Part 2 of “Small Towns, Big Pipes,” a series on the infrastructure crisis facing small communities across Illinois.

Turn on your kitchen faucet and clean water comes out. It feels automatic, like flipping a light switch. It isn’t. That water traveled through a well or intake, a treatment plant, a storage tank and miles of buried pipe before it reached your glass. In most small Illinois towns, some of that pipe went into the ground before your grandparents were born.

This article looks at the drinking water side of the crisis: what is failing, what the state now requires, and why the bill keeps landing on towns that cannot pay it.

Illinois leads the nation in lead

Start with the worst pipe of all. For most of the last century, the small line connecting a house to the water main was often made of lead. Lead is toxic, especially to children, and it can leach into the water passing through it. Congress banned lead pipe in new construction back in 1986. The old lines are still down there.

Illinois has more of them than any other state. In 2019, community water systems reported 677,359 known lead service lines still connected in Illinois. That is just the known ones. In 2023 the U.S. EPA estimated the real number here at over one million.

In 2022, the state responded with the Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act. Every community water supply in Illinois must inventory its service lines, file a replacement plan and then replace every lead line it has. According to reporting on the law, systems must replace at least 6 percent of their lead lines every year starting in 2027, with the whole job finished by 2044 for most communities.

Protecting kids from lead is the right goal. Nobody argues otherwise. The problem is what the law did not include: money.

What replacement actually costs

Digging up and replacing one service line costs between $6,000 and $16,000. That is per house.

Watch how fast it adds up. River Grove, a suburb of about 10,000 people, counted 1,881 lead lines and estimated the total at $28.3 million. La Grange Park figured $23.5 million over 17 years and added a new $8.40 monthly charge to every water bill to cover it. These are comfortable suburbs with thousands of ratepayers to share the load.

Now run that math in a village of 500 people with a couple hundred water meters. Even a few dozen lead lines can mean a half-million-dollar project. Spread across so few bills, the monthly charge that a suburb barely notices becomes real money in a small town, and it lands hardest on retirees living on Social Security.

Statewide, the gap between the job and the money is enormous. Estimates for replacing every lead line in Illinois run from $2.2 billion on the low end to as much as $10 to $12 billion, depending on whose count you believe. Against that, the largest recent federal award for lead pipes in Illinois was $295.6 million, the biggest share of any state but still a fraction of the need. Meanwhile federal support is moving the wrong direction. Recent budgets cut $125 million from lead pipe replacement funding, and a proposed House budget would shrink the main federal water infrastructure program by about a quarter.

Then came PFAS

Lead is the old threat. PFAS is the new one. These “forever chemicals,” used for decades in nonstick coatings and firefighting foam, do not break down in nature and have turned up in water supplies across the country.

Illinois has now ordered 21 communities to remove PFAS from their drinking water by 2029. The treatment systems are expensive to build and expensive to run. The village of Dupo, population around 4,000, expects at least $5 million in costs. East Alton estimates $12 million and has already been denied state help once. One local official put the ongoing cost at an extra dollar per thousand gallons just to operate the new treatment, an expense he said nobody is helping these communities pay.

Twenty-one towns are on the list today. As testing spreads and standards tighten, more will join it.

Paying for water that never arrives

Old systems don’t just poison water. They lose it. Cracked mains and corroded joints leak treated water into the ground, water the town already paid to pump, treat and pressurize. The suburb of Maywood loses about 38 percent of its water to leaks. Some shrinking communities lose half or more of everything they pump.

Think about what that means for a water bill. When a system loses a third of its water, every customer is paying roughly a third more than they should, just to feed the leaks. The money that could fix the pipes is instead soaking into the dirt around them.

The scale of the national repair job is hard to picture. The EPA’s most recent national needs survey puts the 20-year price tag for drinking water infrastructure at $625 billion, up 32 percent from the survey four years earlier. The need is not shrinking as we wait. It is compounding.

Small systems carry the heaviest load

Here is the pattern underneath all of it. Small water systems, the ones serving a few hundred or a few thousand people, are the rule in America, not the exception. Systems serving fewer than 3,300 people make up 81 percent of all public water systems in the country, yet they account for 93 percent of federal drinking water violations. That is not because small-town operators are careless. Research on national violation trends points to the same causes over and over: smaller customer bases, less revenue, limited access to loans and less money to attract skilled operators.

A small system still has to do everything a big one does. Test the water. File the reports. Employ or contract a state-certified operator. Comply with the lead law, the PFAS orders and whatever rule comes next. The rules scale down to the smallest village. The resources do not.

The result, as one national water reporter recently put it, is that many small systems are charging rates that do not cover the actual cost of providing water, digging themselves a long-term financial hole while a wave of overdue replacements builds in front of them.

What this means here

None of this is a scandal in the usual sense. Nobody stole the money. The pipes simply got old everywhere at once, the rules got stricter, and the funding never caught up. But understanding it matters, because the choices ahead are real. Every small town in Illinois will spend the next twenty years deciding what to replace, what to patch and how much debt to take on, and every one of those decisions shows up on somebody’s water bill.

Next in this series: what happens to the water after it goes down the drain, and why more than 200 Illinois communities still have nowhere safe to send it.

Sources