There's No Easy Way to Get the Lead Out

and we're coming to you from Capitol Hill. Sadly, the city of Flint, Michigan, has become almost synonymous with lead contaminated drinking water. The toxic heavy metal started leeching off of the city's pipes after a disastrous decision to start using the corrosive water of the Flint River. But Flint is not the only city that has lead pipes. They're actually really, really common across the country, especially in older

cities in the Northeast and the Midwest. So how do we know lead might not leach out of another city's pipes and into its water. What's being done to prevent this from happening again, According to Dan Kilde, not nearly enough. Kilde is a native of Flint. He's also a Democrat who represents the city in Congress. We met with him in his Capitol Hill offices to learn more about why, almost three years after the crisis in Flint began, the EVA still hasn't updated its regulations on lead in water.

We also asked him when he first realized there was something seriously wrong with what was coming out of his city's taps. We had known that there were problems in the water system, and I was shocked when the state decided to switch to the Flint River. It was almost like, if you're from Flint, which I am, it was like a punchline to a joke, like are you really serious? And then there were some problems, mostly focused on something

called TCHM. But the late summer of fifteen, when doctor Mona hana Atisha released the research that she had done on blood levels led in children's blood levels, that was a shock to almost everybody. And then I think a lot of the national media didn't start paying attention until the end of that year when the mayor declared an emergency. Right right there had there had been some national stories.

I had been raising it here and it had been picked up, you know, in in some ways, but until the state of emergency was declared, and then national news media obviously started paying attention to it. It really didn't get the attention that it needed. So let's let's bring it back to the present. Are you happy, you know, it's been let's say, almost two years since the mayor declared the emergency. Are you happy with what the EPA has done on the issue of lead in water since

then to change its regulations to prevent this from happening again? No, you know the fact that the EPA continues to sort of take a very slow process to update updating the Lead and Copper Rule. And that's that's the rule that requires water utilities to monitor the amount of lead in the water and address signific gets too high, right, And we you know, we had been suggesting changes to the lead and Copper rule even during the Flint water crisis.

I went and presented some testimony to the to the committee that the EPA had formed to rewrite the rule and we were looking for a much more aggressive approach around testing regimes, around notification, around transparency. And it's almost it's almost hard to believe that even now they still have not brought forth a final rule. And this isn't

even a proposed or even a proposed rule. Right, It's kind of interesting because there was a lot of criticism, legitimate criticism levied by some of my colleagues here in Congress on both sides of the aisle, criticism of the EPA for dragging their feet on getting a leaden copper rule final life, an updated rule. And that was two years ago, and that was under another administration, and now here we are ten months in to a new administration

and still nothing. And you know, it's I don't think of this as a partisan issue at all, but it is a little bit disingenuous for some of the Republican members who were excoriating the Obama administration for not moving on a lead and copper rule in the wake of Flint, to now dead silence on this issue when the problem hasn't gone away, and in fact, you know, the flint issue is making some progress, but the overarching issue of lead in water systems is only getting worse, not getting better.

And so the the the impetus for action is something that is a real concern. We need to get something done. So what do you think is blocking the EPA from doing this? Why? You know why? What's preventing it from acting. Well, it's a good question, you know. I think it's fallen victim to the basically the same problems of bureaucracies that you see affect you know, all sorts of government agencies.

I think the problem here is, in part is there's a reluctance on the part of the federal government and state governments to enter into a regulatory regime that exposes the vast problem that we have out there. It's not convenient, for example, for states or the federal government to have to come to grips with the fact that many hundreds of communities maybe more, are not providing water that meets

the standard. And if we get more aggressive in terms of daylighting those problems, it creates a lot of angst. Are there certain stakeholders that are kind of trying to come up the works or just trying to slow roll this process? Is that the utilities, Is it the municipalities? You know, Where is the opposition coming from outside of

the APA? It's hard to say. I do think there's some real concern among municipal water system operators that closer scrutiny absent really significant money available to reinvest in those systems is going to create a real problem. There's going to be some real dissonance, and I think there's a natural tendency to try to stem that, to try to

hold that back. My view on this, and the reason I've been pushing for the updated lead and copper rule and introduce my own legislation to change the standards, is that we have to force this issue. There's no comfortable way to deal with the fact that people can't trust their water. We will all want to we want to believe that if you turn the tap on, that the water's safe to drink. We've been conditioned to believe that

that's the case. And so the only way I think we actually get to the place where we have a system that guarantees drinkable water, clean and drinkable safe water is to create some upset, I mean, and the way to do that is to force the issue. I want to bring down the standard for lead in water, and if we do that, we're going to throw a lot of municipal water systems out of compliance. And that's a good thing. They ought to be thrown out of compliance

