The Mayor Is Lying About Troy’s Response to the Lead Pipe Crisis

March 29, 2025

On March 27, WAMC’s Samantha Simmons reported a story about Troy’s lead service line replacement efforts wherein Mayor Mantello made several claims about the city’s progress in project administration and implementation. While many of these claims warrant additional scrutiny, the following two are immediately recognizable as outright lies:

“Mantello says Requests for Proposals are out for potential contractors.” (0:44)

The purpose of a Request for Proposals (or RFP) is to require contractors to compete for work so that cities can select the firm offering the best value to taxpayers. The way that Troy accomplishes this is by posting RFPs online and circulating them widely to encourage as much competition as possible. On Troy’s Bid Postings page, we can see that there are no open bid postings at this time for lead service line replacement (or anything else). Troy’s Open Solicitations portal on bidnet relays the exact same information.

The only logical reason why an administration would not advertise an RFP publicly is if they would like to give the work to a particular firm but fear that their offer would be untenable in a competitive bidding process, which is a lot of words to say “corruption.” So long as we can assume that the Mayor is not bragging publicly about engaging in corruption for 13 million dollars of public works contracts, her claim that “Requests for Proposals are out for potential contractors” is a complete fabrication. 

“So far, more than 400 lines have been replaced.” (0:31)

Because Troy’s lead service line inventory is updated daily and fully accessible to the public, there is no guesswork or independent analysis required to fact-check this claim. Since taking office in January 2024, the Mantello administration has completed full or partial service line replacements for almost 260 households, give or take two or three apparent coding errors. We know that the Mantello administration tallies lead service line replacements this way (by household) because they had to announce it explicitly at a City Council meeting last year after we caught them doing Mickey Mouse math the first time around.

Since the Mayor does not say when those 400 lines were replaced, the most generous possible interpretation of this claim is that her tally includes all lead service line replacements performed under previous administrations as well. If we count up every lead service line replacement performed under Mayor Mantello, Mayor Madden, and every single other administration dating back to 1991, the city still falls just short of 400 completed lead service line replacements. You can see this for yourself by looking at the city’s unmodified data in the spreadsheet linked below in columns AJ and AL. 

For almost a year, the Mayor has said that she planned to bond for lead service line replacement in January 2025, which did not happen (and has not happened since). Whenever asked when we can expect an RFP to go out, the Mayor has stated publicly that it was “weeks away”, which also did not happen (and has not happened since). Although most organizations and news outlets would politely describe these kinds of comments as “misstatements” or “inaccuracies”, we feel that elected officials consciously and repeatedly attempting to bend reality with self-serving falsehoods should be called what they are: liars. This would be unacceptable conduct for public officials speaking about any issue, but it is especially abhorrent for a widespread childhood lead poisoning crisis. Troy residents should expect and demand better.