Each lead pipe in Albany, like this one on Harris Avenue, is replaced with a copper line. New Castle Paving normally completes three to four replacements every weekday in the city.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Nearly four years ago, Jona Favreau independently tested the drinking water at her Troy home. Findings showed the water contained high levels of lead, and exposure to the element left her son with lead poisoning.
Jim Franco/Times Union
Orange County Legislator Gabrielle Hill’s daughter had an elevated blood lead level that required a seven-day medical process to remove the toxic element from her system.
Kelly Marsh/For the Times Union
Lead pipes in Albany are replaced with copper lines, and one job typically takes a few hours to complete. There are approximately 500,000 water lines in New York contaminated with the toxic substance.
Will Waldron/Times Union
The city of Albany has private contractors conduct lead pipe replacement. Other municipalities in the Capital Region and Hudson Valley do not, said Richard Straut, a water engineer and the mayor of the village of Voorheesville.
Will Waldron/Times Union
For years, Troy Councilwoman Jona Favreau has raised awareness about lead contamination in the city’s water supply. She contends one of the biggest challenges to completing pipe replacements is getting the funding out the door.
Jim Franco/Times Union
Orange County Legislator Gabrielle Hill is one of the many community members in Newburgh who fears more generations — especially nonwhite and low-income communities — will be infected by lead poisoning if municipalities don’t act with a greater sense of urgency.
Kelly Marsh/For the Times Union
When replacing lead-contaminated water lines, workers sift through layers of dirt, tree roots and sometimes concrete.
Will Waldron/Times Union
New Castle Paving normally completes three to four replacements every weekday in the city of Albany.
Will Waldron/Times Union
For centuries, lead was used for piping. It’s a flexible material that is easy for workers to roll out, said Kevin Danish, superintendent at New Castle Paving.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Lead pipe removals and replacements are completed “a block at a time” in Albany, said Thomas Berj Nevins, project manager of the city’s Department of Water and Water Supply.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Assemblyman Jonathan Jacobson is investigating the challenges associated with lead-contaminated water line replacement across New York. He’s found municipalities tend to “compete” against one another to receive funding for replacement.
Lilli Iannella/Times Union
In June 2022, Troy Councilwoman Jona Favreau discovered the drinking water at her city residence contained over three times the legal limit of lead. That was after she learned her 2-year-old son had an elevated level of lead in his blood.
“It’s still emotional for me,” Favreau said, reflecting on the moment she learned about her son’s condition and the “great impacts” lead poisoning had on his health. “I carry a lot of guilt with that as a mother.”
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Once used in everything from pipes to paint, but now widely banned, lead is a dangerous neurotoxin. Exposure to lead — a naturally occurring element in the Earth’s crust that can be toxic to humans and animals — can cause permanent and disabling damage to a person’s brain and nervous system, particularly children, including developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral issues, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The real issue is how devastating this can be,” said Tamsin Hollo, a Newburgh resident and member of the city’s Clean Water Project. “There is no second chance.”
The toxic metal can leach into drinking water carried through lead-containing pipes, connectors and fixtures frequently found in the plumbing of buildings built before 1986 and the water supply systems of older neighborhoods, according to the CDC.
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Beneath the roughly 150 miles of roadways in Troy, there are about 1,500 known lead service lines carrying water to residences and businesses in need of replacement, a number that fluctuates as the city discovers more of them, according to information revealed at a City Council subcommittee meeting on March 19.
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The Collar City’s lines are just a portion of the approximately 500,000 lead-contaminated water lines in New York — the sixth-highest estimate among all states — that must be removed by November 2037, according to a directive from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That estimate doesn’t include service lines of unknown material, which may be identified to be made of lead once they are found and inspected.
State leaders and advocates fear that without significant changes, lead poisoning will continue to plague future generations. Assemblyman Jonathan Jacobson, an Orange County Democrat, worries municipalities across New York won’t meet the EPA’s deadline, a feat that is complicated by a lengthy, multifaceted process to secure funding to replace lead service lines.
In addition, the state comptroller’s office found the state Department of Health, which administers the allocation of Lead Service Line Replacement Program funding, has not provided the oversight necessary to achieve replacement, notably in the most-impacted communities.