if they're not providing safe water. We have to force this question. We have to do something about it. But we're you know, let's get even more specific. You know, you're talking about bringing the standard down for leading water. But you know a lot of people that I've talked to who've worked on the lead and copper rule say that a new rule has to have a mandate to

take lead pipes out of the system. Where does the money come from for that, Because we're talking about ripping up, you know, digging under the ground and ripping up thousands of miles of pipes. That's exactly right, and the money has to come from a combination of really big public investment at the federal level and the willingness of states to contribute to that, and local water systems to have to rationalize the rate structure that they have with the

true needs of providing safe and drinkable water. Now, it would be unfair, after you know, half a century of neglect, to tell water systems by themselves that they have to figure out how to carry the cost of that or I guess that would fall Yeah, the rate payers, because the system has to pay has to pass that cost on to the rate payers that that is going to have. If we went that route, it would have disproportionate negative impact on the communities that are least capable of porting

that kind of reinvestment. The poorest places have the oldest systems and are in need of the greatest investment, Flint being a very good example. So the federal government needs to go big on infrastructure. We need to spend between a trillion on some by some counts to three or

four trillion dollars the whole range of infrastructure needs. And if all we do is rebuild roads and bridges and the things we see and not invest a significant, massive amount of resources into water systems, then this isn't going to go away. So you know, when it comes to infrastructure, that's something that one of the very very few things that Democrats and President Trump have both kind of sounded

similar tones on. What about the other Republicans in Congress, because they are in control of both chambers right now, When you talk to your colleagues, your Republican colleagues about infrastructure and potentially investing a trillion or more dollars into

something like that, what are their reactions? What are they saying? Well, a lot of Republican colleagues are completely on board, and I think if we had before Congress a really big infrastructure initiative, the development of a National Infrastructure Bank, for example. I think you'd find really strong bipartisan support. But you know, I've only been here five years. But the one thing I know for sure is that words are cheap in Washington, DC.

Everyone wants to talk about infrastructure. It's sort of like the weather. People talk about it, nobody ever does anything about it. It is serious, and what we're doing now, unfortunately, is having this big conversation about tax policy outside of the context of the needs of the nation, as if

tax policy is an end onto itself. If we can't think about the need for major investments in infrastructure and contemplate that as we're having the conversation about what sort of tax policy we ought to employ in order to meet those big needs, then we're essentially boxing ourselves out of doing infrastructure. A lot of people say there for it. The President has said he wants to do infrastructure. So far he has done nothing on this nothing. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was Flint. How

are things going there? You know, we're about you know, depending on your when the crisis started. We're about two three years after the crisis. Are things getting better or things getting worse? Or have things gotten better better? Danger of backsliding you know what's going on there? Yeah, I think there have been improvements that we have to acknowledge.

The water has improved slowly over time as a result of going to the Detroit Water system, no longer using Flint River water, which is very corrosive, and using you know, or orthophosphate treatment in order to recode the pipes using corrosion control. That has slowly brought the lead levels down so that it is now at least in the last study, within the federal guideline of fifteen parts per billion. But there are still really big problems as we are now

replacing all those lead service lines. We've done the city has done with money that myself and others fought for. Here we've done three or four thousand lead service line replacements maybe something in that range, out of the eighteen thousand that need to be replaced. So that's a step in the right direction. The problem is this. Fixing the infrastructure is one part of solving the problem in Flint. Dealing with the consequences of lead exposure is not going

to be a short term proposition. We need to make sure that the health and development support, especially for young children who've been impacted by lead, lasts well into the next decade. That's an area that we're focusing a lot of energy on. We need to actually focus some attention on economic growth and economic development. One of the reasons that the city was put into this crisis is that it was in collapse and to simply get the Flint back to where it was before the water crisis, that's

not a good place. So we're focusing a lot more energy now on how we rebuild the economy of Flint, grow small business. I'm trying to find allies where I can. I just met with Secretary Carson last week at HUD and asked him to come to Flint, asked him to use the resources at HUD to help us rebuild this place. What are you saying, You know he's open to it. I mean, you know, I appealed to his knowledge. I mean,

this is a guy who's a pediatric brain surgeon. He understands the impact of lead exposure on the developing brain of a child and knows that it can't be fit just by changing the pipes in the house where that child lives, so I want him to come to Flint, Okay. I have my differences with this administration, but when it comes time to fight for my hometown, I'll take any ally that I can get. Democratic Congressman Dan Kildey of

Michigan speaking with Parts per Billion. For more of our reporting on drinking water and other pollution issues, visit our website at bnanews dot BNA dot com. Today's episode was produced by myself with help from Jessica Coombs and Rachel Dagel. The music for Parts Pavilion is a message by just Our. It was used under a Creative Comments attribution Share Life license. More information can be found at Better with Music dot com