March 16, 2025
The Community Digest is TIMBER’s newsletter on recent news impacting Troy and surrounding communities. This digest is focused entirely on Troy’s lead service line crisis.
Before we dive into that, we first want to share that the Troy Public Library is still accepting applications to fill a vacancy on its Board of Trustees. The appointee will serve from April until September of this year. Troy community members interested in the position can find out more about the vacancy on TPL’s website. The deadline to apply is March 24.
LEAD PIPES AT A GLANCE
Troy replaced only 255 lead service lines in 2024, falling well short of its own target of 400. In August, TIMBER warned that the city was on track to replace “about 250 lead pipes” in 2024. (Kobe!)
Since the beginning of 2023, Troy has replaced 365 lead pipes. The city estimates that it will ultimately need to replace approximately 3,000 pipes. We believe the real number is at least 4,000.
Troy populated the first 50% of its service line inventory in 2023. Progress stalled in 2024, with the city ending the year having completed only 51.4% of the inventory. That figure has climbed quite a lot in the first few months of 2025: the inventory is now 57.3% complete.
Troy was unprepared to submit an application for Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding for lead service line replacements in 2024. Neglecting to submit a BIL-LSLR application last year meant that Troy lost out on millions of dollars of free aid.
In 2025, the city will likely begin its lead service line replacement program late because it has failed to solicit contractor proposals or bond for liquidity despite explicit and repeated promises from the mayor.
To comply with an EPA administrative order, Troy is gradually treating its water with orthophosphate as a corrosion control measure. Troy’s new corrosion control system is expected to be operational later this year. If successful, the lead levels detected in Troy’s water samples should dramatically improve in the second half of the year. This would not solve Troy’s lead problem, but it would substantially mitigate its impact on public health.
BACKGROUND
Beginning in the late 19th century and ending in the mid-20th century, many homes were connected to city water mains using lead service lines. Although lead service line installation was formally prohibited in 1986, many Troy buildings are still served by the pipes laid in the ground when the building was first constructed. Since so many of the buildings in Troy were constructed before it was prohibited, a lot of residents are drinking water after it travels through a lead pipe. This is not the only cause of lead poisoning in Troy, but it is a major one that is entirely solvable with time, resources, and attention.
When we track Troy’s progress in addressing the lead service line crisis, we primarily focus on three metrics:
The completeness of the city’s service line inventory;
The number of lead (and galvanized) service lines that have been replaced; and,
The amount of lead detected during routine drinking water sampling.
The only way to permanently eliminate lead from our drinking water is by removing the lead service lines. We can do that by first identifying (inventorying) the lead pipes and then replacing them once we know where they are. While that’s happening, we can also mitigate the amount of lead that comes out of your faucet with corrosion control treatment at the water plant.
The widespread presence of lead pipes throughout the city is what makes alarming water samples possible, while the absence of effective corrosion control treatment at our water plant is what makes the lead levels detected in our water now especially bad.
THE INVENTORY
Every community water system in the country is required to build and maintain a complete inventory of all its service lines. A good inventory helps us keep track of what pipes need to be replaced, but it also directly impacts how much grant funding the city is eligible for. State and federal financial support for local lead service line replacement is not unlimited: scarcity forces New York State to rationalize how it allocates its funding to the many local governments around the state with lead pipe problems based on need and preparedness. The inventory is a very good tool for analyzing both, which is why its completion should be a major priority. The funding is only available now, so procrastinating on the inevitable just costs us a lot of money while poisoning more people for longer.
Currently, Troy’s inventory shows that the city has 13,438 service line connections. When inventorying a service line connection, the city must account for the public section (the portion of the pipe running from the water main to the curb stop) and the private section (the portion running from the curb stop to your home) separately. This is because they are often made of different materials. Every segment of the service line must be logged as one of only four things: lead, non-lead, galvanized requiring replacement (GRR), or unknown.
The city makes progress on its inventory every single time that either a public or private segment of a service line is switched from “unknown” to one of the other three categories. We can calculate the completeness of Troy’s inventory simply by first adding up the segments of pipes that aren’t currently unknown and then dividing that by the number of private segments plus the number of public segments.
Troy completed the first 50% of its service line inventory over the course of 2023.
Troy ended 2024 with a lead service line inventory that was 51.4% complete.
As of March 11, 2025, the inventory is 57.3% complete. Most of the inventory’s progress since Mayor Mantello took office has occurred in the last few months.
As of this moment, the city has identified nearly 1,800 service lines that still require replacement. It is likely that there are several thousand more pipes that the city does not yet know about that will also need to be replaced.
REPLACEMENTS
Since 2023, Mayor Mantello has repeatedly promised to replace all of Troy’s lead service lines by December 2027. The city estimates that this will require about 3,000 lead service line replacements. We believe that this estimate is too low. Our main concern is that the city arrived at its 3,000 lead pipe estimate by looking at the 1,500 or so lead pipes in the inventory when it was roughly 50% complete and doubling that to get to 100%. Since the city’s housing stock constructed after 1960 was overwhelmingly included in the first 50% of the city’s inventory, we believe that the city is getting an optimistic estimate by extrapolating from a generous sample. We will not know for certain how many lead pipes will need to be replaced until the inventory is complete, but we expect it to be at least 4,000 (if not many more).
After accounting for administrative hurdles and financial constraints, environmental experts and community advocates recommended that the city replace 800 lead pipes in 2024. After consulting with seemingly nobody, the Mantello administration instead settled on a target of 400 lead pipe replacements for the year. The inventory reflects that the city replaced only 255 service lines in 2024, which means that the Mantello administration set a very modest goal for itself and then got about two-thirds of the way to achieving it.
Of the 255 service lines replaced in 2024, 220 (86%) belonged to homes in council districts currently represented by Republicans. We are hopeful that this lopsidedness is merely a coincidence. Coincidences like this can happen when sample sizes are very tiny, as in this instance. If these numbers hold as the replacement program scales up in 2025, however, we would infer that the administration was determining who gets lead poisoning based on its electoral strategy. Since that would be both revolting and effortlessly observable, we hope to see replacements distributed more evenly throughout Troy over the next eight months.
Since 2023, Troy has replaced 365 service lines. If there are 4,000 service lines throughout the city requiring replacement, this would mean that we are almost a tenth of the way finished.
The Mantello administration plans to make up for lost time by replacing 1,000 service lines in 2025. In order to do that, the city will first need to hire a contractor. After a coalition of unions, legislators, advocates, community members, and state agencies joined forces to explain how to make that happen, the mayor concretely promised to put out a request for proposals (RFP) in December 2024. As of today, the RFP for lead service line replacement work still has not gone out, so that work cannot begin despite the idyllic weather.
The city also has not bonded for lead service line replacement despite direct, personalized, and public clarity about its legality from both the Office of the State Comptroller and the Office of the Attorney General. This was ostensibly the last hurdle preventing Troy from starting large-scale lead service line replacement.
To replace 1,000 service lines in 2025, the Mantello administration needs to hire contractors immediately so that the work is spread out across the entire construction season. If 1,000 service lines are dug out and replaced in only three or four months due to financial mismanagement or administrative dysfunction, the disruption to our roadways and water system will be biblical. Recall how challenging it was to get around South Troy last year and try to imagine if it was somehow four times worse than that. That is what a truncated timeline for 1,000 pipe replacements would look like.
We encourage supporters of TIMBER’s work who have not donated recently to please consider doing so.
