Although the proposed regulations gave the city a deferred deadline of 40-50 years, the EPA’s final National Primary Drinking Water Regulation for Lead and Copper (LCRI) will put the city on an accelerated timeline. 

Chicago Water Tower. Photo © Alex Garcia/Circle of Blue

By Evgenia Anastasakos, Circle of Blue

A plan by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit lead contamination in drinking water would require most water utilities across the nation to replace all lead pipes within ten years. Chicago, which has nearly 400,000 lead service lines, will receive additional time to get the job done, with a 20-year-timeline. 

The EPA’s revisions to the National Primary Drinking Water Regulation for Lead and Copper (LCRI), finalized in October, intend to eliminate lead service lines and galvanized service lines from water systems. The rules would do so by reducing the lead action level, improving tap water sampling, and requiring water systems to create regularly updated inventories and come up with replacement plans. Most cities would have to replace at least ten percent of their lead service lines annually from 2027 to 2037, accelerating the pace for many water systems.

Those mandates are now being challenged in court. On December 13, the American Water Works Association, a trade group that represents water utilities, petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to block the rules, arguing that the cost of compliance would make water less affordable for low-income customers.

In the LCRI draft, proposed in December 2023, Chicago was eligible for a deferred deadline of 40 to 50 years to replace its service lines, stoking concern among residents and community organizations over heightened lead levels and adverse health outcomes persisting in neighborhoods for generations. The proposal received nearly 200,000 public comments from citizens, with many criticizing the delayed response. 

“It’s unconscionable that we have to wait decades to deliver safe drinking water to homes,” Chakena Perry, senior policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a member of the organization’s Safe Water Initiative team, told Circle of Blue before the finalization of the timeline. Prior to NRDC, she worked for Chicago’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District as a staffer and commissioner for one year. NRDC advocated for Chicago being on a ten-year replacement timeline, like most of the nation’s other water systems. 

Of the country’s projected total of 9.2 million lead service lines, Illinois is home to over a million. Part of the reason lies in Chicago’s building code history: until a nationwide ban on the installation of new lead pipes in 1986, the city required lead service lines to connect homes to water mains. Attempts to end the requirement were opposed by the city’s plumbers union, who promoted the metal for its durability and hoped to maintain a monopoly for their workers. After the ban, existing service lines were left in the ground, sometimes leeching the metal into the water supply. Most of the remaining lines belong to single-family and two-flat residences. 

The legacy of these historic building codes can be seen in modern Chicagoans’ tap water. A January 2024 Chicago Tribune analysis of 1,797 homes revealed that nearly 70 percent of homes tested showed elevated lead levels in their tap water. 

Lead exposure can result in lead poisoning, and, for children, can lead to developmental delays. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no safe level of lead exposure. A March 2024 study said that an estimated 68 percent of children younger than 6 years old in Chicago are exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water. 

Chicago skyline. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Chicago Policies

City programs have attempted to tackle the challenge of lead contamination since 2016, when Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the Lead Service Line Replacement Program. Lightfoot’s initiative came after residents in Flint, Michigan, discovered that their water supply was contaminated with lead. Since then, Chicago distributed free lead test kits, provided free lead service line removal for low-income homeowners, free removal for licensed day cares low-income neighborhoods, and incentivized homeowners to remove service lines on their property by waiving permit fees. 

However, critics say the city’s programs have failed to match the full scope of the problem. In 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Mayor Lightfoot’s programs had fallen short of goals, replacing only 280 of the city’s hundreds of thousands of service lines. As of July 2024, Lead-Safe Chicago, a city project, reported having replaced just 6,820 service lines across their five programs. 

Chicago property owners are responsible for maintaining service lines on their property and must replace them at their own expense. But the price can be costly — estimates range from $15,000 to $26,000, depending on the site and the construction technique. For the city’s approximately 400,000 lead service lines, the total cost ranges from $6 billion to $10 billion. Although some cities have financed the replacement of lead lines, the finalized LCRI makes no provisions for water utilities to pay for the cost of lead pipe removal. 

According to Isis Bazaldua, an organizer from Southeast Chicago social justice organization Bridges // Puentes, there can be barriers to accessing the city’s equity programs. Although the program aims to help low-income homeowners, renters still would not qualify. 

