States Awarded $6.5B to Help Remove Lead Pipes

When the Environmental Protection Agency handed out money last year to remove dangerous lead pipes, Illinois didn’t get its fair share.

Although Illinois has the second most lead service lines in the nation, it received significantly less funding than California, which has a fraction of the number of lead pipes. With about 730,000, Illinois received just $52.4 million. By comparison, California received $122.5 million to remove about 65,000 lead pipes, according to the EPA.

But the distribution of funds was evened out last week when the EPA distributed more than $6.5 billion in Drinking Water State Revolving Fund dollars. This time, states that previously felt they were being shorted are getting a much larger share of the funding. 

“States that had really been shortchanged, like Illinois, are getting significant increases,” said Erik Olson, senior strategist and advocate for the National Resources Defense Council's initiatives on health, food, and agriculture.

The issue last year was that states and water districts hadn’t yet completed an assessment of how many lead pipes they had. So when it came time for the EPA to distribute the first $1.3 billion of the $15 billion allocated to remove lead pipes in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the agency wasn’t able to distribute the money based on need. Without the data, the agency used its 2018 assessment of states’ drinking water needs, which did not include lead pipes, to distribute the money.

“There are some states that feel that their allocation of lead service line money is insufficient for the need. Others think that the allocation is too much, given how much the need is there,” Radhika Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, acknowledged at a hearing last month before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But by the time the agency distributed this year’s tranche, it said 75% of water systems around the country had completed their assessments of how many pipes they had, changing how the money was spread around. That allowed the agency “for the first time” to distribute the money “commensurate with their need as soon as possible, furthering public health protection nationwide,” the EPA said in a statement to Route Fifty.

According to the new data collected from the assessments, Illinois estimates that it actually has just over 1 million lead pipes, for a total of 11.3% of all lead service lines in the nation. So this year, it received $230 million to remove the pipes, more than twice as much funding as last year. 

The money was much more than the $107 million that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency was expecting, an agency spokeswoman said. “The increased funding allotment for Illinois more accurately represents the challenges we face,” said John Kim, the agency’s director, in a statement. “This infusion of funding is vital to Illinois being able to take on this formidable yet crucial task.”

Ohio also benefited from the EPA having more accurate data. Based on the agencies’ figures, the state last year received $35 million or 2.6% of the nation’s funds. This year, the state, which the EPA says has more than 745,000 lead pipes, will receive $167 million or 5.8% of all of this year’s funds.

“The additional funds will be tremendously useful as we continue working to help communities meet their infrastructure needs,” said James Lee, a spokesman for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

“They’ve significantly increased the allocations for the states that have heavy burdens of lead service lines because of the [updated] information that they got,” said Donald Jodrey, director of federal relations for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

Surprisingly, Florida is the state with the most lead pipes, according to data collected from the assessments. Its 1.1 million lead lines make up 12.6% of the 9.2 million service lines in the nation. As a result, Florida is receiving $254.8 million this year, compared to $54.54 million last year.

“[It] has everyone puzzled,” said Olson of the National Resources Defense Council, noting that Florida saw most of its development after lead pipes were banned in 1986.

California, on the other hand, found that is has about 13,400 lead service pipes—just .15% of all lead pipes in the nation. The state, which received 9% of last year’s funding, will only receive $28.6 million, or the minimum 1% every state receives.

The potential dangers of lead pipes for drinking water drew national attention following the 2014 Flint, Michigan, water crisis that exposed thousands of residents to high levels of lead. Scientists say there is no safe level of exposure to the chemical.

Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said at the Senate hearing that the agency could make even more money available to the states under a longstanding policy where the agency takes back money that states haven’t spent after two years and redistributes it.

But it’s not clear how much of an impact that could have because states more flush with money could spend it before the agency claws it back, said Olson.

“Unfortunately, sometimes states can spend a lot of money, not necessarily very wisely. So that money may or may not be available two years from now,” he said.

Despite the progress the agency made in spreading the money around, Jodrey said, it’s not enough in the long run. New estimates from the EPA finds that states will need $625 billion to maintain their drinking water over the next 20 years, about a third more than the $472.6 billion the agency previously estimated.

“That tells me the funding is not keeping up with the needs,” Jodrey said. “Everybody knew that when Congress appropriated the $15 billion in the infrastructure bill that wasn't enough to replace all the service lines.”

Still, said Olson, the funding is a “big down payment.”