Canceled Plans & Pleas For Help Denied
Federal Funding Cuts Maintain Our Toxic Footprint & Limit Our Access To Clean Water.
Pleas for help going unanswered. Canceled grants to upgrade water treatment plants. These setbacks expose how solvable issues persist across this great nation. Just another day in paradise?!
No Federal Help For Schools in Milwaukee
First, we have an all-too familiar problem in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the state’s largest city. Officials asked for help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to deal with recently discovered high lead levels in city public schools that serve 68,000 children.
The answer they received was a big, fat “no.”
Why? You might ask. Lead is a known neurotoxin that according to our own regulatory agencies has no safe level of exposure and can cause everything from stomach pains and headaches to lowered IQs and permanent brain damage.
The agency no longer has the staff to help.
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Dr. Mike Totoraitis had been working with the CDC for two months on this issue, according to CNN. But when 10,000 federal health employees were laid off as part of government downsizing and as a “Transformation to Make America Healthy Again,” the city was told its CDC contact could no longer help.
“I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this EpiAid request,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein, director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, wrote last week to Milwaukee officials. A copy of the letter was obtained by CNN.
What is an Epi-Aid? It’s essentially an investigation of an urgent public health problem, such as infectious or noninfectious disease outbreaks, unexplained illnesses, or natural or manmade disasters. An Epi-Aid enables rapid, short-term (1–3 weeks), generally onsite, technical assistance by EIS officers and other CDC subject matter experts. The focus of an Epi-Aid investigation is to assist partners in making rapid, practical decisions for actions to control and prevent the public health problem.
These officers, known as “disease detectives,” are sent to state and local health departments to investigate urgent public health issues and provide short-term help to local agencies.
But the entire lead department has been eliminated. It’s gone.
Milwaukee closed several schools because of concerns that students were being exposed to unsafe amounts of lead, and needed help to triage which schools and children might need additional screenings and how to understand the lead levels they might find.
While we have covered toxic lead levels in school water systems, this case was about the paint in schools. Lead can be found in many places in a child’s environment, including soil, paint, and in the water.
This case began when a Milwaukee child tested positive for an elevated level of lead in their blood. The CDC recommends that all children who are at risk for lead exposure should be tested for lead poisoning.
While there’s no safe level of lead, the CDC deems any lead levels above 3.5 micrograms per milliliter as cause for concern. This child’s level was close to 15, and triggered an environmental investigation to find the source of the toxic heavy metal.
Lead exposure can be common in for those living in or visiting homes or other structures built before 1978, and most of Milwaukee’s schools were built before then.
Inspections of some schools has turned up “significant lead hazards,” according to local health officials.
I know many people have lost faith in the federal government to investigate what’s making people sick in their communities, and that’s part of why they turn to me. But I don’t have the same kind of resources as the federal government. Neither do states or local governments.
Ideally, these entities should work together, pulling in specialists and funding to tackle these larger problems. No one wants these processes to get bogged down in red tape, but eliminating the people with the expert knowledge isn’t the answer.
In fact, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the lead prevention program might be brought back.
“There are some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I think that’s one of them,” Kennedy said on April 3, noting that “there were a number of instances where … personnel that should not have been cut were cut.”
But is bureaucracy the problem when it comes to solving environmental issues?
“Bureaucratic dysfunction occurs when the system that we've created ceases to produce the value that we wanted out of it.” writes Jorrit de Jong at Harvard Kennedy School.
He argues that we also don’t have to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Instead, we can create organizations that have the benefits of accountability, standardization, and specialization without the burdens of slowness, rigidity, and silos.
Research we did with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative shows how organizations can improve performance by building capabilities that make them more nimble, responsive, and user-friendly. Cities that leverage data to better understand the communities they serve and measure performance learn and improve faster. Cities that use design thinking to reinvent resident services save time and money. And cities that collaborate across organizational and sector boundaries come up with more effective solutions to urban problems.
When it comes to local government, he writes about how close they are to their constituents. It’s a short feedback loop, as city leaders immediately hear it when residents are unhappy. But they often lack the tools to systematically address performance issues, and many refuse to listen to their communities.
Despite significant strides in reducing lead exposure, many homes, schools, and businesses still face the risk of lead leaching into their water supply from aging pipes and fixtures. We still have a long way to go.
The first step in fixing any problem is admitting you have one. We’ve seen lead problems before in Flint, in Newark, and in many communities across the country.
The EPA’s Office of Research and Development with collaborating partners from Department of Housing and Urban Development, CDC, and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, have identified states and counties with the highest potential lead exposure risk from old housing sources of lead in this U.S. Lead Exposures Hotspots Analysis.
