July 28, 2025

CT Construction Digest Monday July 28, 2025

Meriden wants state guarantee there's funding for bridge projects after FEMA paused money

Mary Ellen Godin

MERIDEN —  The city is seeking confirmation from the state Federal Emergency Management Agency office that its funding to replace a bridge won't be cancelled. 

"If the grant got cut off, we would have to find additional money to finish Phase I," City Manager Brian Daniels recently told members of the Senior Center Building Committee. "We have sent a letter to FEMA asking them to confirm we are not going to get cancelled."

FEMA closed down its federal funding stream in April leaving the city scrambling to complete the work on two bridges.

"We are halfway through that project," Daniels said. "We have to finish that bridge replacement."

The city was set to receive Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities monies for the Cedar Street and Center Street bridges. But FEMA eliminated the BRICs program in April and put several other emergency programs on life support. 

BRIC funding is used in municipalities across Connecticut to mitigate the impact of potentially disastrous floods.

Connecticut and 19 other states are filing suit in federal court over the loss of funding through the program, state Attorney General William Tong said during a recent news conference in Stamford.

“For more than 30 years, states and municipalities have depended on BRIC funding, and Connecticut is no different,” Tong said at the press conference. “And now $84 million has been cut, starting in April.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was recently joined by Meriden Mayor Kevin Scarpati, who said during a Hartford news conference that Meriden had spent the past decade working with federal and state governments to address its flooding issues, primarily with Harbor Brook in the city center.

Scarpati said these projects are making the city more resilient and attractive for people to move to and open businesses who might not have done so before because of the flooding.

"We have a project that is going on right now that is in jeopardy of coming to fruition and finishing," he said at the news conference. "We literally have shovels in the ground today. We have excavators on site for two bridges that need to be torn down, widened and rebuilt."

He said one of those bridges is already down and has to be rebuilt.

"We are relying on funds from FEMA — these funds to continue this project, funds we've already been awarded," Scarpati said.

Scarpati said it's a two-year project that started seven months ago and now told the city has to finish next month. He said if they don't get the FEMA money, the city will have to go to the city's taxpayers to cover the cost of that project and the two or three flood control projects that go with it.

Daniels told building committee members after the recent press conferences that the city is working with contractor LaRosa Construction to ensure money doesn't interfere with finishing Phase I, even if that means putting it into the city's capital improvement budget in the future. Phase I isn't expected to be finished until late 2026, early 2027.

"We're going to have to see how it plays out," Daniels said. "We can't get any more money, we have gotten our entire grant money for the project." 

The city still has a grant application in to the state to pay to deepen and widen the channels but has not learned its status, as of last week.

Eventually, the city hopes to truck the dirt onto 116 Cook Ave. to raise the lot elevation.  A new senior center is planned for the site, but design and construction work can't begin until the channel and dredging work are complete.

The city initially planned to build a new health department with the senior center at 116 Cook Ave., but officials agreed to separate the two projects and renovate the existing health department at 165 Miller St.

About 20 prospective architectural bidders recently walked through the two-story Health and Human Services building to assess the project. The city will select an architect by Aug. 15 to recommend to the state. The chosen architect will work on design plans that will accompany a Community Investment Fund grant application before a Dec. 5 deadline.

The Board of Education intends to relocate its Success Academy alternative high school program on the second level which would translate into a 70% reimbursement on that part of the overall project.

Health and Human Services Director Lea Crown drafted a public survey asking residents to describe their expectations for a health department building. 

The survey questions were based on specifics included in the grant application, Crown said. They will be distributed by staff and posted on the city's website and other places in early August. 

Crown said that unlike the Senior Center, where people gather for long periods of time, the health department consists of offices, conference space and a clinic.


$20M Waterbury train station renovation will begin in September, DOT says

Paul Hughes

WATERBURY — Work is expected to start in September on a $20 million renovation of the Waterbury train station, including construction of a new indoor waiting room in the former Republican-American building next to the Metro-North Railroad platform.

