Minnesota combats lead in drinking water with ambitious – and costly – pipe replacement plan

Helen Davis had no idea her son Frederick had dangerously high levels of lead in his blood when health care workers, accompanied by police, showed up at her doorstep to rush the two-year-old to a hospital. 

Unknown to Davis or anyone, Frederick had for some time peeled paint containing lead off a wall of his grandmother’s house in Chicago and ingested it, carefully replacing a chair over the affected area to hide his operation.

“He was eating the wall and I didn’t even know it,” Davis said. 

A routine blood test gave Frederick away and kept him in the hospital for three months. Decades later lead poisoning continues to affect him. His mother said it inhibited his ability to learn. Now 39 years old  Frederick still has lead-related problems. “He forgets a lot,” Davis said. 

And when Frederick suffered a car crash about 10 years ago, Davis was convinced that the high levels of lead that were still in his system inhibited his healing. 

Davis moved to Duluth in 2004, where she works as community outreach specialist for a non-profit involved in the revitalization of the low-income Lincoln Park neighborhood. She also continues to sound the alarm about lead, which has been found in  the drinking water of some of Duluth’s older homes, where many low-income residents live, including the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Minnesota has taken on what many consider a herculean task – to replace all of the lead water service pipelines in the state, estimated to be about 100,000 – at no cost to homeowners who would have to pay thousands of dollars to replace those pipes.  

The program, funded jointly by the state and the federal government, is in its infancy.

Right now, there are only  a few water service providers tearing up streets and excavating front yards to rip out lead service pipes, prevalent in older homes, that could pose a serious health hazard, especially to small children and pregnant women.

In Minnesota, childhood lead exposure is tied to poverty. In neighborhoods with rates of childhood poverty higher than the state average, children are more than 3.5 times as likely to have lead poisoning than their peers who live in areas with lower-than-average poverty rates, according to the Minnesota Department of Health’s 2024 Statewide Health Assessment. 

The problem also disproportionately affects people of color since they are more likely to live in poverty – and in older homes and apartments.

Homes, schools and apartment buildings built before 1948 are the most likely to have lead pipes, but any structure built before 1986 could have some lead in its water pipes. 

St. Paul has a point system 

Cyndi Falconer, utility program manager for Duluth, said the last recorded lead service installed in Duluth was installed in 1946. Falconer also said  there are 7,700 known lead service lines in the city, which the city has already begun to replace.

St. Paul has also begun to replace all lead pipes that run from the water main to homes and apartments. 

Like Duluth, St. Paul also found unsafe levels of lead in the water of some of its residences. The Environmental Protection Agency’s action level for lead is 15 parts per billion (ppb). The water in 12 out of 51 homes tested in St. Paul had more than 15 ppb of lead.

St. Paul has a system for prioritizing which locations will have their pipes replaced each year. 

Right now,  according to Racquel Vaske, general manager of St. Paul Regional Water Services, lead pipes in neighborhoods where construction is already taking place take priority, because that saves money since the streets are already ripped open.

Then  priority will be given on a point system. A neighborhood could score up to five points based on the demographics of its households – including income, ethnicity and race determined from U.S. Census data. Neighborhoods could earn another one to five points based on the number of children who live there who are under five years old. The higher a neighborhood’s score, the higher priority it is to replace the pipes.

 “This year,” said Vaske, “we’re going after all the tens and the nines.” 

If St. Paul residents don’t want to wait to have their lead service pipe replaced, they can apply for another program that allows homeowners to  pay back the city for replacing their pipes via property tax increases that would be spread out over 20 years.

‘The biggest bang for the buck’ 

The dangers posed by lead are well known. Exposure to even small levels over time can cause damage. The greatest risk is to brain development in children, and higher levels can damage kidneys and the nervous system in both children and adults.

The problem is that the sources of lead poisoning are not always known.

“A lot of homes that have lead pipes also have lead paint,” said Sasha Lewis- Norelle, an environmental health and justice organizer for Clean Water Action, Minnesota.

Lead can also be found in spices, soil, medicines, supplements and other sources. Yet those who have pressed for the pipe replacement program say it’s one sure way to combat a known source of the toxic metal, which can accumulate in an individual’s body and will never leave it.

