White House Summit on Lead Pipe Replacement

It was such a privilege to be able to speak at the White House Summit on Accelerating Lead Pipe Replacement hosted by Vice President Harris last week. We announced our own efforts to support 50 overburdened communities across the country over the next three years in our lead service line replacement efforts, however, the best part was hearing so many stories from mayors and water utility directors on the effective ways they are replacing lead pipes at scale. Dozens of those mayors - and more than one hundred other partners - joined a new coalition focused on faster work to eliminate lead water pipes.

I thought I'd share some responses from questions I was asked (and others I wished I was asked), and the tape of the whole event is also here on Youtube.

Question: What is the most impactful tool that your sector can bring to bear in accelerating the removal of toxic lead water pipes in American homes?

The Environmental Policy Innovation Center – EPIC – is a nonprofit that specializes in a few things but especially in the financing of better water infrastructure for historically underinvested communities. And we do it in a specific way – we constantly ask the question ‘what could make this process go dramatically faster?’ 

Our speed-focused mission was borne of working from 2014-to the end of the Obama Administration at the White House CEQ on infrastructure permitting and seeing how many obstacles – usually for the best of intentions – come up at every step of the way to get to the point where a project can break ground.

Partners like our organization and many others in the room today, are best place to help overcome many of the challenges that slow or stall lead pipe replacement.  Using either private or government grants, we - with more than a dozen partners from tech companies to engineering mavens - offer free help to disadvantaged communities to predict where lead pipes are, map them, engage with their community to prioritize the work, and develop financing plans and funding applications. 

Question: Can you talk about how you are working together across NGOs, unions, foundations, and water utilities? And how can we all work together to ensure that the communities that need LSL replacements the most are getting them and quickly? 

In the past decade, water infrastructure programs have only reached about 7 percent of communities. The other 93% of towns and cities and utilities have never received a grant or loan from these programs that just got a lot bigger. 

We have got to double or triple that number of communities we reach. The only way to do that is by:

(1) fixing the programs so they are more equitable – and that is very much a positive work in progress. Part of what our organizations do is look at the data on who gets the money today and how disadvantage is defined and try to make that more fair. We’ve been working together to make that data available to all advocates and states in programs that just haven’t had much of this kind of attention before.

(2) by making it simpler to get the money – we are going in the wrong direction here.

(3) by providing direct help and support for communities to fill out paperwork, organize community engagement, help prioritize projects that will matter most to residents, and help develop the applications and financing to secure this funding so the work of replacing lead pipes can get going. That is the kind of work that we and many other partners in this room are doing. We are helping communities jump the hurdles to doing this work. For example, with communities – including Chelsea MA and Newburgh NY here today - we’ve been helping provide resources to map lead pipes and secure federal funds. 

4) Predevelopment loans. Here is another example – State revolving loan programs are so complicated that in some cases a community has to take out a loan in order to be ready to apply for a loan. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has done amazing work to capitalize the first predevelop loan fund like this that I know of – in the Deep South, run by Communities Unlimited. Disadvantaged communities can get a low interest loan to pay for that upfront work and then pay it back with the SRF loan they apply for – and if they don’t get the SRF loan the first loan is forgiven. Other foundations are building these in the Great Lakes, but we need more of them and the federal and state governments could add money to these predevelopment funds too.

Question: We are using every tool in our toolkit to leverage federal funding. What can the Federal government do to better leverage the Federal resources we have? What is working?

What is working? We can’t forget the core success is that the SRFs have been successful for a long time. Yes, they have weaknesses. These were already billion dollar programs that have been growing rapidly year after year as communities pay back their loans. And now they are even bigger. Some states need a nudge to get the lead pipe replacement money into the hands of historically underinvested communities, but this effort is absolutely going to work.

Where we can do better? 