The renovations to Waterbury Union Station are part of a larger project the state Department of Transportation is undertaking to upgrade all six train stations along the 28.5-mile Waterbury branch of Metro-North's New Haven Line.

The work at Waterbury Union Station includes replacement of the existing platform, construction of a new indoor waiting room on the south end of the former Republican-American building, and installation of a new ticket kiosk, upgraded security systems and elevator. The project budget is $20 million.

DOT spokesman Josh Morgan said Friday construction of the waiting room is anticipated to kick off the project in September, and the platform work is expected to start by the end of the year.

The platform replacement is expected to temporarily halt train service. Morgan said substitute bus service will be provided during this period of disruption. He said DOT officials anticipate bus service starting in the spring of 2026, but the exact dates and duration have not been set at this time.

The new waiting room will be approximately 1,570 square feet and feature 21 seats, restrooms, water fountains and customer information displays. A staircase will lead to private offices for Metro-North and DOT. A new elevator will be installed to connect all three floors, but will not be accessible to the public. The basement will house dedicated spaces for elevator control, and DOT and Metro-North telecommunications and security equipment.

Mayor Paul K. Pernerewski Jr. highlighted the coming start of the Waterbury Union Station project in a Facebook post Wednesday.

"This project isn't just about trains. It is part of a broader vision for a more walkable, vibrant downtown and a stronger, more connected Waterbury," he wrote. "The work happening at the station is a symbol of the city's momentum and a clear sign of what's ahead."

Built in 1909, Waterbury Union Station was designed by famed New York City architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. The Pape family, who took ownership of the Republican-American in 1901, bought the building in 1952 and converted it into the newspaper's headquarters.

The former Republican-American building is now being marketed for sale and redevelopment by owner American-Republican Inc. The family-owned company sold the Republican-American newspaper to Hearst Connecticut Media Group in February. HCMG had been leasing space in the building, but the lease ended this month after American-Republican Inc. decided to terminate the lease in May.

Morgan said the September start date of the Waterbury Union Station project is independent of the Republican-American’s recent departure from the site.

The Waterbury branch line carried 269,352 passengers last year, up from 257,076 in 2023, according to DOT figures.

Ridership had declined during the COVID-19 pandemic but has rebounded in recent years. It fell from 243,671 in 2019 to 108,199 in 2020, and then started climb back to 127,378 in 2021 and 197,392 in 2022.


CT attempts to buckle down on overregulation with environmental permitting reform; some argue more is needed

Andrew Larson

Unpredictable, inconsistent and unfriendly are some of the more benign words that business leaders and credit rating agencies have used to describe Connecticut’s Byzantine regulatory approach.
Connecticut consistently ranks poorly in national business climate studies when it comes to the cost of doing business and the complexity of its regulations.

In recent years, investment bank UBS and Regulatory Research Associates, a unit of Standard & Poor’s, have placed Connecticut into their bottom-tier utilities regulatory environment rankings.

Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) is facing fierce criticism from utility companies Eversource Energy and Avangrid Inc. for recent decisions that have roiled investors and crippled the utilities’ ability to recover capital expenses.

In June, Moody’s Ratings downgraded the credit ratings of Eversource subsidiary Connecticut Light and Power Co., calling Connecticut “the least credit supportive utility regulatory environment in the U.S.”

Meantime, CNBC’s 2025 “America’s Top States for Business” index recently ranked Connecticut 28th overall, an improvement from No. 32 in 2024. However, the state ranked worse — No. 32 — in the business-friendliness category.

According to a 2021 report by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, greater regulatory burdens are correlated with regressive effects: increased poverty rates, higher levels of income inequality, reduced entrepreneurship and increased consumer prices.

The report cites research that found, between 1997 and 2015, the effective federal regulatory burden in Connecticut increased by 56%, contributing to a 14% rise in the state’s poverty rate.

Also, between 1999 and 2015, industry-level federal regulatory restrictions increased by an average of 3.78%, according to the study. Based on that average, Connecticut lost about 110 small firms and 1,541 jobs annually as a result of regulatory hurdles, the researchers found.

