Lead Pipe Bill Will Help Home Owners

State Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt recently praised the state Senate’s passage of the ‘Leading on Lead Bill.’ The state lawmaker from Fond du Lac notes a lot of older communities, like Fond du Lac, have a number of homes with lead pipe laterals piping water into their homes. He stressed that lead if ingested over time can make people sick and in children can affect cognitive abilities. He says, “Affecting cognitive development that obviously impacts quality of life. It means you are going to have more kids in schools that need special assistance, which means it is more expensive to educate them and by-and-large the public is paying for the education of those children.” The City of Fond du Lac struggled last year with coming up with a way of using money from a safe water drinking loan to help home owners to replace those laterals. Thiesfeldt says under the bill municipalities could use money from water user fees to establish programs to help with up to half of the costs of replacing lead pipe laterals. He says, “We are kind of trying to pave the path for municipalities such as Fond du Lac to be able to establish programs where they can take the money that is paid by the rate payers and set up low interest loans, grants and things like that.” The bill is on its way to the Governor’s desk.