Lead poisoning prevention advocates plan to rally outside City Hall this morning, as they’ve done many times before. But this time, it’s to protest a new City Council bill that could require property owners to get rid of their dangerous lead pipes over the next decade.

The law, Int. No. 942 of 2024, would fine noncompliant homeowners up to $1,000 if they don’t replace their lead service lines – pipes that connect from the city’s water supply to individual buildings – in the next 10 years. Each replacement will cost between $5,000 and $10,000, according to the state health department, though the bill says lower-income homeowners will be eligible for financial aid.

Members of the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning, which has advocated for decades for stricter regulations on lead in pipes and paint, have sharply castigated the legislation for charging homeowners, rather than the government, with the task of completing the repairs.

They argued that replacements will be more costly than a cohesive citywide plan and relying on homeowners to schedule them independently will cause a chaotic cascade of construction projects, tearing up roads and possibly even dislodging more lead particles in the process.

But city officials contended that because the service lines are on private property, they’re outside local agencies’ purview and a mass replacement would be prohibitively expensive.

“This bill is a public health and logistical and construction nightmare,” said Valerie Baron, a member of the coalition and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water safety program. “This is not something that it’s at all reasonable to expect people to figure out by themselves.”

Baron also warned that, as written, the law could cut New York City off from its largest potential source of lead pipe replacement funding — a $15 billion pot promised to the states by the federal government as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021. Money from that tranche is only available to municipalities whose water utilities replace the service lines themselves, according to a 2022 EPA memo, so homeowners who take on that work won’t have access to it.

“Passing the cost along to the property owner should be the very last thing you do, after you’ve tried everything else after you have looked under the couches or searched high and low for money,” said Joshua Klainberg, another member of the coalition and senior vice president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “In this case, there’s no need to look under the couches or search high and low because the money is there.”

Some city officials said they disagreed.

Beth DeFalco, a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection, said the city is only entitled to about a quarter of the state’s share of federal funds for service line replacement, and that regular New Yorkers would have to make up the difference with their monthly water bills. She estimated the total cost of replacing all the city’s lead service lines to be more than $2 billion.

Councilmember James Gennaro, the bill’s sponsor, said in a written statement that the legislation will likely be amended, a process that will kick off during this morning’s hearing of the City Council’s committee on environmental protection, resiliency and waterfronts.

“Financial assistance for homeowners will be a major area of discussion with the Adams Administration,” he wrote, adding that the amendments will include channels for state and federal funding.

Klainberg and the other members of the coalition said that’s not enough. They called instead for a citywide program like one in Newark, N.J. that makes use of state and federal funding sources.

“This bill is so badly broken it cannot be fixed,” Klainberg said. “It must be replaced with someone better and healthier and equitable.”

Lead pipes have been banned in New York City since 1961. But they still serve hundreds of thousands of buildings across the five boroughs.

As many as one in five New Yorkers may get their water from lead pipes, according to a coalition analysis of city data, though the water itself is treated with chemicals to keep the toxic metal from leaching into the water supply.

Exposure to lead in childhood can cause irreversible brain damage and learning problems. Poor New Yorkers are more likely to be lead-poisoned than their higher-income neighbors, and children of color make up more than four-fifths of all kids with elevated blood lead levels citywide, according to health department data.

The Biden administration wants cities across the nation to finish replacing them in the next ten years as part of an update to the federal Lead and Copper Rule planned for the fall of this year. In May, the EPA announced that New York state would receive close to $130 million in federal funding to help identify and replace lead service lines statewide. It’s not clear whether New York City would have access to this or other federal money under the proposed City Council bill.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

The department did successfully replace about 600 low-income New Yorkers’ lead service lines using a state grant, according to its website.