Lead pipes will cost Pittsburgh water authority $50M
PITTSBURGH –
Pittsburgh's beleaguered water authority will spend $50 million to replace lead service lines, give filters to lowincome residents and take other steps to address the city's lead crisis under a settlement approved Thursday by state utility regulators.
It comes a week after the Pennsylvania attorney general's office filed criminal charges against the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, alleging it mishandled a lead pipe replacement program in 2016 and 2017 and put more than 150 households at elevated risk of lead poisoning. The authority, which had previously admitted civil liability in the case and was fined $2.4 million by state environmental regulators, is fighting the charges.
Clean-water advocates hailed Thursday's settlement as a significant step toward reducing lead levels in the city's drinking water, and as a model for other cities also struggling with lead.
“The people of Pittsburgh have been drinking lead-contaminated water for far too long. This settlement requires aggressive, affordable solutions to protect public health and hold officials accountable to the people they serve. It's what Pittsburgh and every community in America deserves,” Dimple Chaudhary, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.
Chaudhary, who led a lawsuit over lead water pipes in Flint, Mich., represented a coalition of Pittsburgh community, labor, religious and environmental groups in the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority's rate case before the Public Utility Commission.
The utility agreed to accelerate its existing lead line replacement program, promising to swap out 3,800 of its own water lines and 2,800 privately owned lines, at no charge to residents, this year and next. The money will come from grants and a loan from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, or Pennvest, which funds sewer, stormwater and drinking water projects throughout the state.
Other provisions require the water agency to focus its replacement program on neighborhoods at greatest risk of lead exposure; increase outreach to residents who refuse to get their water lines replaced; make more residents eligible for free filters and replacement cartridges; and restrict the use of partial lead line replacements, a practice that can lead to temporary spikes of lead in the water.
The authority is under a mandate to replace at least 7 percent of its lead service lines each year due to elevated lead levels in drinking water. Lead can cause brain damage and other lifelong injuries, especially in children.
Customers' bills are going up substantially. Regulators approved a 14 percent rate increase, meaning a typical residential customer will pay nearly $9 more per month. But low-income customers will get a bigger discount than they do now.
The rate hike will yield $21 million in new revenue for a water utility that has been trying to address decades of mismanagement, heavy debt, billing problems, chronic understaffing, elevated lead levels and a dilapidated system that loses 50 percent of the treated water it produces to broken pipes.
State lawmakers placed the authority — which an independent consultant once called a “failed organization atop a dangerous and crumbling structure” — under the control of the Public Utility Commission last year.