Lobbyist Bradley Peterson started the Minnesota legislative session with a quarter-billion-dollar ask. That’s how much money he said was needed to keep funding the replacement of lead service lines, which connect water mains to buildings.
It’s going to cost about a billion dollars total to replace all of the lead lines in Minnesota, and the money initially invested into the program is drying up. The state has already capped the money available for new projects.
Still, Peterson, who represents more than 100 local governments in the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities, knew that asking for that much more money would probably be a hard sell.
“The state's fiscal situation has changed, and so any dollar ask is going to be tough,” he said in February, referring to forecasts of future budget deficits. “But on lead service lines specifically, we think if the Legislature is going to spend money on anything, it should be something like this.”
As the legislative session started, the coalition lowered the request from $250 million down to $100 million.
But what they took away was far less.
When lawmakers finally passed the $1.2 billion buzzer-beater bonding bill in the waning hours of the legislative session, funding for the state’s lead replacement program came in at $15 million.
That’s 6 percent of what the coalition initially wanted.
“That's a pretty big disappointment, frankly," Peterson said. “A lot less work will be done. I mean, I'm sure the work won't stop completely, but you're just going to be able to do a lot less, and that's just math.”
Minnesota has taken the lead on lead
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Lead and Copper Rule requires lead service lines to be replaced by 2037. Minnesota’s goal is to get it done by 2033.
According to the state’s online inventory, water systems have identified more than 87,000 service lines in Minnesota that need to be replaced because they are either made of lead or galvanized steel, which can contain lead particles that enter drinking water.
Another 200,000 are made of unknown material and may contain lead.
Sometimes the pipes are easy to categorize — building records may contain info and the homeowner may be able to visually determine the material. But some pipes aren’t visible without digging deep underground.
In Moorhead for example, about 250 lead lines have been identified, and about 1,000 lines are unknown.
“There's a lot of work that needs to be done to fulfill that remaining portion, and that's going to be a couple years before we're done,” said Marc Pritchard, water plant manager at Moorhead Public Service.
In the meantime, Moorhead has begun to replace some lines. In 2024, a pilot project funded the replacement of 12. Another project last year funded the replacement of 30 lines, and that work is being wrapped up this spring.
Those projects were fully funded through the Minnesota Drinking Water Revolving Fund. Each one costs around $8,000 – $12,000, according to Jake Long, water distribution manager at Moorhead Public Service.
He said the process consumes a full day of work that involves a full crew of contractors and supervisors who dig holes in the basement and the front yard before installing a new copper service line.
“We've been able to receive the funding that works for Moorhead Public Service to replace the lines that we want to each summer,” Long said. “Of course, it could be different in the future with available funding, but it's been very, very nice to receive that funding to make these projects successful.”
Smaller cities, like nearby Dilworth, haven’t begun replacing any lines yet. Their inventory process was done by a local contractor, Moore Engineering, and they found 34 lines that need to be replaced and more than 700 made of an unknown material.
“A lot of the records are just inconclusive, or they didn't have sufficient detail to determine precisely what the materials were, and so it's quite an undertaking to continue to refine those details,” said Andrew Aakre, project manager at Moore Engineering. “That's kind of where we're at … just continuing to refine the inventory to reduce the number of unknowns.”
Aakre said he expects replacements to begin “in the next year or so” but his firm doesn’t have any active contracts with the state.
And as more cities begin actually replacing lead lines, Long is worried the $15 million passed by the Legislature won’t be enough to sustain projects across Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, most of the remaining funding will likely be used by the end of the 2027 construction season.
“I think to really make this successful, to really continue these lead service line replacement projects, there will need to be more funding available,” Long said. “It is costly for a homeowner to get it replaced, and, if the Minnesota Department of Health and the EPA really push to get these replaced, we're going to need grant funding to make it happen.”
Lead program already low on funds
In a document highlighting its intended use for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, the Public Facilities Authority has a long list of lead pipe replacement projects, but “the demand for funds exceeds available resources” and a “cap will be placed on the amount available to systems.”
That cap could have been removed if the Legislature appropriated more funds early this year, according to the document.
“The resources are tight, and the work has begun,” Peterson said. “There are lines that are being removed and cities have plans in place, and they're continuing to do the inventories to figure out what the last ones are that need to be identified, so it's a pretty significant disappointment that we couldn't have done better this session.”
The longer it takes to get those projects up and running, Peterson worries it will be tougher for Minnesota cities to retain the labor needed to complete them.
“We were actually probably nationally on the leading edge of that effort,” he said. “Now other states are catching up, and what that means is that the contractors and the workforce that we've been working with — if the money isn't there to continue the work into ‘27 and ‘28 — they'll go find work in other states, and it's really hard to get that momentum back once you lose it.”
Plus, the longer the lead lines stay in place, the longer people are exposed to lead, a toxic metal with no safe amount of exposure. Particularly damaging to children, lead exposure can cause brain damage, developmental problems and, in rare cases, death.
“Your total effects from lead are going to be from all of your cumulative exposures, so that would be from exposure over time,” said Stephanie Yendell, supervisor of the Health Risk Intervention Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health. “A longer duration of exposure is going to increase those effects.”
In the meantime, Peterson said he and the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities will try again next session.
“The next governor and the next Legislature are going to have to figure out how to reprioritize that issue and maybe look at something along the lines of a dedicated funding source, so that we don’t have to rely on the back and forth, ups and downs, maybe, maybe not, of a bonding bill from year to year,” he said.
