N. Grove takes first steps to remove lead pipes

NEWTON GROVE — The town board took steps Monday night to remedy by removal harmful lead pipe that exist across the town, approving a proposal calling for its replacement.

The topic was brought up TRC Site and Design Director Tyrus Clayton, who provided an overview to the board saying a study of the town’s water system to identify lead piping for removal was a requirement.

“There’s an EPA requirement that all public water systems have to do a study of their systems to determine, through historical reviews and physical investigations, any kind of lead service line piping you may have in your system … so we can identify for replacement,” he told the board.

The reason for the EPA requirement quite simply boils down to the health risk lead pipes pose to residents, he said. In order to start working towards identifying those problem areas, Clayton noted that TRC has been helping the town find funding to conduct the study.

“Pretty much everybody’s aware lead pipes are not a good thing for your health,” Clayton attested. “We’ve helped the town file an application for funding to conduct this work, which again, has to be done, plus part of it has to be done and reported to the EPA by Oct. 16 of this year, that’s the initial inventory.”

Clayton said the town was offered a “loan with principal forgiveness” which should account for the cost of the study.

“I don’t think I’ve discussed that before,” he said. “Basically, it’s agreed to give you the amount of the money needed to do the study and the initial investigation, and the principal amount of that loan is forgiven. So that means $0; you just have to pay the loan closing fee, which is about 2 percent of the total loan value. I’d have to go back and do some math, but that’s less than a $1,000 I think.

“So again, basically that will pay for us to conduct that service which we will do along with some of the staff here in town.”

The proposal, he said, consists of multiple steps.

“So we’ve got a proposal in front of you, and there’s several steps involved,” he noted. “The first one is to complete a historical data review. Basically, what that entails is we’re going to look at age of houses, when they were built, when they may have been renovated. That’s to see if we could rule out those that have been installed or constructed after lead service lines were allowed to be used at all, since they became illegal.

“We’ll rule those out then, after that, we’ll probably go ahead and file a report with EPA to get you in compliance before the Oct. 16 deadline, so they have that initial inventory in place.”

Additional field investigation will follow that initial step, but Clayton told board members there were some unknown factors that could come into play during the process that might impact cost before they complete the historical data.

“We’ll then go through some additional field investigation and that’s something we’ve proposed because until we get that initial historical data review completed, we’re not sure what that’s going to require. We’ve included an amount that we think is reasonable to the size of a town based upon some of the other towns we’ve done the same service for.

“Conducting those field investigations could physically mean we have to dig up on either side of a meter with a shovel to look at a line. That’s what we’ve had to do in other locations; we’ve got methods in which we can do that and it’s very unnoticeable. By the time we get done, we’ll fill the hole back in, but we may need to do that.

“That’s just so we can actually look at pipes, leaving the meter and going up to the original house so we can see the actual amount of line from that meter up to the main roadway.”

While those field investigation mean they may be required to dig up parts of the ground around town, Clayton said they’ll be filing for reimbursements to cover those cost.

“As part of this, we’ll also file for reimbursement request through the state for a funding source to actually get money into the towns coffers for that actually work,” Clayton said. “Then we’ll file a formal final report with the fees on your behalf and one of us will probably come back and share those findings with you before we do so, to let you know what we found. Eventually, if there’s any lead pipes identified, the town is probably going to have to institute a plan to replace those.”

Commissioner Cody Smith asked how much of the lead piping the town would be responsible for replacing. “Is this from the meter to the house?” Smith said.

Clayton clarified, noting that homeowners would be responsible for some, but money to assist that should be available.

“So the town’s responsible from the main line to the meter, but there’s, hopefully, going to be some public monies available to assist the homeowners with the replacement of the actual service line,” he said. “The service line, or the meter to the house, is owned by the resident. But, we’re getting word there’s gonna be some money available to help assist those homeowners that have those potential lead service lines for replacement.

“Part of this is also going to be some public education and we want to put together some information you can share with the residents as we get the study near completion. There’s a lot of pre published documents we can use that EPA’s has put out, and we can tell it to the town.”

After the discussion, Smith made the motion to accept TRC’s proposal, which was unanimously approved by the board.