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topicnews · August 27, 2024

Project 2025: The Threat to Democracy from Schedule F

Project 2025: The Threat to Democracy from Schedule F

Extended Exposure to lead increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease and reduced fertility. However, it is particularly harmful for children as exposure can lead to significant neurodevelopmental disorders.

Gina Ramirez is the Midwest Environmental Health Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and lives in Chicago’s 10th Ward. As a third-generation resident of her district, Ramirez’s concern about lead contamination is directly tied to her love for her community, which is one of Chicago’s most affected areas by lead water pipes.

“If you go to my neighborhood, you’ll see shopping carts full of water bottles everywhere,” Ramirez said. “It’s this unspoken truth, nobody in my neighborhood trusts their faucet, but we don’t talk about it, it’s just this habit. [we all have].”

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Chicago has been the focus of media attention in this regard due to the high number of lead pipes in the city. According to an article by ABC 7, the city estimated last December that replacing all lead pipes will take about 40 years and cost $12 billion. The Chicago Lead Service Line Replacement Department estimates that Replacing each line costs between $16,000 and $30,000.

Given the enormous cost to the city, the 40-year timeframe to complete this process may seem more understandable at first glance. However, when you look at the process of replacing lead pipes in other cities like Newark, NJ, this high cost becomes questionable.

In June 2018, the NRDC Lawsuit filed against the city of Newark after the city found evidence of high lead levels in the city’s drinking water, reaching up to 47 ppm in some cases. EPA rules on lead and copper requires 15 parts per billion before action needs to be taken, but the agency admits there are no safe levels of lead for children.

In 2018, it was discovered that there were 23,000 lead pipes in the city of Newark; three years later, almost every single pipe had been replaced. Since then, Newark the template for the complete replacement of lead pipes in American cities.

Mark Di Ionno was a columnist at the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, in 2018 when the NRDC lawsuit was first filed against the city. He recalls the city receiving particularly negative press about the process, which he felt was unfair.

“I actually wrote a column about what the city has done to inform residents [of the issue],” said Di Ionno. “And that column was rejected by an editor on the grounds that it was not consistent with the rest of our coverage, which was just ridiculous.”

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the news commentary category, Di Ionno said he was not pleased with how news outlets reported on the city’s handling of the issue, and he considered the Comparing the problem in Newark with that in Flint, Michigan.water crisis. So he quit the newspaper and eventually found a job with the city of Newark, where he changed the narrative about Newark’s lead pipe replacement program.

“There were big differences between us and Flint,” Di Ionno said. “We never changed our water source, we never changed our chemical corrosion system to save money. What happened to our chemical corrosion system was that the pH weakened it over time and … nobody got sick.”

Nevertheless, there were still 23,000 lead service lines in use in Newark.

Di Ionno now works on Newark’s communications team and witnessed the completion of the complete lead service line replacement throughout the city. He attributes the city’s success to Mayor Ras Baraka’s ability to work with legislators to ensure the process was completed in the most cost- and time-efficient manner possible.

To speed up the process, The Newark City Council passed several measures which saved costs and time. First, they made the procedure mandatory and free for all residents with lead pipes. Second, they required access to homes without the owner’s permission by declaring it a public health emergency, since roughly 74 percent of Newark’s residents are renters. This allowed the city to replace the pipes block by block, rather than having to do so sporadically across the city (as is often the case in Chicago). Third, they streamlined the permitting and paperwork process to reduce costs and red tape, and provided incentives for contractors to work quickly and efficiently to minimize street closures.In addition, the city created apprenticeship programs so that residents could find employment as part of this process while also gaining skills for future employment. Di Ionno credits this with creating a sense of community.

“About 70 percent of the money we spent on the project stayed in the city,” said Di Ionno. “We hired Newark contractors, we had a training program [that hired Newark residents].”

In total, Newark spent $190 million to replace all 23,000 lead pipes, which works out to about $8,200 per pipe, well under the estimated cost of doing the same job in Chicago. Additionally, Di Ionno said, much of the money went toward public education efforts about the process, and actually amounted to about $6,000 per pipe.

Ramirez expressed frustration with the process of replacing Chicago’s lead pipes and the city’s lack of transparency about other available safety measures.

Ramirez, whose mother had the lead pipes in her home replaced, says she witnessed why this process is so frustrating for so many Chicagoans. A plan was drawn up for her mother’s house; she was told it would take six weeks, but it ended up taking six months.

“The city has so many protocols and processes, but once everyone was there, it only took one day to replace the pipes,” Ramirez said. “But it took about six months for them to actually get to that point. It took two years in total because they kept going back and forth, ‘You’re missing paperwork,’ ‘You’re missing water samples.'”

Thanks to her advocacy work on this and other environmental issues, Ramirez was able to navigate the process of replacing lead pipes for her mother. However, she admits that other residents are not offered the same access to information about lead pipe replacement and other temporary solutions.

“Even the city councilors don’t talk about it much,” said Ramirez. “I go to events and they [don’t advertise that] You could have your water tested. [They don’t say] There’s this website where you can get a free water filter…it’s not as accessible as other programs in Chicago.”

Newark is a much smaller city than Chicago. Its population is about 300,000, while Chicago has only about 2.6 million people. However, if Chicago were to replace its lead pipes as Newark did, the total cost would be about $3.2 billion, assuming a cost of $8,200 per pipe, as opposed to the current projected cost of $12 billion.

In addition, the city of Newark has complicated terrain that makes construction particularly difficult. Di Ionno credits his ability to navigate the construction project in the city’s complicated geography to the knowledge of Newark Water and Sewer Authority Director Kareem Adeem and his 30 years of experience at the agency.

“The city of Newark is located on the slope of hilly terrain,” said Di Ionno. “Part of the city is on a river delta, and parts of the cliff are made up of clay and shale.”

Following the passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act by Congress in 2021, the Biden administration planned 15 billion US dollars to the state’s drinking water fund for lead pipe replacement. This money is earmarked for all 9.2 million lead pipes nationwide, so Chicago will only receive a portion of it. However, if a significant reduction in replacement costs could be achieved in Chicago, as was the case in Newark, this money could go a long way toward solving this public health problem that leaves thousands of Chicago families, who live primarily in underserved black and brown communities on the South and West, searching for clean water.

“Because we have so many lines, they want to give us 40 years. [to replace them all]”, said Ramirez. “So my children will still be drinking from a lead faucet in their lifetime, which is totally unacceptable, and I find [it] creates more inequalities.”

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