President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
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The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
Kind of true, but some lead pipes just aren’t an immediate issue. Like asbestos in a building that isn’t disturbed, it doesn’t hurt anyone until it starts to come loose.
Getting the worst of it solved is a good step.
The issue with not dealing with problems immediately, is that people have a tendency to push them down the line over and over until it’s not just immediate, it’s an emergency over a decade ago. Flint still doesn’t have clean water. This should have been a good first step Obama did, like he promised he was going to.
Flint actually does have clean water by most metrics and independent measurements, but public trust is reasonably deeply, deeply shaken.
This, and I don’t mean this as a bad thing, isn’t actually a thing Biden started. It’s a massive disbursal of funds allocated by the infrastructure bill to a program started in 1996 for upgrading water infrastructure and specifically removing lead pipes.
So this is something great to do, and we should keep doing more of it (there’s $12 billion more waiting for future rounds), and we can be slightly happy that we’re not complete fuck ups since we actually started nearly 30 years ago.
We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we need to advertise that the people entrusted to be basically competent at managing our public works are doing their jobs, but here we are, and we should probably advertise this stuff better.