Why Lansing's BWL is a model for Biden's plan to replace the US stock of lead water lines
LANSING — New and stricter rules about drinking water safety championed by the Biden administration are drawing criticism from municipal water systems that say, among other issues, the proposal requiring the replacement of lead lines within a decade is too aggressive.
Yet the federal agency is pointing to Lansing’s Board of Water & Light as a national model for how the work can be done efficiently. The utility replaced all of its lead service lines over a 12-year period beginning in 2004.
EPA officials estimate there are more than 9 million lead service lines still delivering water in the U.S., and those pipes are concentrated in low-income areas and communities of color. BWL replaced more than 13,000 lead lines during its initiative
It is the strongest overhaul of lead rules in more than three decades and will cost billions of dollars. Pulling it off will require overcoming enormous practical and financial obstacles.
“These improvements ensure that in a not-too-distant future, there will never be another city and another child poisoned by their pipes,” said Mona Hanna-Attisha, a former Flint area pediatrician and clean water advocate who is now a public health professor at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine.
The current rules require utilities to replace the lines that carry water from the water main to homes and businesses based on a formula, rather than a set number of years. Michigan cities, for example, must replace all lead water lines on a 20-year plan by 2041 under current state rules. The Biden administration's proposal would require many communities to complete the work on the much tighter 10-year timeline.
Critics, including the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, a national group that represents about half of the municipal customers nationwide, said the EPA’s proposed timeline is too aggressive, could prove costly for water companies and customers and would be complicated due to incomplete records of where lead lines are as well as the private water lines that start where the public lines end.
The EPA said those concerns are exaggerated and pointed to BWL's replacement program as a blueprint for how utilities can meet the proposed deadlines.
BWL was the first utility nationwide to begin replacing all of its lead water service lines — in 2004. It completed the job in 2016, coming in after Madison, Wisconsin, as the second utility to finish a full replacement.
The utility typically did the work without obtaining easements, in large part because of a vibrant public relations campaign, the EPA emphasized. BWL later advised Flint in the wake of the city’s water crisis and has given technical assistance to other municipal water systems.
Lead poising hits impoverished communities hard
The EPA enacted the first comprehensive lead in drinking water regulations in 1991. Those have significantly helped reduce lead levels, but experts have said there are loopholes that keep lead levels too high and lax enforcement allows cities to ignore the problem.
“We now know that having literally tens of millions of people being exposed to low levels of lead from things like their drinking water has a big impact on the population” and the current lead rules don't fix it, said Erik Olson, an expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council who challenged the original regulations back in the early 1990s. “We’re hoping this new rule will have a big impact.”
The EPA proposal would set national standards similar to the protections Michigan has approved in the years since the Flint water crisis of a decade ago. Michigan has a standard of 15 parts per billion, and in 2025 a new standard of 12 parts per billion will kick in.
The federal rules would usher in a 10 parts per billion standard. If 10% of water samples have more than 10 parts per billion, mitigation is required.
The federal recommendations — including stricter lead tests and more rigorous testing methods — single out BWL as an example of a way to more quickly and less expensively replace lead lines through public relations efforts instead of a more bureaucratic approach.
Lead crises have hit poorer, majority-Black cities like Flint especially hard, propelling the risks of lead in drinking water into the national consciousness. Their impact reaches beyond public health. After the crises, tap water use declined nationally, especially among Black and Hispanic people. The Biden administration says investment is vital to ensure everyone has safe, lead-free drinking water.
“We're trying to right a longstanding wrong here," said Radhika Fox, head of the EPA Office of Water. “We're bending the arc towards equity and justice on this legacy issue.”
How BWL did it
One complaint from utilities is that it takes time to negotiate easements to access and replace pipes that carry water from the water main at the street to homes. The EPA pointed out BWL skirted the need for easements, allowing the utility to replace lines more quickly.
"The Lansing Board of Water and Light in Michigan replaced 100 percent of their LSLs (lead service lines) over a 12-year period and noted that the system had not sought easements to conduct replacements, relying instead on 'good customer interaction and follow-through,'" the EPA said. "Lansing emphasized their engagement strategies, such as brochures and bill stuffers, open houses at local schools and community centers, customer education in their water quality report, letters sent to homes with LSLs, and in-person follow up with the customer prior to the date of the service line replacement to explain the replacement process."
BWL General Manager Dick Peffley said the utility sent out mailers, emails and phone calls to tell residents about the importance of switching out lead lines. If someone resisted, BWL moved to the next home, focusing on the people who wanted the replacement.
"Near the end, we went back to the more resistive folks,” he said. “A lot of them were calling us and saying we need to get in and do it.
“When we started doing this, lead concerns weren’t high in the press. But near the end, we started to hear more about it in 2014, '15, '16. And it was: 'Can you come do my house first?'"
