Steve Hvozdovich: Investing in clean water

Pennsylvania is an old state with old infrastructure.

As the commonwealth boomed in the early to mid-20th century, we built roads, bridges, highways and water systems.

But as the commonwealth has aged, so too has our infrastructure, and we have struggled to maintain it.

Some of those signs of aging are clearly visible — like potholes in our roads and rusting beams on our bridges, while others we can’t as easily see, like the deteriorating lead pipes delivering drinking water into our homes, schools and businesses.

We’ve known for decades that lead is highly poisonous and can lead to all sorts of health effects, especially in children. But when Pennsylvania boomed, we still built many of our cities with lead infrastructure because of its lower cost and ease of production.

Over the years, we’ve made incremental progress and improvements, but replacing them has been prohibitively expensive leaving many of our cities and municipalities, large and small, still lined with lead pipes.

But President Biden and his administration are taking action by making huge investments in our cities and health through infrastructure bills that will help finally rid our cities of lead pipes.

They’ve looked to cities in Pennsylvania, like Pittsburgh, as inspiration.

Since 2016, Pittsburgh has diligently removed more than half of the lead service lines in their system and replaced them with modern water infrastructure.

But now with new federal funding not only can completion of the work in Pittsburgh be supercharged but we can replicate the efforts among the mid and small sized water authorities that service Pittsburgh’s suburbs.

That progress and opportunity is why Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA Administrator Mike Regan traveled to Pittsburgh as part of the Investing in America Tour to announce nearly $6 billion in funding for clean water infrastructure from Biden’s Investing in America agenda, including almost $200 million for Pennsylvania.

The funding is a massive investment to upgrade America’s water infrastructure and the largest investment in clean water in American history.

The federal funding also aligns with the administration’s goal to replace all lead service lines within ten years.

In November 2023, the Biden administration launched its Get the Lead Out (GLO) Initiative, which creates partnerships with 200 underserved communities nationwide and provides them with technical support to secure federal funding and eliminate lead service lines.

By combining funding and technical assistance, more communities can follow Pittsburgh’s lead in removing lead pipes and protecting their residents.

Unfortunately, our history of clean water failures doesn’t start and end with lead pipes.

More recently, Pennsylvania’s water systems have been threatened by PFAS, a suite of thousands of manmade toxic chemicals used in many industrial and consumer products, including firefighting foam, that has made its way into our water systems.

Removing PFAS requires costly upgrades to treatment plants and water systems, which are often cost-prohibitive for the municipalities affected by the chemicals.

And the companies that produced the chemicals that seeped through the soil and found their way into our water systems have disappeared or evaded consequences.

The Biden administration is taking on the challenge of ridding our water of PFAS head-on by dedicating over $1 billion to cleaning up PFAS pollution and helping communities build new water treatment systems to safeguard their residents, so we don’t have yet another legacy water pollution issue to solve 50 years from now.

Thanks to Biden, we finally have a nationwide strategy and the funding behind it to clean up our water and build new, modern water systems.

This is about protecting a fundamental right and a constitutionally protected one in Pennsylvania. That’s why we need to maximize the opportunity the Biden administration has provided to ensure everyone has access to safe, reliable drinking water now and for generations to come.

Steve Hvozdovich is the Pennsylvania campaigns director for Clean Water Action.