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The city of Park Ridge could be looking at a multi-million-dollar bill over the next two decades as it works to comply with a new state law requiring the replacement of lead water pipes.

Wayne Zingsheim, director of Park Ridge Public Works, said the city has identified approximately 2,500 lead service line pipes that will need to be replaced under the state’s Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act, which was signed into law in August.

Service lines carry water to homes from the municipal water main and are located on private property. Pipes made of lead account for roughly 20% of the service lines in Park Ridge, Zingsheim said.

Currently, no water mains maintained by the city contain lead, Zingsheim said.

Under the new state law, municipalities must create an inventory of all lead water service pipes and submit to the state a plan for replacing them by April 2024, Zingsheim told the City Council on Dec. 13.

Beginning in 2027, the city will need to replace a specific number of private water service lines each year in order for all to be replaced over the next 17 years, he said. To replace 150 lead service lines each year could cost approximately $1.5 million to $2.2 million annually, Zingsheim said, though the exact expense will not be known until the city is ready to seek bids from contractors.

Replacement of some lines will begin as soon as 2022, however.

“Starting Jan. 1, when we replace a (city-owned) water main and come across a lead service (line), we need to replace the line all the way into the building,” Zingsheim told the council. “In the past we replaced lines up to the water shut-off — the b-box in the parkway.”

Zingsheim expressed hope that state or federal dollars through the Build Back Better bill will become available to assist municipalities in replacing lead pipes on private properties. Raising water rates and issuing bonds are other options the City Council may need to consider in order to pay for the annual replacements in the future, Zingsheim said.

“We have plenty of time and hopefully this unfunded mandate will receive some federal or state dollars to help with the cost,” he said.

Lead pipes can be found largely in homes that were built prior to the mid-1980s when the federal government banned installation of lead water pipes.

According to the Illinois Environmental Council, an advocacy group, lead was used for decades as the primary material in water service lines that bring drinking water into homes.

The private lead service lines in Park Ridge can be found across the city and are not concentrated within specific neighborhoods, Zingsheim said.

Because Park Ridge has seen a great deal of new residential construction since the 1980s, many lead service lines that once existed have been replaced, he said.

“Park Ridge has had a lot of turnover in homes, so any newer home that goes up doesn’t have a lead line,” he said.

Homeowners can tell if their water service line contains lead based on the color of the pipe, which can be found by their water meter, Zingsheim said.

“If it’s gray, it’s lead. If it’s copper, the color is copper. And galvanized pipe is a lighter gray color and you can tell it’s metal and not lead,” he said.

In a press release announcing the passage of the Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act, the Illinois Environmental Council wrote that Illinois “has more lead pipes than any other state in the nation,” and is one of only three states to now mandate replacement of lead service lines.

The other two states are Michigan and New Jersey.

Communities like Park Ridge collect water samples from homeowners who volunteer to have their water tested. Between 2015 and 2020, 60 water samples were collected from homes in Park Ridge, with eight of them containing above 5 parts per billion of lead, according to data released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The highest amount of lead in a sample was 11 ppb.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stress that lead is unsafe to consume at any level, though the Food and Drug Administration’s limit for lead in bottled water is 5 ppb.