New Orleans        Almost everyone, up and down the line from politicians to public health officials to public water utilities to families know by now how dangerous and destructive, especially to children, infants, and the elderly lead can be.  The Flint, Michigan water crisis and many just like it from Newark to Milwaukee to just about every city and town that installed lead service lines to deliver water to homes, buildings, and schools have been forced to admit this is a huge health issue that can cause permanent neurological damage.  The problem has been, simply put, who pays to fix this mess.  Local utilities used lead pipes because they were cheaper, but have not wanted to pay the cost of replacement, often delaying the job, or trying with the help of subservient state legislators to pass all of the costs onto the water customer without accepting their own responsibility.

There’s good news from the Biden administration as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the final result since…

…the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements will establish a national inventory of lead service lines and require that utilities take more aggressive action to remove lead pipes on homeowners’ private property. It also lowers the level of lead contamination that will trigger government enforcement from 15 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb.

In doing so, they cut through the whack-a-mole of who pays by squarely placing the burden on the local water utilities to get the job done over the next decade.  The consensus is that the utilities may well scream and holler or even try to delay once again in court, but advocates are confident that this rule, amending a more diluted one from the Trump administration, will stick.

Furthermore, the Biden administration is backing up the new rule with some real dollars.

President Joe Biden has made replacing them one of his top environmental priorities, securing $15 billion to give states over five years through the bipartisan infrastructure law and vowing to rid the country of lead pipes by 2031. The administration has spent $9 billion so far — enough to replace up to 1.7 million lead pipes, the administration said.

It’s a big job.  There are estimates that nine million homes have lead service lines and only “367,000 lead pipes have been replaced nationwide since Biden took office, according to White House officials, affecting nearly 1 million people.”

Biden is taking a victory lap over the rule to Wisconsin, which makes sense.  No, not because it is a battleground state, although certainly it is, but likely because they realize that the whole state historically moved all of its water through lead pipes.  Working with a local organization in Milwaukee some years ago, I went to a meeting with some of their leaders and learned all about it and still get their email bulletins.  A lot of lead was mined in Wisconsin.  To win favor with mine owners and support local industry, the Wisconsin state legislature passed a law mandating that all water pipes in the state be made of lead from those mines.  In trying to wheedle out of that historical mistake, more recent legislatures there have made the replacements of their lines the individual property owners responsibility, which was unaffordable to many.  At the request of the Mayor of New Orleans and local legislators, the Louisiana legislature had done the same thing as Wisconsin and many other states to shift costs to consumers as well.

Utility industry spokespeople are whining that the administration is low-balling the costs, which they say could be two or three times as much.  Maybe that’s true, but if they had done it years ago when they should have taken on the job, it probably would have cost half as much, and that doesn’t count the incalculable human damage to generations of children, so I’m not crying with them.  They also say that consumers will see higher water utility rates while this is happening, and that may also be true, but despite an increase in rates, the pipes will be gone everywhere, and it will still be cheaper for the customer than if they had either been forced to live with the problem or carry the whole weight of the cost.

Big whooping hooray for all of the lead-heads out there who fought this to victory finally, including ACORN groups that made this a priority over the years.