The call from the pediatrician’s office came to Christine Grice’s phone on the way home.
At a regular, six-month checkup in November 2023, her infant son had been tested for lead — a small pinprick on his big toe.
The test results indicated a high level of lead in his bloodstream and medical staff, Grice said, told her they would need to do a blood draw at an area hospital.
And when those test results came back, the reported lead levels were even higher, Grice said in an interview with WGLT. That prompted a response from the state and local public health departments that eventually led to the revelation that water to the LeRoy home Grice and her husband moved to in 2022 flowed through a lead pipe.
“I wholeheartedly believe that my son was exposed to the lead because of me — when I was pregnant and cooking and drinking the water. I think that played a big part in it, unfortunately,” Grice said. “It really just pisses me off. I was trying to do everything right for my son, and this is where we got.”
In 2021, Illinois became the third state in the nation to mandate the removal of lead drinking water pipes, an ambitious piece of legislation aimed at reducing the public health threat that lead exposure poses not only to adults, but children in particular.
Compliance with that law, however, requires municipalities to accurately identify all lead service lines in their area and oversee their removal. It’s that former part that left the Grices more than frustrated with their city, they said in interviews, as they were initially assured their home wasn’t serviced by lead piping at all and felt belittled when they insisted otherwise.
“I was expecting them to be like, ‘OK, well, let's try to figure this out.’ And no, we just got slammed like, ‘No, it's not our issue,’” Christine Grice said.
And it’s that second part — the funding — that frustrates LeRoy’s water superintendent, Perry Mayer, who said the community of about 3,500 doesn’t have the financial resources to keep pace with other municipalities in lead service removal.
“Five or six is about all we can budget a year. And according to the [I]EPA, that's fine, because they say that you only have to change out 7% of your total every year for the next 10 years,” Mayer said. “But you have kids or the elderly that are the more at-risk population and they’re like, ‘Where am I on the priority list?’”
The unfunded mandate is an important endeavor for public health in the wake of high-profile water contamination seen in places like Flint, Michigan, Galesburg and Chicago, but its completing the task will require the political willpower of municipalities to figure out how to fund that work.
Concerns in LeRoy
The Grices have not been the only family to have a child exposed to lead in LeRoy.
Gigi Jagger and her family also moved to LeRoy in 2022 and, like the Grices, bought a home built in the early 1970s.
They did a bathroom remodel and replaced pipes that were clearly in need of replacing, but even weeks after that replacement, Jagger said, the water would still run brown at times. When they spoke with the city about the recurring issue, Jagger said they were encouraged to run the water for 20 minutes at a time before using it. Even so, something remained “off” about the water, so Jagger said they tested it and found higher-than-expected levels of lead.
“I immediately was upset, calling my son’s doctor, taking him in to get tested. He got tested and had lead in his system, but it wasn’t bad enough to where they had to report him to the health department,” Jagger said in an interview.
In children, lead exposure can lead to neurological defects or stunt development, though those effects may not be seen for years. Organ and nervous system damage is possible, too, at high rates of lead poisoning.
At a certain level, state law requires that state and local health departments are notified of a child whose lead test results are high; those departments then offer case management services to families for free. The Grices received this kind of assistance, which included surface testing of different sites in their home, since paint is statistically the most common form of lead exposure for children. [Christine said all of the health department surface tests came back negative for lead.]
In both the Grices and Jaggers’ cases, they said their pediatricians told them the same thing: LeRoy was a high-risk area for lead exposure and other families had come in with similar concerns.
That tracks with Illinois Department of Public Health [IDPH] data that includes LeRoy — among several other communities in McLean County — as a “high-risk” ZIP code for pediatric lead exposure.
A handful of factors are used to calculate that designation, including:
- At least five children testing at high levels of lead
- The number of pre-1978 housing units in an area [indicating a greater likelihood of lead paint exposure]
- Lead hazards that can include lead drinking water pipes.