10-year deadline to replace contaminated pipes
Municipalities across New York are working to remove the lines, some facing the prospect of replacing hundreds of lines and others faced with thousands. So far, thousands of lead service lines statewide have been replaced using funding from New York State’s Lead Service Line Replacement Program alone, with some municipalities working at faster rates than others.
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The EPA calls the 10-year deadline “feasible,” and while some state leaders agree, others, including Jacobson, aren’t as confident.
“I believe municipalities and the state are acting in good faith, but if we keep doing it the way we’re doing it now, I have little faith we’re going to meet the deadline,” said Jacobson, who is leading a legislative investigation into funding for the removal of lead-contaminated water lines.
In late November, Jacobson — chair of the state Assembly’s Oversight, Analysis and Investigation Committee — led a three-hour hearing that examined the funding challenges surrounding the removal of the roughly 500,000 lead-contaminated water lines across New York.
He found that municipalities tend to “compete” against one another to receive funding for lead pipe removal and replacement. On Wednesday, Jacobson’s office said “ongoing budget negotiations” have delayed the expected release of a final committee report, which is now not expected until this summer.
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“The process of getting money should not be a version of the Hunger Games, pitting one municipality against the other in a deadly competition,” Jacobson said. “These lead-contaminated lines remain in use, threatening public health, until they are replaced.”
At last fall’s hearing, a panel of lawmakers faced a crowd of around 30 people eager to share their concerns in meeting the federal deadline and pose questions to officials from the Department of Health, the state Environmental Facilities Corporation and representatives from municipalities and advocacy groups.
To meet the deadline requires around at least $10,000 to remove each line, steady diligence from municipalities, maintaining up-to-date water line inventories, adequate contractor staffing and cooperation from property owners.
“It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of resources, there are a lot of requirements,” said Richard Straut, a water engineer and the mayor of the village of Voorheesville. “This should have happened a long time ago, the intent of it, to get the lead out of our drinking water.”
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Jacobson said the requirements are creating roadblocks for municipalities across the state that are trying to complete removal projects, especially for smaller or economically challenged communities that often lack the capacity to apply for grants, prepare engineering reports or pay the up-front costs to qualify for state reimbursements.
“We need major reforms and a sense of urgency,” Jacobson said in his opening statement at the committee hearing six months ago. “Our job is to help devise a path that gets us to the finish line on time.”
‘A block at a time’
On a slightly cloudy, cool day in late March, a team of workers from New Castle Paving meticulously dug through the front lawns of a handful of houses on Harris Avenue in Albany using an excavator and shovels to locate lead pipes running from the water main to the curb. They sifted through layers of dirt, tree roots and sometimes concrete while avoiding house planters.
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“There’s a lot of different variables because every house is different,” said Kevin Danish, superintendent at New Castle Paving.
Once the workers located the lead pipes, they extracted them using a hydraulic winch and cable. As the machine spun, the lead pipes coiled around it.
“That’s why they used it back in the day. It was so easy to roll out,” Danish said.
Lead pipe removals and replacements are completed “a block at a time” in Albany, said Thomas Berj Nevins, project manager of the city’s Department of Water and Water Supply. Each lead pipe in Albany is replaced with a copper line, and one job typically takes a few hours to complete. New Castle Paving normally completes three to four replacements every weekday in the city, Nevins said.
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When Hollo moved to Newburgh about 10 years ago, she assumed her pipes were contaminated with lead because her house was built in 1890, nearly a century before the use of lead in new pipe installation was prohibited. Replacement of her pipes took about a day, a process she said was prolonged due to the bluestone sidewalks on her property workers had to dig through.
Hollo paid close to $10,000 for the removal and replacement of the pipes, an amount she figured into the purchase price of the house. But not all new homeowners have the financial resources to do that or, in some instances, the knowledge that it needs to be done.
“Unless you’re really aware of this and you know your rights and you know about lead, you’re not going to be thinking about it when you’re buying a home or moving into a place,” said Gabrielle Gonzales, coordinator of advocacy group Lead Free Kids New York. “The housing market is really rough out here, so you’re just trying to have safety, a good neighborhood; if you have kids, you’re thinking about the school district. A lead pipe and lead paint is probably not top of mind.”
