MILWAUKEE - An exclusive I-Team investigation found Milwaukee children living in toxic homes and a public health system that can't always get them out.

There are the tens of thousands of homes in Milwaukee full of chipping, poisonous lead paint, inside and out. The kids living in them shouldn't be living in them, but that's what happens when you have landlords that seemingly don't care and a system that sometimes lets them get away with it.

Four-year-old Maurice Wells has lived most of his life in a home full of poison.

"That's how it is," said Maurice's mother, Bertha Webb. "I try to do the best that I can to try to keep it clean."

No matter how hard Webb works, it's still a constant struggle to keep up. Their duplex apartment on Milwaukee's north side is covered with chipping, crumbling lead-based paint: the windows, walls, doors, floors, everything.

"I sweep almost every day, because it's falling from the walls," Webb complained. "The paint chips on the floor, I have to mop constantly every day."

Still, doctors found dangerously high lead levels in Maurice's body last year, enough to cause problems later in life.

The Milwaukee Health Department ordered the landlord, Tawanna Hardman, to clean the place up. It even warned her that she "may be liable for damages to children if they become exposed as a result of your negligence."

Hardman ignored all of it. The I-Team spent weeks trying to track her down. We stopped by her apartment on Milwaukee's west side a half-dozen times. We never saw her, but did run into a man once parked in a spot assigned to Hardman's apartment. He wouldn't tell us who he was, just that Hardman wasn't home and that he'd leave a message.

Webb told us the man may have been Hardman's brother who only stops by on the first of each month.

"He accepts my rent money, pick up the rent money. It shouldn't cost that much to get a seven or eight dollar can of paint to cover up some of this lead," said Webb.

However, removing lead the right way takes a lot of money for things like new windows. The Health Department will kick in up to 65 percent of the cost, but only if the property owner picks up the rest and gets the work done within 45 days.

Just two blocks over from Bertha Webb's place, we found a young mother and an infant living in a home where, back in May, inspectors found had high levels of lead. The only contact info we could find for that landlord was a PO Box.

It seems our visit may have motivated the homeowner. We stopped back a couple weeks later and saw haz-mat signs in the window and a permit for the work to finally get done nearly five months after the city issued the lead removal order.

In fact, the I-Team found nearly 120 homes in Milwaukee the Health Department says should have had the lead paint removed already -- anywhere from several months to several years ago. In case after case, we found children still living in those homes.

"It's incredibly frustrating," said Paul Biedrzycki, Director of Disease Control and Environmental Health for the City of Milwaukee Health Department. "I think many people don't treat childhood lead poisoning as an imminent health threat."

Bertha Webb knows her son, Maurice, is in danger, but can't do anything about it.

"I don't have the financial means right now to move," Webb admitted. "I'm trying to save up to move."

The Health Department is pinching its pennies, too. Health officials figure there are around 130,000 homes in Milwaukee with lead paint in really bad shape. Still, over the last four years, the Feds have cut funding to Milwaukee's lead removal program by 30 percent -- about $3 million less.

Less money has forced the department to make some tough choices, like: only stepping in to help when a child's lead level is 15 micrograms per deciliter or higher, even through the Feds say anything over 10 is dangerous.

"That means there's a whole cohort of children between 10 and 15 micrograms per deciliter that are remaining poisoned, because we don't have the resources to either do the epidemiological follow up or the abatement of their home," Biedrzycki explained.

In simple English, it means the Health Department doesn't have enough money to help a whole lot of kids with too much lead in them, who live in homes with too much lead in them.

Another issue, the feds make the Health Department help pay to remove lead from between 1,000 and 1,200 homes every year. Which means, if a landlord like Tawanna Hardman doesn't cooperate, even after being cited and fined, the department says it has to move on to other homes.

"It's a very difficult situation for the Health Department and tenants, obviously," Biedrzycki said.

And for tenants like Bertha Webb, one final insult. The bank recently foreclosed on the property when the landlord couldn't pay the note. So even if her landlord wanted to remove the lead that's making Maurice sick, the Health Department wouldn't pitch in a dime.

"I'm scared the social service might come out here and see what type of condition that this home is in, with the lead, and they might end up taking my kids for something that's not my problem, that's not my responsibility to have fixed," worries Webb.

Keep in mind that the lead removal orders stays with the house. That means if the bank takes back the duplex Webb lives in, whomever buys it will ultimately be responsible to clean the place up before they can rent it out again.

Click here to see all of Milwaukee's open lead abatement orders.

Click here to learn more about the Milwaukee Health Department's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.