MILWAUKEE – The Milwaukee Common Council approved an ordinance removing the cost to homeowners to have their lead service lines replaced. This was one of a number of items approved on a busy docket for the Council on Tuesday, December 12.
The holiday gift to homeowners: the end of a $1600 charge that the city had collected when replacing the portion of the lead service lines that lead directly to the house on private property, with the goal being to reduce a barrier that residents faced to getting their lead lines replaced.
This is welcome news for Deanna Branch, an advocate for the Coalition on Lead Emergency and the author of “The Lead-Free Superhero,” a children’s book about her son’s experiences with lead poisoning.
“Seeing how things are progressing quickly is giving me hope,” Branch said.
Branch said that she wasn’t able to get her service lines replaced after her son Aidan was hospitalized because she was a renter, another barrier that residents may face. She said there was no time to begin that process because Child Protective Services wouldn’t let her take her son back to that house.
“After hearing that I initially just broke my lease and started living with family, lived in a shelter. I had to get my child out of that situation,” she said. “It turned into a whole legal battle of breaking my lease and having to find housing. It became a nightmare for me and my family.”
Branch said she still distrusts the pipes even today, continuing to use a water filtration system.
The cost of the service lines will be paid by the city up-front, with funding coming from federal dollars already earmarked for the city to work on lead mitigation that are coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Branch said that despite this momentum and progress, there are still new challenges that residents and advocates are facing, including the closure of the North Shore Pediatrics clinic near 29th and Clarke, in an area she said has high lead levels in the population.
“That clinic was the go-to source for parents in our network to go when they felt like their child wasn’t being lead tested or being helped,” Branch said “The doctors there were great, and they’re closing down the only clinic in our community that was actually helping reduce the lead levels in the community.”
The new ordinance will go into effect in summer 2024. If you’re worried about whether your house has lead service lines, the city keeps track of which properties have them in an online database that can be searched here.