• Bond market structures. Cities like Newark got much of their lead pipe replacement done because municipal bond funding was available to do so. Bonds for water infrastructure in disadvantaged communities offered by states like Massachusetts have buyers lined up out the door because the social impact is so obvious.  And that demand means that communities end up getting a lower interest rate. The Chicago Federal Reserve has taken an interest in this very question. There is more that the federal government should do to work with the bond market to create a repeatable template for the paperwork that every state and many cities could use to attract social impact capital from the bond market. The Administration could help communities save hundreds of millions in borrowing costs by doing so.
• Use data to reach historically underserved communities. We should rely on better data and methods to identify which communities need help. Right now, many states use strict cut-offs to identify need. For example, Illinois automatically rules out communities with a population over 25,000 as eligible for additional help through their Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program. States should identify which communities to help based on a scale that shows their relative needs rather than strict in/out rules. 
• More and predictable technical assistance. Communities with limited resources often need assistance to develop projects and applications for federal funds. The federal government and states should shift this burden by paying more partners to consistently provide technical assistance to tribes, towns, and utilities.  Congress has funded EPA to do this but states should do the same. For example, Maryland passed legislation last year that created a sub account to set aside funds for technical assistance and make it easier to track the use of funds for this purpose.  We need to stop pretending that state and federal agencies can ‘staff up’ – it is not going to happen in the timeline that it takes to get disadvantaged communities to the front of the line for infrastructure funding – you have to use outside technical assistance partners who can hire faster.

Question: Can you talk about the role that you are playing helping provide technical assistance to states and communities?

Its not just in big cities that we need to get this work done. It’s in thousands of small communities across America. Like Edgerton, Wisconsin, which I know is represented here today by Ramona Flanagan, its city administrator. They are more than 200 pipes into replacement with less than 100 less to go and that they could get done within two years if they find a bit more funding.  Understanding approaches that can work for small water utilities and small towns like Ramona’s – and teaching other communities how to copy those successes is at the heart of what partners like us are trying to do and why its essential that we work together. Sometimes those towns need financial planning assistance, sometimes they need advice that only a water engineer can provide, sometimes they just need help filling out an application. In Mississippi, for example, EPIC is partnering with Mississippi Communities United for Prosperity to hold training for local government and water utility members from West Tallahatchie Water and West Holmes Water on how to access state and federal funds.  In Lexington, MS, we are working with the Sweet Home Water and Sewerage District on community outreach.

We are thrilled that we will be able to expand this work in the future as something called an ‘Environmental Finance Center’ with funding by EPA. This further expands our and 29 other centers’ efforts to help connect communities to funding, resources. and technical service providers.

Question: What are seeing as the big gaps to replacing lead service lines?

• Contracting innovation is one big gap. There are maybe 9 million lead pipes in 11,000 communities. Thousands of those small communities that might just have a few lead pipes each. It makes no sense to make a complicated loan to each of them. We have to find ways to get funding to communities – and plumbers – in batches so that it only takes one financing action to get money to dozens of places. Public-private partnership approaches and other procurement strategies are needed to help get this done but the state programs and EPA policies don’t make this as easy as they should. As Vice President Harris said today on the importance of public-private partnerships, “I think it’s the only way to go.”
• We need a contracting and procurement database that makes the paperwork that some cities and water utilities are using to get lead pipes replaced at scale, available for others to copy. The recipe for what Denver– and Newark – and Rochester who are all in the room at this Lead Summit – have done in replacing more than 1,000 lead pipes needs to be shared. That recipe is found in the contracting and procurement paperwork that they have each used – and other communities will be able to go faster if they can copy it.
• We should also be using Pay for Success or outcome contracts so that states can just pay any pre-approved licensed plumber who replaces a lead pipe in a disadvantaged neighborhood a fixed fee for their service.

Question: The partial replacements of lead pipes is an issue across the country. How can we find ways to help utilities replace privately owned lines?

Honestly, its less of an issue than people make out. States like New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois – those are states that have more lead pipes than just about any – don’t have any state law that prohibits replacing the entire poisonous pipe regardless of whether it crosses public or private land. Places like Chicago just have to change a municipal law if they want to. And in many places, there is no legal barrier, just a cultural one that makes utility staff want to object. 

Question: If you had 30 seconds to tell the President and the Vice President one thing about lead service line replacement, what would that be?

Replacing lead pipes is a task that takes skill like those the plumbers and apprentices have – but its not complicated compared to just about every other infrastructure project in front of us. If we are going to replace a pipe 1 million times in the next 5 years, we have to make sure that the millionth pipe is less expensive and easier to replace than the first one. 

But people often try to make it more complicated than it is. Finding excuses for example, to delay replacement efforts until they finish all the mapping of all the pipes. There could be 500 communities using money to replace lead pipes right now – and 1,000 communities by next year. The money is there to get that started – we just need more political encouragement to get more communities to take the first step, to get more states to give out their money instead of sitting on it. America’s mayors know how to get that done if we let them.