Many municipalities statewide provide free replacement programs and grants that reimburse homeowners for the cost of replacement. As of February, the city of Newburgh has replaced more than 250 lead-contaminated water lines, according to Jacobson, the assemblyman. The city utilized about $543,000 in funding from the state’s Lead Service Line Replacement Program to replace 76 of those lines and other funding it secured on its own, including through the American Rescue Plan, to replace the other 174 lines, Jacobson said.
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‘Everything can be solved with enough money’
The city of Albany has an estimated 13,000 lead service lines. Of those, it’s replaced more than 2,200 since 2019. When asked about the possibility of meeting the 2037 federal deadline, acting Water Department Commissioner William D. Simcoe said “it depends” on whether the city is able to keep receiving the funding necessary to carry out removal projects.
“We’ve been replacing more and more each year since we started our program,” Simcoe said. “But keeping up with that at the pace we’re doing now depends on more and more either financing or grants.”
The city is relying on a $12.8 million grant from the state Environmental Facilities Corporation and $2 million in federal grants to inventory lead service lines. That’s just to fund projects this year.
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When applying for grants that support lead pipe removal, Simcoe said the city typically learns they’ve been awarded the funding within six to nine months. Favreau contends one of the biggest challenges to completing pipe replacements is getting the funding out the door.
“It’s just not going fast enough,” Favreau said.
Over the past few years, municipalities in the Capital Region, Hudson Valley and across New York have pushed efforts to remove lead-contaminated pipes, some more aggressively than others.
Albany has private contractors do the work. Other municipalities in the Capital Region and Hudson Valley do not, said Straut, who has been mayor of Voorheesville since July 2021. Eventually, he thinks the marketplace will adjust to account for demand.
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“Everything can be solved with enough money. If there’s enough money and demand, I would think that contractors would get into this marketplace,” Straut said. “Right now as it stands, I would say that there are not enough contractors to do those replacements.”
It’s estimated that for New York to meet the federal deadline for removing contaminated water lines by 2037, the cost will be at least $500 million.
“It’s staggering the amount of money necessary across the state of New York to do this,” said Steve Noble, the mayor of Kingston.
By last fall, New York had awarded only about $200 million of state funding along with $340 million of federal funding for inventory and water line removal. Of the federal funding awarded, just $60 million had been received by municipalities.
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Working with unknowns
Federal and state grants continue to be awarded to municipalities across New York to support the removal of lead service lines, but they’re only awarded to those who qualify and apply for them. Applying for grants is a monthslong process that does not guarantee an award.
“There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ there that can be challenging to budget for,” Noble said.
For the projects covered by New York’s Lead Service Line Replacement Program funding alone, 3,574 lead service lines were replaced statewide as of last November, according to the governor’s office. Of the program’s $30 million allocation, $23 million has been spent by 44 municipalities across the state to identify and replace lead service lines.
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Still, an audit by the state comptroller’s office released in January found the state Department of Health “did not implement sufficient controls to ensure the program’s effectiveness, which limited the ability to replace more lead service lines” between March 2018 and last June.
The audit found the $7 million that was unspent was returned to the New York’s Clean Water Infrastructure Act’s fund and not redispersed to other municipalities that also qualified for the funding. In the Capital Region, $346,112 was left unspent, accounting for 13% of the region’s awarded funding through the program.
“New York is committed to removing health disparities by targeted funding for underserved communities so that we may all be afforded the basic right to safe drinking water,” Erin Clary, a state Health Department spokeswoman, said in a statement provided to the Times Union. “The Lead Service Line Replacement Program was an opportunity for the department to learn about the challenges communities face when starting a local program to replace lead service lines. These lessons learned have informed current programs and were a critical part of providing technical support for lead service line inventories and administering lead service line replacement funds awarded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.”
The audit also found amounts spent to replace lead service lines were at times “significantly higher than expected.”
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“In its plan, DOH estimated a maximum cost of $11,000 to replace a typical lead service line,” the audit reads. “However, we identified 382 individual line replacements that cost over $11,000, with the highest single line replacement totaling $66,000. Overall, DOH reimbursed the municipalities about $1 million over the maximum expected cost of $11,000 (per line) for the 382 lead service lines.”