About 5% still resisted BWL. BWL still replaced their lead lines from the outside, in a more typical and expensive fashion.
The EPA lauded BWL, which is owned by city of Lansing taxpayers, for getting residents to agree to the replacement rather than relying on the traditional approach that includes obtaining access.
“EPA is aware of anecdotes supporting the notion that robust public education can increase customer participation in systems' replacement programs,” the agency said in the report that noted BWL’s success in avoiding easement issues. “Frequent customer communication and engagement using multiple outreach methods was cited as important to obtaining customer consent for full service line replacement.”
New technique increases efficiency
BWL also got creative in the field. The normal approach to replace water lines is to dig into the street, through asphalt and the curb and any trees or roots, expose the line and replace it. Instead, Peffley said the work was done from inside residents’ homes and businesses, with their permission.
"One guy had made a cutter head, and we could push a cable through the pipe in the basement, hook to that cutter head and to a cable attached to a backhoe and that would split the lead line," Peffley said.
A new line could be pushed into place, cutting the replacement timeline in half, especially when the soil is wet in the spring, Peffley said, as opposed to digging up the line.
The new technique was much cheaper, around $2,500 per pipe, about half of what digging up the pipe would cost. The same approach was later used in Flint, Peffley said.
"We did it early. There was no one telling us we had to, but we always try to improve things and this was something we wanted to improve," he said.
Peffley said BWL has, for about a decade, shared its model with others and regularly hears from other utilities.
He said that doesn’t discount concerns municipal water agencies are raising about costs.
If BWL had to replace the more than 13,000 lead lines it completed replacing in 2016 today, it would cost at least twice as much as the $44 million the utility spent, due to increasing labor and material costs, he said.
How big of a concern is Michigan?
Michigan is ahead of much of the country in dealing with lead in water pipes, in part because of crises in Flint and Benton Harbor.
At least 10% of Michigan's utility pipes are known or suspected to have lead, according to a state inventory from July:
53% — No lead or galvanized pipes previously connected to lead
24% — Unknown, but likely no lead
11% — Unknown, no information
7% — Unknown, likely lead
4% — Known lead
1% — Galvanized pipes previously connected to lead pipes
Peffley said the water that leaves BWL's treatment plants has no lead — "non-detectable is what we call it."
But, many homes, including his own, used lead as solder or in household fixtures prior to the late 1980s, Peffley said. State tests pull water samples from homes that may include some of those outdated features, which is often how water systems in the state end up with detectable, but below state standard, amounts of lead.
BWL's water, in state testing, shows 2 parts per billion of lead, well below the state and federal thresholds.
Lansing has a significantly older housing stock than the surrounding communities, meaning about half of the homes in the city limits could still have lead soldering or fixtures that predate various decades-old bans, Peffley said.
Most Greater Lansing communities outside of the city, in places such as East Lansing, Delta Township and Bath Township, are newer and have a far lower percentage of homes with the possibility of lead. Many communities have no lead lines.
A state database of 1,388 reporting communities shows the vast majority have water that tests below the state standard.
East Lansing, Lansing Township, Meridian Township, Stockbridge, Webberville, Charlotte, Sunfield, Elsie and St. Johns are some of the mid-Michigan municipalities with zero lead in their latest tests. Michigan State University also scored zero.
Eight communities, representing about 3,700 people out of 7.5 million whose water tests were reported, are listed as being above the state standard. Those include the Loch Alpine Sanitary Authority in Washtenaw County, with 89 parts per billion and the most people affected. The Hidden Hamlet Association in Emmet County and a farm district at Michigan State University each report more than 50 parts per billion. High lead levels were also found at the Hess Lake RV and Mobile Home Park in Newaygo County, Chateaux Du Lac Condominiums in Genesee County, Boyne Mountain Resort in Charlevoix County, Northern Pines in Iosco County and Woodland Center Correctional Facility in Livingston County.
Michigan was earlier than most in requiring stricter lead and copper standards.
The new rules didn't come in a vacuum. One of the nation's most well-known lead crises arrived in Flint in 2014. And it didn't end there.
In Benton Harbor, nearly 4,500 water service lines were replaced or verified as nonlead by the state in a little more than a year in 2021 and 2022. The action in Benton Harbor, whose population is more than 85% Black and is among the most impoverished cities in the state, came after three straight years of lead levels exceeding federal safe drinking water guidelines, and a petition by 20 community and environmental organizations to have the EPA take control of the situation.
Brian Redder, a manager of regulatory and scientific affairs for the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, said the group is planning to submit a more detailed letter outlining its concerns to federal officials before a Feb. 5 deadline.
Submit your comments to federal regulators here.
Detroit Free Press reporter Keith Matheny contributed to this story.
Contact Mike Ellis at mellis@lsj.com or 517-267-0415
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Why Lansing's is a model for Biden's plan to replace the US stock of lead water lines
