Greater Johnstown Water Authority prepares for lead pipe overhaul as final federal rule on lead-free America issued | News | tribdem.com

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A customer waits in line to pay her bill at Greater Johnstown Water Authority, 640 Franklin St., Johnstown, on Monday, Dec. 7, 2020.

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – President Joe Biden’s administration issued a final rule this month for ridding America’s water systems of lead. It builds on previous mandates from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that required communities to compile inventories of lead service lines.

The Greater Johnstown Water Authority has found thousands of lead lines, and thousands more still need to be examined as it refines its inventory.

The final rule provides a period of 13 years to replace lead pipes in the system, GJWA general manager Michael Kerr said. The clock starts when the rule goes into effect 60 days from the Oct. 8 date it was signed.

“What they are going to do is give us three years after it goes into effect to put a plan together and 10 years to execute it,” Kerr said.

The GJWA considers the water service line system as two parts. There’s the public side, which comprises the main service lines owned by the GJWA, and there’s the private side, or the pipes that run from curb stops to water meters at houses and businesses.

The GJWA is examining the nearly 900-page final rule to answer the question of whether the private side must be replaced, and whether the GJWA or individual property owners would bear the cost.

Lines that run through private property have not been installed by the GJWA and are not maintained by the GJWA, Kerr said, which is why a comprehensive inventory of lead lines has never before been generated until the recent federal requirement.

The inventory is still being updated, but customers of the GJWA can view the lead status of their public and private water service lines through a map available at the authority’s website, GJWA.com.

The GJWA is also sending letters through November to inform customers of their service line lead status.

Excluding private lines, the GJWA expects it will need to replace roughly 4,000 public main lines identified in its inventory. That is estimated to cost $21 million, Kerr said during a September GJWA board meeting.

Among other plans, including an estimated $21 million upgrade to the North Fork Dam, the lead pipe overhaul was a factor in the GJWA board of directors’ decision in September to approve a $3 monthly rate increase effective in January.

While guidance on replacing private lines is yet uncertain, the GJWA has identified 2,000 private lead lines running to individual households and businesses and an additional 12,000 private lines that must still be examined either by appointment or during routine meter readings.

Property owners across the Johnstown region, including Harry McMinn, of the Riverside section of Stonycreek Township, have spent $10,000 or more to replace their sewer lateral lines in recent years due to a mandate passed from the federal government to state and local governmental agencies to residents.

If property owners’ individual water service lines must be replaced in the future, McMinn said, it should be funded either by the GJWA or the federal government.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to replace lead lines,” he said, “but if that’s their intention, then they should pay for it.”

For the past 15 years, the Johnstown Redevelopment Authority – a separate entity from the water authority – has been under a Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection consent order to eliminate all sanitary sewer overflows from its system by Dec. 31, 2024.

The JRA had elected to achieve that goal in agreement with local municipalities by requiring homeowners to pay for excavating and replacing sewer connections at their properties, while replacement of sewer mains was completed with public tax dollars.

“People here put a lot of money out on sewer lines,” McMinn said. “To throw this one in now, too, you are looking for some problems. People are tired of being squeezed.”

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has allocated $395 million to Pennsylvania to accelerate progress toward Biden’s goal of replacing lead pipes, a July fact sheet from the White House said.

With the Biden administration’s Oct. 8 announcement of the final Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, it also announced that the EPA is investing an additional $2.6 billion nationwide for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

How much of that federal funding could be awarded to the GJWA for replacing lead service lines is not yet clear.

Lead tests of the GJWA’s public drinking water meet the “non-detectable” standard under federal guidelines, but the federal government is making it standard to remove lead pipes whether there are detectable levels of lead in water or not.

“No level of lead exposure is safe,” the October White House press release said. “Yet due to decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment, lead poisoning disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.”

Developing the final rule, the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, had been a goal of the Biden administration since its first year in office. Signing the rule this month showed Biden’s “commitment to spend his remaining months in office ‘sprinting to the finish,’ ” the press release said.

Russ O'Reilly is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter @RussellOReilly.

The Greater Johnstown Water Authority is preparing for an estimated $21 million project to remove lead pipes throughout its system.

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