Council advances ordinance amendment to offer $40 per lead-sampling event to support lead service-line program

City Manager Boyer told the council the city has remediated roughly 1,600 lead service lines and will bring forward an amendment to the city code to allow a $40 per-sample credit on customers' water bills to encourage households to complete required lead/copper sampling for the lead service line replacement grant application.

Boyer said the Environmental Protection Agency has expanded sampling requirements, increasing the frequency and number of required samples. “EPA has changed that to every 6 months, and they've also doubled the number of samples,” he said, adding that sampling requires following a specific regimen and can be a burden on residents.

Why it matters: the city said it faces difficulty finding enough households to complete the twice-yearly sampling now required; the proposed $40 bill credit is intended as a temporary incentive until lead service-line replacements are complete and the city can return to copper monitoring.

Boyer told council that historically the city performed far fewer samples per year but that the EPA rule change means the city must secure roughly 60 participating households who will sample correctly twice per year to meet monitoring requirements. He proposed the $40 credit as a way to recruit participants; the credit would be temporary and would end once lead services are remediated and monitoring changes.

Alderman Johnson asked which parts of the city are eligible; Boyer said eligibility is determined address-by-address based on which addresses still have lead services and that remaining affected addresses are now relatively few. Council voted to move the ordinance forward to staff (motion by Alderman Sellers, second by Alderman Schadl); the motion passed by voice vote and will return to council at the next meeting for consideration.

No specific ordinance text or effective date was adopted at the meeting.