit over the next fiscal year.

The lead paint issue is one with which observers of public health scares and junk science are all too familiar. Since the 1970s, lead paint, and other industrial uses of lead, have been under assault by activists who claim that lead exposure is an epidemic threat to our nation’s children. While high levels of lead exposure can harm humans, there is little scientific basis for the assertion that low levels of lead exposure impair children’s mental development. Studies purporting to show a slight correlation between blood lead levels and learning and behavioral problems fail to deal convincingly with other variables, such as social and economic factors.

Regardless, what has been found in New York City schools is not elevated lead in the blood of pupils attending those schools, only lead levels in some water outlets “slightly” — in the words of the New York Times — in excess of the 20 parts per billion set forth by an overcautious federal government. While we understand the concern of any parent with children in the 222 elementary schools identified, the problem can likely be mitigated by flushing the water systems, which the city is already doing.

As it happens, New York has been under sustained legal attack by the tort bar for years on the lead question because some city-owned housing has lead in the paint on its walls. Why a city under attack by the tort bar on the lead issue would open its schools to a voluntary inspection of its drinking water, when our courts are so open to abuse by junk science, is beyond us. In a climate in which the city can be held liable for 100% of the damages in an accident where a drugged-up driver injures someone swerving around a city truck, the city is only asking for trouble.

Its proposals tomorrow deal with problems more of the slip-and-fall variety. One would require a written report to be filed before the city can be said to be aware of a defect in a sidewalk or road (currently, the Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Corporation, an organization established by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, submits maps); the other proposal would make building owners, rather than the city, responsible for accidents that happen in front of their establishments. It will take Albany to make more progress on tort reform, ending joint and several liability or limiting losses for pain and suffering. If it removed liability in lead paint cases, it would be safe for the city to inspect the water pipes in its schools.