“This does not take care of the whole lead problem, but it gives us the biggest bang for the buck,” said Steve Morse, executive director of Minnesota Environmental Partnership.

Concern about lead levels in drinking water came into the national consciousness about a decade ago, after a decision to pump very corrosive water from the Flint River resulted in the leaching of lead from pipes into thousands of homes in Flint, Michigan. 

Using river water was considered a cheaper alternative than what the city had done for decades, piping treated water for its residents from Detroit.

“What happened in  Flint, Michigan re-emphasised the importance of removing lead pipes,” said Tom Hogan, director of the Environmental Health Division at the Minnesota Department of Health, the agency that is in charge of the state’s lead replacement program.   

Local concerns also spurred Minnesota to take action.

Rep. Sydney Jordan, DFL, who represents northeastern Minneapolis and southeastern Como, said she heard about concerns of lead in drinking water while door knocking in her district. After that, she says, she became a “nerd” about lead. That led her to sponsor legislation approved last year that established a $240 million program to start replacing all the lead service pipes in the state.

Davis helped win support for Jordan’s bill by testifying in favor of the legislation, recounting the problems lead poisoning caused her son.

“I needed to put it out there and tell people ‘This can happen to your kids,’” Davis said. 

The state’s decision to appropriate the $240 million opened the door to a federal program in the Biden administration’s massive  infrastructure law that has granted the state with an additional $340 million, over five years  for the pipe replacement program.

Yet the cost of the program, according to  a study by the University of Minnesota, is likely to be at least $1 billion.

“We need to do more, and the feds also have to step up,” Jordan said.

Mapping the problem 

Although it’s nowhere near enough to finish the job, which the state wants completed by 2033, the money that’s been allocated for the program allows  St. Paul, Duluth and other Minnesota cities and towns to move forward.

Jordan said she wishes the water services in Minneapolis, which serve her constituents, would follow St. Paul in its aggressive response to the problem. 

“I think Minneapolis has to step up and do what St. Paul is doing,” Jordan said.

The Minneapolis city government did not return calls requesting comment.

Minnesota’s new program will give cities and towns grants or forgivable loans to replace their lead pipes. They could be helped by a federal requirement that states that receive federal money map all their lead pipes. 

Minnesota’s Department of Health has formed a partnership with the University of Minnesota to develop an interactive map that will allow residents to search whether a home or apartment receives its water through a lead service pipe.  

The goal is to have the interactive state map completed by mid-October and on display by the end of the year, said Len Kne, a specialist in spatial computing at the university. 

In creating the map, Kne and his colleagues are using information submitted by the 961 water systems in the state, which are creating their own local maps of lead pipes.   

The gold standard 

Environmentalists, and some water service companies, have looked to Newark as a leader in the fight against lead in the water.

“Newark is the gold standard,” said Lewis-Norelle of Clean Water Action.

Like Flint, Newark faced a crisis after record-high levels of lead were found in the drinking water of the city’s schools in 2016. 

After the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection required the city to monitor lead in its drinking water more extensively, Newark reported lead levels were above the federal action level – rising in 2018 and 2019 to some of the highest of any major city in the country.

With the help of a $192 million county bond, Newark was able to replace nearly all of its lead pipes – about 23,000 – in two and a half years.

But replacing service lines does not eliminate all of the lead pipes that carry drinking water in a home. Homes and apartments that have lead service lines are also likely to have lead pipes inside the home. And Newark’s program, like Minnesota’s nascent one, did not replace those pipes or eliminate any risk they may pose.

Besides urging residents to run taps for several minutes if they want to drink water or cook with it, Newark is distributing 40,000 water filters in an effort to reduce lead in homes that may still have interior lead pipes or pipes that are welded with lead.

But more importantly, Newark has made its water service replacement program mandatory. That means no homeowner or landlord could stop the city’s water company from replacing a pipe. In contrast, Minnesota’s program is voluntary, leaving the possibility that some landlords and homeowners may not replace dangerous water pipes.

“We replaced more lines faster than any other city in America because we made it mandatory,” said Mark Di Ionno, spokesman for Newark’s Department of Public Safety. 

Yet Hogan of the Minnesota Department of Health said he’s confident the Minnesota program will be very popular.

“With no cost to the property owner, we are confident the acceptance will be high,” he said.

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