City’s Lead Pipe Replacement Program Debuts to Confusion

City’s Lead Pipe Replacement Program Debuts to Confusion

Robert Schultz, director of Newport Utilities, holds a piece of pipe made of “unknown” material. (Photo by Philip Cozzolino)

Due to recent federal and state changes, the City of Newport has 10 years to replace all lead water service pipes, including those under private property. The project is expected to cost $105 million, and the city says funding sources are unknown.

Newport is not an isolated case, as many cities and towns across the state and country are currently in various stages of a lead pipe replacement program. In October, the Biden administration ordered water systems nationwide to replace main service lines within a decade. Congress banned the use of lead pipes in 1986, even though many homes built by then may contain them.

The White House said low-income communities were disproportionately affected.

In November, nearly 10,000 Newport Water customers, about 75 percent of its total customer base, received letters informing them that the city had identified a lead or unknown pipe connecting their property to the city system. The outreach prompted many to contact the city's water department, which still has a backlog of 700 calls and half as many emails that need to be answered. The city is offering free water filters and free filter replacements to customers with confirmed lead pipes.

“For the most part, the responses have been two extremes, neither ideal,” said Robert Schultz, the city’s utilities director. “Either someone panics or ignores the letter.”

The city says its water is lead-free when it leaves the treatment plant, and in tests on lead pipes throughout the city, the water consistently shows lead levels below federal intervention standards. Still, no lead use is considered safe, and the city must replace its own lead service lines under public property that connect to private pipes and homes.

“We have more than 20 years of sampling,” Schultz said. “We know that the lead we have is very stable, so the risk is not high. This is by no means a public health emergency.”

The city's goal is to replace all lead pipes within ten years, “subject to available funding,” in accordance with the law, with the next few years spent on surveying, identifying and immediately replacing the pipes in some situations, such as schools , are dedicated.

“In the short term, we are accelerating the modernization of service lines for early learning and education facilities and will prioritize uncommitted lead service lines thereafter,” said city spokesman Tom Shevlin when asked whether low-income communities would be prioritized. “Fortunately, because Newport's public and low-income neighborhoods were developed after lead service was deployed, a significant portion of our most vulnerable residents are served by lead-free service. Newport Heights, for example, has some of the newest infrastructure in the city, while other neighborhoods operated by the Newport Housing Authority have also been equipped with lead-free utilities.”

According to the city's water service map, there are homes with lead pipes throughout the city, from the North End to Thames Street to Bellevue Avenue and beyond. The highest concentration of lead pipes is found in the city's historic core, including older homes in the Kerry Hill and Off-Broadway neighborhoods. The city said the core areas would be a “major focus.”

Newport Water said it lacks data for many homes in Middletown and Portsmouth, which it also serves, even though Middletown has fewer lead pipes than Newport and most of its concentration is near Easton's Beach, Memorial Boulevard and Purgatory Road neighborhoods located.

Lead is most harmful to children, the elderly and pregnant women, but it can harm anyone. Lead poisoning can cause irreversible damage to cognitive development, kidney damage, slow learning, cardiovascular disease and, at very high concentrations, even death. It may also increase the risk of low birth weight and miscarriage.

A blood test is the only way to test for the presence of lead in a person's body. Tap water lead testing kits can be purchased for about $20.

Under new state and federal laws, the Rhode Island Department of Health requires water utilities to take several actions, including creating an inventory of utility lines, inspecting private utility lines at no cost to the property owner, notifying customers, including renters, and providing filters.

“If lead is detected in a private service service line, the service service line must be replaced,” says a RIDOH website about the law changes. “If funds are available for replacement projects, all leading service lines will need to be replaced over the next 10 years.”

But the city said it doesn't know how it will fund the estimated $105 million project to meet its zero-lead goal. According to the city, the money to replace lead pipes cannot be generated by water customers or water rates, a “Catch 22,” Schultz said. He said it precludes using any part of the recently passed $98.5 million infrastructure bond.

“Customers are the only way we can get our financing,” Schultz said. “There is no tax money.”

Additionally, the city has not yet received any dedicated federal or state funding, with much of the federal funding for the initiative going to Providence, which has been replacing lead pipes in some of its lowest-income neighborhoods at no cost to homeowners since 2023.

Schultz said the $105 million burden would be unaffordable for low-income customers because 11 percent of their annual income would go toward water and sewer bills if the cost of replacing lead pipes were added.

“That’s not realistic,” he said.

An update to the Environmental Protection Agency's 2021 Lead and Copper Rule and recent changes to the Rhode Island Lead Poisoning Prevention Act created the mandate. State law requires water utilities to classify private and public utilities into one of three categories: conductive, non-conductive or conductive status unknown. The law required customers who have or are connected to lead and unknown pipes to be notified.

The city estimates there are approximately 2,000 lead-containing service lines on the network, including 1,376 public lines and 625 private lines. However, those numbers depend on the city's use of machine learning models that analyze historical data and predict the likelihood of lead-containing utilities.

The technology is not currently legally recognized, with Rhode Island and Tennessee the only two states east of the Mississippi that do not allow the use of predictive models to identify leading utilities. The city says the technology's success rate is 100 percent so far and is currently applying to the RIDOH for permission to use the modeling. If this were possible, the number of unknown pipe classifications would decrease from 9,000 to 1,091.

According to state law, with a few exceptions, all galvanized house connection lines are classified as lead connection lines. The water utility may classify a galvanized service pipe as lead-free if it can demonstrate that a portion of the pipe is not, or has not been, downstream of a lead service pipe and is not currently located downstream of an unknown lead service pipe.

The Water Department is currently conducting inspections at homes to determine pipe material, notifying customers and encouraging anyone with concerns to reach out. The company asks the public to be patient if it receives a callback or email as it only has three full-time employees to handle customer service requests.

“I can’t change the letter,” Schultz said, admitting that it “sounds scary” and caused confusion. “Under the law and the way it was required to be worded by state order, a cement-lined pipe is a lead pipe.”

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