Using this framework, IDPH has identified nearly 1,200 high-risk ZIP codes across the state, underscoring the recent urgency state and federal governments have shown toward lead service line removal and allocating funding opportunities for it.
Since Illinois’ Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act went into effect in 2022, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency [IEPA] created a Lead Service Line Inventory Grant to give municipalities or water districts funding to help identify such lines for future removal. Grants ranged from $20,000 to $50,000 a piece in 2023; more than $107 million was expected to be distributed in 2024.
Additionally, Gov. JB Pritzker’s 2025 budget set aside some $20 million for grants related to municipal planning for lead service line removal.
LeRoy, however, has not received any such grant funding, though it is now in the process of seeking it.
Looking for help
City administrator Dave Jenkins said the city, thus far, has "been unsuccessful in finding any grants to assist our efforts to replace lead service lines primarily because of the city median household income level," but hopes to receive loans through the IPEA.
Water superintendent Mayer said the primary grant is based on median income level and LeRoy’s is higher than the state average, making it ineligible for that particular grant, which the IPEA confirmed. Jenkins added the city would seek state loans instead.
“I just find it aggravating that these bigger towns… can be below the median income level and get millions of dollars and little old LeRoy must be this rich little town, but yet we can’t afford to replace these [pipes],” Mayer. “The [I]EPA says the city is responsible to see that the line is replaced. They don’t tell you how to fund it.”
Mayer said he is well-aware of “some customers that are really upset” by the situation, but added he feels hamstrung.
“You’ve got other towns that are just coming right out in public and putting out great big ads and saying, ‘We’re paying for the whole thing — customer’s not paying a dime.’ So that puts us in a bind because our customers are going, ‘Well, Bloomington is paying for all of theirs. Why aren’t we?’ Well, we don’t have the budget for it,” he said.
Municipal approaches to funding lead service line removal have varied, with some reallocating pre-existing funding [Normal] and others raising water service rates [Bloomington] to cover the costs.
The total cost to remove LeRoy’s remaining 56 lead service lines, Mayer said, is $974,600. Jenkins said the remaining cost LeRoy needs, since some lines have been removed already, is around $750,000. He added that, for homeowners so far, the city has covered the cost to replace service lines in their entirety.
At the current rate of five-to-six removals a year, Mayer said the city will complete the project in about 10 years, which is on-track with IEPA-set deadlines, but still not quick enough for homeowners who want their lead infrastructure gone quickly.
The hope is that state funding will expedite that work, though because the city must seek loans, it must also plan a way of repaying that funding.
“I just want people to know that we're constantly working on this to get in full compliance with everything,” he said. “We're not sitting on our hands waiting around for the money to come in so that somebody can do it for us. We're doing everything that we can to make things better as fast as possible — it’s just not something that gets fixed overnight.”
Unknown hazards
Part of the Grices’ frustration, in particular, was that their lead service line was unknown — not only to them, but also to the city.
In emails shared with WGLT, the Grices expressed frustration to Mayer directly about the recurring lead in the water, but were told there was “no lead line, no lead.”
Other correspondences indicated some local government officials felt the Grices were being “dramatic” about the situation.
“That's what I struggle with: OK, I'm doing this and I'm being vocal because my son has had this issue. He was testing high and you just want us to sit here. Or, ‘Oh, you're just part of the drama club. You're just being dramatic.’ No, I'm not being dramatic. This is a huge issue. Like how can you sit there and act like that?” Christine Grice said.
But when the city dug in the Grices' yard earlier this year, a lead service line to their house was unearthed. It had not previously been recorded in inventories of lead piping in the municipality, which had been built off survey data from 2003 and water meter swap-outs over the past decade or so.
Mayer called it a sort of “piecemeal” approach of information gathering, which generally speaking can be a challenge in some communities due to record keeping — or a lack thereof.
