Solutions to Construction Challenges for an Equitable and Incentivized Lead Service Line Replacement Program

The City of New London provides water to 60,000 customers through 14,000 service connections in the City and surrounding communities. The City has been in compliance with lead and copper limits under the Lead and Copper Rule as demonstrated through periodic water sampling and reporting in the Annual Water Quality Reports. Most recent lead and copper sampling was performed in 2017; average concentration of lead (1.8 ppb) and copper (0.12 ppm) were below the action limits for these constituents. The City is aware of about 3300 lead service lines within its system and is proactively embarking on a Lead Service Line Replacement program, the first in the State of Connecticut. This presentation will focus on the ongoing lessons learned of a Lead Service Line Replacement Program for the City of New London CT. The City is embarking on a replacement program and has received over $11 million in funding for the first year of construction. Construction began in Fall 2023. We will discuss the public outreach efforts related to this work and provide details on cost, level of effort, and lessons learned for conducting this important replacement work. We will share highlights of the most frequent issues and questions raised by affected residents and how we address them. We will provide examples from the contract document that illustrate the finer points of how we accommodate the residents. Highlights of our presentation will focus on how to incentivize people to proactively replace their lead service lines (private property) and will provide details on the funding structure planned. An important piece of our work is to utilize the State of CT defined vulnerabilities index set to aid in setting priorities this includes median household income and known blood lead level data. We will show how we incorporate these data sets into our replacement program priorities. This presentation will share best practices and lessons learned from the first LSLR program in the State of Connecticut, with a strong emphasis on achieving equity using CT's defined vulnerabilities index. This information will benefit other utilities, local governments, regulators and consultants as many will need to embark on aggressive LSLR programs, beyond those paired with water main work, for compliance with the Lead and Copper Rule Revisions.