A section of state Public Health Law requires the state Health Department to allocate the program’s funds equitably across all municipalities and prioritize funding to those communities with a high percentage of elevated childhood blood lead levels.
The comptroller’s audit found that “while DOH’s funding methodology complied with the law, the methodology at times left municipalities with high percentages of elevated childhood blood lead levels without an award in favor of ones with much lower percentages.” At times, the Health Department chose the municipality with a greater number of houses built before 1939 as a tiebreaker to award funding.
“For example, one municipality with 3.65% of children with elevated blood lead levels was awarded a grant, even though three other municipalities in the region had higher percentages, including one with a 7.16% rate of elevated childhood blood lead levels — nearly double the percentage,” the audit found.
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The law also requires the Health Department to consider whether the community is low-income and the number of lead service lines in need of replacement when distributing awards.
As of August, the state comptroller’s office reported 5% of public water systems in New York had not submitted lead inventories, while many reported a high number of service lines composed of “unknown” material. Until water systems have complete inventories, the number of reported undiscovered service lines that may contain lead is unknown, according to the EPA.
Despite the comptroller’s critique, Clary said the Health Department “views the lead service line inventory project as a resounding success.”
“The program achieved 90 percent compliance rate within months of the due date, which indicates high quality guidance was provided by the department,” she said. “The overwhelming majority of public water systems continue to identify service line materials and update their inventories.”
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‘The clock is ticking’
About two decades ago, the city of Newburgh’s aging water system left Orange County Legislator Gabrielle Hill’s daughter, who was a toddler at the time, with an elevated blood lead level that required a seven-day process called chelation to remove it from her system. It involved placing an IV into her arm used to wash the lead out of her blood, Hill said.
“I was frantic, because they said ‘your baby could die. She could have irreversible brain damage,’” Hill said. “We are bearing the burden of this challenge. We don’t really think about things that are going on that we can’t see and things that are out of our control.”
Hill and Jacobson, the assemblyman, and other elected officials and community members are pushing for changes to make water line replacement more efficient. For instance, Jacobson has proposed “a non-competitive” system that would involve state reimbursement for municipalities that provide proof of lead-contaminated line removal and replacement. Municipalities wouldn’t need to wait for funding to come in before starting removal, and the state would cover $10,000 per line, plus interest on any loans.
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“The clock is ticking toward the federal deadline,” Jacobson said. “We need to change how we’re doing things, because all the municipalities are fighting for the money in the beginning. … They shouldn’t be fighting among themselves, because everybody is under the same mandate.”
Noble, who has been mayor of Kingston since 2016, and state lawmakers have pushed for the establishment of the Safe Water and Infrastructure Action Program. The mayor said the annual allocation would “give local municipalities the funding stream they require to keep up with repairs and rehabilitation of their current local infrastructure.”
Noble contends that would help municipalities plan better for how much support they’re going to get for water infrastructure projects.
“We’re always going to do the work that’s necessary to help protect the health and safety of our residents,” Noble said. “I feel confident that we’ll be able to get done what we need to get done to meet our goal regardless of how much federal funding actually comes the state’s way.”
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Diana Palmer, the mayor of Glens Falls, wrote in an op-ed published in the Times Union that the program would create a “reliable funding stream that municipalities could count on and build into their budgets.”
Several of the lawmakers invested in the effort said funding for removal and replacement should be prioritized for municipalities with high percentages of elevated childhood blood lead levels.
“We want to move with a sense of urgency, but that doesn’t mean we should just be reactive,” said Straut, the Voorheesville mayor. “I think it means a sense of urgency is let’s have a well thought out plan, let’s prioritize properly and then move as quickly as we practically can.”
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Hollo and Hill are two of the many community members in Newburgh who fear more generations — especially nonwhite and low-income communities — will be infected by lead poisoning if municipalities don’t act with a greater sense of urgency. Hill urges municipalities and agencies to “let this process flow” in “the most effective, least harmful way.”
“This has been an open secret for the last 40, 50 years,” Hollo said. “The best time to respond to it as an emergency would have been 40 years ago. The second-best time is now.”