A new survey was sent to residents earlier this year, Mayer said, as part of the city’s compliance efforts with the Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act. The legislation required all municipalities and water districts to submit a detailed report of service lines and their composition material by April 15.
Anyone with a lead service line was required to be notified within 30 days of inventory completion about the presence of the lead pipe and its corresponding health concerns, according to IEPA documentation.
Additionally, the city’s lead testing increased over the past couple of years, Mayer said, as the state modified the sample size from which it needed to collect tests for lead.
In a statement, the IEPA said a 211-person increase in the city’s population in 2021, plus water treatment plant improvements, required the city to begin testing 40 samples every six months, a change from 10 samples every three years. Mayer said the subsequent lead results were high enough to result in a visit from the IEPA to determine what was going wrong.
Mayer maintained then, as he does now, the problem lies not with the city, but the state.
“They mandated where we had to take them [samples] from, and they mandated how we had to take them and they put us in this little, tiny window and expected us to fit in there — and we didn't,” he said. “We only have 56 places that have lead lines, or supposed lead lines, but because we’re putting it out to the whole town, everybody thinks they have a lead line. Everybody thinks there’s lead in the water.”
For people like the Grices, the issue is less about who or what is to blame and more about who will solve the issue and when [though their service line was replaced already].
“Everyone is pointing fingers, but nobody is, like, dropping the hammer on anybody to get any results on anything,” Jason Grice said. “So we’re just stuck in this situation.”
Finding the money
While a significant amount of funding has already been allocated by the state and federal governments to grants and loans aimed at helping water districts and municipalities rid themselves of lead infrastructure, it’s possible that other options could be on the table later, said Illinois Environmental Council executive director Jen Walling.
“This does need to be replaced and we’ve told municipalities they need to do it. We’ve done it in a way that has a lot of flexibility for them to do financing, but we haven’t given them the money,” Walling said. “We’re working on federal money and there’s been a bunch already, but we need more — and we may just need a more statewide option.”
Walling, whose organization advocates for environmental public policy, said it’s possible the state could look at charging Illinoisans a small fee to help everyone cover the cost of lead service line removal. Already, municipalities and water districts handle their funding in diverse ways, with some communities maintaining low water rates and others raising or using water rates to help source funding for things like pensions.
As these entities prepare for widespread lead line removal, Walling said costs will likely vary from community to community as well.
“My ideal way to pay for it is a small statewide water fee, or a small statewide fee, because I think that that would create something, especially with bonding, that could do this work really quickly. It's a challenge, it's going to be expensive, but I think it's really important work that is going to be important for more than just just public health,” Walling said.
'Not going to make everybody happy'
As the head of a two-person water department, Mayer said he’s more than familiar with the way some residents feel, but added the LeRoy department is working alongside the IEPA in multiple ways to maintain compliance.
In late 2023, LeRoy entered into a compliance agreement with the IEPA to get too-high chlorine levels down and correct some lead and copper pipe sampling failures. In a statement to WGLT, IPEA noted the city had complied with the terms of the agreement and, following one last test submittal in October, would complete it this year.
“There's been some talk that people think that we aren't taking this serious — I guess would be the mildest way to put that — which is not true,” he said. “The city is doing everything in its power, as fast as it can, to make things the way everybody would like to see them.”
Mayer said there is a priority list in place to address the existing 56 lead service lines based upon the highest-risk populations in the city, but added the existence of that list “is not going to make everybody happy.”
For some residents — like the Grices — the hope is that the removal process could be expedited to reflect homeowner concerns about lead exposure. Jason Grice said after their situation had become more publicized, another city resident told him she had had issues for a couple of years and just recently got her service lines replaced.
Speaking generally, Jason Grice said he hoped some city government leaders would “stop seeing the interaction with the public as a confrontation.”
“We need answers, we need action, and you need to tell us what those answers and actions are,” he said.
Capitol News Illinois contributed reporting.
