Echoing Newark: How American Cities Can Replicate Newark’s Success in Replacing Over 23,000 Lead Pipes in Under Three Years
By Maureen Cunningham, Chief Strategy Officer & Director of Water Strategy
From first banning new construction projects with lead service lines in 1953 to experiencing its first lead exceedance above the US EPA action level in June 2017 to this week, Newark has managed to do what no other water system has been able to until now: create a lead service line program that replaced over 23,000 lines in under three years. It’s both a historic and an unprecedented win for clean drinking water and for public health - not only for 311,549 Newark residents but for others around the country who may now look to this city for guidance. And the next question 11,000 communities across the country with toxic lead pipes should be asking is, simply, how’d they do it? What transformed Newark’s story from one about lead contamination to one about efficiency - and ultimately a story of crisis to one of success?
Though it’s historic, it was by no means a surprise. The Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) has been talking to Kareem Adeem, Water Director and Tiffany Stewart, Assistant Water Director - who run the City of Newark’s Water Department and other partners like New Jersey Future to learn more from Newark’s incredible success and to share some of their key lessons learned. What we found are definitive steps that can be replicated to ensure lead pipe replacement happens faster, taken from our conversations with these Newark officials and a roundtable we did in partnership with them and New Jersey Water Works with 30 municipalities in January 2022. We asked Newark what they would tell other municipalities launching lead service line replacement programs. The following are the top ten lessons learned of this incredible story that we hope can help other communities get the lead out faster:
Focusing on a three-tiered approach for their crisis management plan. Newark city officials knew they had a problem with the first and subsequent lead exceedances, resulting they thought from failed corrosion control treatments at one of two water treatment plants that served roughly half of the city. In response, they adopted a three-tiered approach and plan to reduce lead exposure for their residents, what they call their crisis management plan: in the short-term, distributing point of use filters; in the medium term, adopting the use of orthophosphate (a corrosion control inhibitor) for corrosion control; and in the long term (and initially an eight-year plan), replacing lead service lines. The intent of this approach was “to take ownership, be accountable, be transparent and be compassionate,” a mantra for municipal officials everywhere.
Making their program mandatory and free of charge to residents. When they launched their program in March 2019, the program was voluntary and homeowners were required to pay $1,000 for their portion of the replacement. As a result, between March and September 2019, Newark only replaced 650 lead service lines, resulting in a rate of replacement of only a handful per day. A pivotal moment came in September 2019, when a few things happened to help Newark transform its program. In September, the City Council passed a local ordinance, mandating lead service line replacement, enabling right of entry into residences for the city, and requiring proof of replacement at the time of real estate transfer or sale. Importantly, the right of entry was not only for the property owner but also for renters whose landlords couldn’t be reached or didn’t respond. In a city where the homeownership rate is only 22.3 percent, this was critical - and it was also backed by enabling legislation in early 2020 at the state level. Starting in September 2019, the now mandatory - and at that point free program for residents - was ramped up to perform 80-100 replacements, and at times well over 100, per day.
Securing funding - through collaboration among local, state, and federal officials. Everyone knows that funding is a big piece of any water infrastructure solution, which is why $15 billion for lead service line replacement from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year is so pivotal, and will surely make a dent in the problem of toxic lead pipes around the country. But Newark three years ago was without this level of federal funding, and Water Director Kareem Adeem talks more about the collaboration of officials at all levels than the funding these officials facilitated. Nonetheless, the $120 million municipal bond facilitated by the Essex County Improvement Authority in 2019, alongside federal funding through the State Revolving Fund program, paved the way for the replacements to be provided free of charge for residents - and as a result, enabled Newark to set a goal of three years, down from eight. A lease agreement with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey brought in $155 million to service the debt on these bonds. This funding facilitated the end of the cost-share arrangement requiring residents to pay $1,000 for their side of replacement, something that was supported by enabling state legislation in 2018 that allowed municipalities to replace lead service lines on private property. All of this, coupled with the right of entry legislation, enabled the replacements to go at a block by block pace, which is both faster and more efficient than what was happening prior to September 2019.