So why are we still letting states and local towns discover these issues on their own? Why can’t we get more sweeping action at the federal level?
If we want a bright future for our children, we’ve got to get a grip on our nation’s lead problem, which includes paint hazards in old homes and buildings—and an estimated 9.2 million lead service lines (LSLs) in communities across the country.
Congress must allocate additional funds to get the job done. While I hate that school children in Milwaukee have been left hanging, this moment is an opportunity for more public awareness and pressure, along with funding so that communities get the attention and remediation they need.
For locals in the area, join the parent-led group, LEAD-SAFE SCHOOLS MKE, to find out more information and to get involved.
Cancel Your Plans To Upgrade That Water Treatment Plant
Millions of dollars of grant money needed upgrades at the water treatment plants has been canceled by the federal government.
For the city of Richmond, Virginia, a $12 million grant was part of FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program.
Just in January, Richmond residents experienced how vulnerable the water system had become when a mild winter storm knocked power out at the plant, resulting in 5 days of little to no water coming out of their taps and a boil water advisory.
In an email sent by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to the city on April 11, the department said FEMA had canceled the Notice of Funding Opportunity for fiscal years 2020 through 2024, as reported by local news.
The cancelation of funds came “in alignment with the President’s Executive Orders,” the email said.
The water treatment plant improvements were submitted for the fiscal year 2022.
Following the announcement, Mayor Danny Avula released a statement on social media, expressing his disappointment.
“We’d planned on using these funds to invest in the resilience of our water treatment plant,” he said.
He added that the cancelation of funds will not impact immediate operations or delay improvements at the water treatment plant.
“By cutting funding for critical infrastructure, the federal government is shifting significant costs directly onto our residents and ratepayers,” Avula said. “I urge FEMA to reissue these funds, and I will work with our federal reps to advocate for our residents.”
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner called the canceled grant “unbelievable.”
On top of those funding needs for upgrades and repairs to its water treatment plant, the city also asked the state for $250 million over the next two fiscal years to upgrade its aging sewer system to eliminate overflows of raw sewage into the James River.
The city’s sewers date back to the Civil War, and the outdated system carries storm water and sewage in the same pipes to the water treatment plant.
But Richmond is not alone in these water issues.
Cities across the country have a staggering need for investment in water system repair and improvements. Many water systems are aging and physically vulnerable, resulting in widespread leaks, bursts, and other quality and reliability concerns.
The average American town maintains a water system that’s at least 50 years old. More antiquated systems have water mains that are more than a century old.
Most utilities maintain their water systems through rates paid by customers. The need for rate increases is a reality for almost all utilities across the country due to rising operation and management (O&M) costs.
For decades, utilities spent about an equal amount of public funds on O&M costs and capital projects. But since the mid-1990s, a gap between these costs has widened and now utilities spend about twice as much on O&M as on capital projects.
At the same time, about 14 million (12 percent) of U.S. households have water bills that are too expensive, or above the EPA’s recommended threshold of 4.5 percent of household income. Unlike for energy, there is no federal assistance available for individual ratepayers struggling to afford drinking, waste, and stormwater bills.
“Keeping up with needed water upgrades requires considerable public and private investment at a national, state, and local level,” according to the Brookings Institution. “Recent estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that $744 billion will be needed to address drinking water and wastewater improvements over the next 20 years.”
Plans for a new water treatment facility in Grants Pass, Oregon, saw a similar setback when their $50 million FEMA grant got canceled last week. The decision eliminates a critical funding source intended to help replace the city’s nearly century-old water treatment plant.
The current plant was built in the 1930s and is located in a 500-year floodplain. The facility has known seismic vulnerabilities and critical electrical components situated below grade, leaving the city’s water supply susceptible to disruption from earthquakes or floods.
City officials have planned for years to build a modern, more resilient plant on higher ground to ensure safe drinking water and fire protection for its approximately 58,000 residents. Aging infrastructure has previously strained city services, as shown by a 2019 incident where the wastewater plant was forced to release untreated sewage into the Rogue River during heavy rains.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley sent a letter to Kristi Noem, Secretary U.S. Department of Homeland Security, urging her to reverse the decision to cancel all the BRIC grants, writing, “The Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, signed into law by President Trump during his first term, established the BRIC program, which was designed to enhance the resiliency of communities against natural disasters, including floods, tornadoes, and other severe weather events that are increasing in both frequency and severity.”
The risk of flooding is the main reason Grants Pass was awarded the BRIC grant.
What do you think about these unanswered pleas for help and canceled grants? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.
This country is going to hell in a hand basket
The govt is searching for ways to kill us off. Especially people of color. I was a State of Texas Lead/Pb inspector. This is very serious