“A lot of properties here are owned by landlords that own multiple properties. The owner of the home would have to be the one that applies,” Bazaldua explained. 

The program is also limited by city funding; currently, the program website notes that “due to the availability of funding for the fiscal year, applications may be placed on hold until 2025.” A spokesperson from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago told Circle of Blue that the city’s “ability to scale our replacement programs is contingent upon identifying funding necessary to complete them. The programs may evolve over time based on the amount and type of funding available to us.” 

Other barriers that Bazaldua points to are city information sessions, which are long and difficult for community members to get through, and barriers to resources, like strict requirements to qualify for city programs. One family needed to obtain documents for proof of their child’s age. Other households, living in two-unit apartments, struggled to register for free water filters due to rules stating that only one resident per address can apply. 

“When these resources that are supposed to be for everyone aren’t accessible, it becomes an issue of fairness,” Bazaldua said. 

Bridges // Puentes has been organizing for safe drinking water in Chicago for the past two years, leading workshops, registering residents for city resources, and distributing water filters. According to Bazaldua, one of the homes that the organization tested was revealed to have around 70 times the EPA action level for lead.  

Bazaldua said one of the biggest challenges the organization encountered was raising awareness among residents about dangerous lead levels. 

“What we noticed while doing info sessions is that few people actually know about lead water pipes or the magnitude of how many the city of Chicago has,” Bazaldua said. She said that, when many residents think of lead, they imagine paint, which was banned for residential use in 1978. 

‘This is still a current problem. We got rid of the paint but we still have this toxin in our homes,” she said. 

Even when dwellings or establishments are tested, Bazaldua said that the information isn’t always easy for people to interpret. 

“We had a schoolteacher talk to us about how one of their drinking fountains tested for three times over the action level, but they didn’t understand exactly what it meant,” she said. 

Many of the neighborhoods with the highest prevalence of elevated blood lead levels are home to predominantly Black and Latino communities, prompting organizations like Bridges // Puentes to call this a racial justice issue. Many of these neighborhoods also lagged behind in testing, suggesting blindspots in the city’s approach. 

“We know that the presence of lead pipes is disproportionately in black and Latinx and low-income communities and we also know that these same communities can’t bear the out-of-pocket cost of replacements on their own,” said Chakena Perry of the NRDC.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Funding Constraints

A spokesperson from Lead-Safe Chicago told Circle of Blue that the city is using a $336 million federal Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan, along with federal earmarks and community development block grant funding, to fund the project. 

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also promised to address the issue while on the campaign trail, tweeting in 2023 about Chicago’s ZIP codes with the most lead being home to primarily Black and Latino residents. 

“That ends with a Johnson administration — because water is life,” he wrote. 

However, according to Perry, the current project is lacking coordination and steady funding. 

“There are so many different programs taking place at the same time. How do we coordinate those efforts to make sure that we’re not only getting the most bang for our buck, but also making sure that we’re doing this in an efficient and equitable manner, because everything is really scattered,” she says. 

An example she points to is Newark, New Jersey, which replaced all of its lead service lines at a quicker pace, through a $190 million, two-year program which replaced pipes block-by-block. The city’s 18,000 lead service lines were replaced at no cost to homeowners, thanks to city funding and bulk pricing from contractors. 

“In Newark, being able to replace things on a block-by-block basis was not only more affordable in the long run, it also just sped up the process,” Perry says. “What Newark was able to do by having a reliable funding source, which allowed them to replace their pipes on a block by block basis, it shifted the cost from residents to the utility and then it allowed lead pipes to get replaced on a much quicker timeline than they would have done if they were trying to reply on outside sources of funding, particularly from the federal government.”

Another city which embarked on a similar lead service line replacement project was Lansing, Michigan. Over the course of twelve years, the city replaced all of its lead service lines, funding the project through a water rate increase.  

Activists like Bazaldua argue that like other cities Chicago can, and should, speed up the pace of replacements. 

“Within the Latino community, we have multi-generational families all living in one home. For our communities, 50 years will mean three to six generations. We know the outcomes of lead for young children. We’ve seen an increase in youth in the community having disabilities, and we don’t know if it’s connected to lead, but if there’s an ability to mitigate that possibility, why would we wait?” she said.