Keeping good records - and inventories of lead service lines. Newark officials credit its “old-timers” in the water department for keeping great records of past lead service line replacements and existing lead lines, modeled after nearby New York City. These records enabled the water department, faced with a lead contamination crisis, to move forward with their replacement program in record time. While this old-time recordkeeping sounds folksy, knowing where and how many lines there are facilitates the necessary number-crunching needed to budget for it. Without this clear picture, many municipalities we talk to every day are playing a guessing game - which makes it hard to line up the necessary funding and implement a clear solution. Moving forward, municipalities across the country will have to comply with the new federal mandate - the Lead and Copper Rule Revisions promulgated in 2021 - requiring lead service line inventories by October 2024. In New Jersey, they will have to go a step further - and faster - with state legislation signed by Governor Murphy in 2021 that expands the definitions of lead service lines, requires an earlier compliance schedule for inventories and replacement plans (which is already underway), mandates a replacement rate of ten percent within a ten-year time span, and bans partial lead service line replacements except in emergencies.
Enabling workforce development and apprenticeship. Finding the necessary workforce who can help replace the nation’s six to ten million lead pipes is no small feat, but is definitely possible with groups like the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) at the national level poised to make this happen. In Newark, a city with six percent unemployment at the time, city leaders established an apprenticeship program to train dozens of local residents - and to ensure more of the laborers were representative of a city that is a majority Black (50 percent) and Latino (36 percent). The residents were trained as laborers and equipment operators in partnership with LIUNA Local 472. The city also focused on hiring Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE) in contracts. These actions not only helped the community - by hiring local workers, ensuring funding stayed in the community, and creating a figurative pipeline to future careers - but also helped build greater trust with the community. Kareem Adeem says that it also made the actual work easier because local workers often knew the residents with whom they were dealing and the houses where they were trying to gain entry.
Having an extremely competitive procurement and contracting process. According to Water Director Kareem Adeem, if you give a contractor a year, they will take the year to do the work, and longer contracts generally eat up more money. In the case of Newark, city officials, therefore, streamlined and shortened the length of contracts over time to push contractors to do the job faster, which also cut costs. City officials also put out bid documents on consecutive days in a row which allowed all the contractors to see where their competition was landing and gave them the chance to revise their bid for the next day if they wanted. This competition for jobs resulted in more competitive pricing.
Backing up the program with data and technology. Though the City of Newark started off with good record-keeping, CDM Smith was the behind-the-scenes engineering firm that helped build a strong database and management system. They helped the city pair GIS records with a project management tool called E-Builder to ensure the project team was all on the same page. The outputs from this work included two dashboards, one that is public-facing and one that is internal to program administrators.
Building trust and prioritizing transparency. The success of Newark’s program is not just in the numbers; city officials also recognize that building public trust and confidence in the water supply and prioritizing transparency is critical. In addition to the regular water testing program they have had in place for years, the city partnered with 120Water to distribute water testing kits to residents six months after their lead pipes are replaced to increase the confidence these residents have in their water.
Assembling a strong team. After talking to Kareem and Tiffany, you realize that part of Newark’s success lies with its leaders. Water Director Kareem Adeem, incredibly, started out working seasonally for the City of Newark in 1991, filling potholes when he was only 20 years old. He rose through the ranks in the city, serving as truck driver and heavy equipment operator and eventually became director of what is arguably the most successful lead service line replacement in the country. After three decades, he knows the infrastructure of this city most likely better than most, which has to be a factor in the program’s success. Assistant Director Tiffany Stewart, also with Newark roots, was recruited to work for the city, has multiple roles, and is still on the board of New Jersey Shares, a nonprofit partnering with the city to help struggling residents pay their water bills.
Having local elected officials as champions. In all our conversations, we have not yet spoken to Mayor Ras Baraka directly. But his name has come up in all of this, and some aspects of Newark’s program - the apprenticeship program in particular - are credited to him. What we do know is that, when faced with an October 2018 New York Times article that first captured the nation’s attention and collective horror by calling Newark “an echo of Flint,” Mayor Baraka rejected this comparison flat out. And it turns out he was right. The city is not another Flint after all, but in fact, a story of its own and with its own successes (and failures too). The real challenge now for the rest of the country - with an estimated six to ten million remaining lead pipes underground - is to figure out how to be an echo of Newark.