Cumbersome regulations have been accumulating for decades, not just in Connecticut, but across the country.

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s crusade for stronger consumer protections in the 1960s and 1970s led to a wave of landmark regulations, including in Connecticut, where the 91-year-old lawyer and political activist resides.

But the robust regulatory environment that enhanced consumer protections also contributed, in the eyes of critics, to an overabundance of red tape that some view as burdensome for businesses and the economy.

The regulatory environment covers everything from labor and health insurance mandates to the lawsuit/liability climate, industry oversight, permitting and overall bureaucracy.

Now, many business leaders and some state officials — including Democrats — believe the pendulum has swung too far in favor of government regulations, and they are seeking to undo some of the bureaucratic constraints.

“I think there was a period of time where we promulgated a lot of regulations in order to protect the environment, protect health, protect lots of different things,” said Christopher Davis, vice president of public policy at the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA). “I think that over time, those things sort of build up and calcify. … Sometimes they’re redundant, sometimes they’re unnecessary, sometimes they’re no longer relevant. And it takes a concerted effort to look back and say which things are still relevant, and which ones are not.”

The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) is one of the most notorious regulatory agencies in Connecticut — it oversees 125 state and federally mandated permitting processes.

The morass of red tape has created an opportunity for improvement, which DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes has made a hallmark of her tenure at the agency.

“I hear just as much from developers as from our own staff about how important it is to make these processes work better for our goals,” Dykes said. “Because when permitting works effectively, it means that someone who wants to invest in the state is getting an answer faster with less friction.”

When Gov. Ned Lamont tapped Dykes to lead the agency in 2019, he asked her to make DEEP more efficient, she recalled.

“He said he’d been on the campaign trail … and he heard from lots of businesses that DEEP was a black box and that it took too long to get answers, that it was really difficult to know how to navigate the process,” Dykes said.

“I think some of that was a bit misplaced,” she continued, “but we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.”

Dykes launched an effort to streamline DEEP’s permitting processes through an initiative she calls 20BY26. The project outlines 20 performance goals that DEEP plans to achieve by the end of 2026, with the aim of improving the transparency, efficiency and predictability of its permitting.

Uniquely complex

As a densely populated state with an industrial legacy, Connecticut has particularly complex permitting needs, Dykes said.

“As we think about new infrastructure projects, new developments coming into the state, folks are often working with parcels that have been previously disturbed,” she said. “We may be looking at a brownfield. We may be looking at a location that’s close to a lot of population centers.”

Those factors not only make permitting processes more involved, but underscore their necessity to “accommodate the next generation of investments while also protecting human health and the environment,” she explained.

A key component of 20BY26 was establishing a business concierge service, or a “one-stop shop” for applicants, stakeholders, municipalities and developers to obtain information and status updates about applications.

The concierge service debuted in 2021.

“That provides a lot of benefits for the applicant in terms of having clear communication and someone that they can call all the way through the process to help them navigate the different programs within the department,” Dykes said. “It also provides a lot of benefits to our DEEP staff, so that our technical staff, our permit writers, can conserve and focus their time on processing permits.”

During an internal review, DEEP discovered that about 40% of staff time was being taken up with back-and-forth correspondence with applicants about their incomplete applications, Dykes said.

DEEP’s reforms also involve guiding developers toward properties where they will face the least amount of environmental hurdles. The agency has created an online database of endangered and threatened species, which developers can use to find out if a property will trigger an endangered species review, Dykes said.

Also, the newly created Community Renewable Energy Siting Tool helps solar developers find the least environmentally conflicted sites for developing solar facilities.

Further, DEEP has undertaken a wide-ranging review of its 125 permitting processes to determine the reasonable amount of time that it should take to issue a decision for an application for each one.

“I’m really proud to say that over the several years that we’ve been implementing this, we are achieving about 90% on-time completion rates for the 55 different types of permits that we expect to take about three months,” Dykes said.

She said DEEP has made adjustments by repositioning staff resources to where they’re most needed.

In addition to reducing timeframes, DEEP obtained legislative approval during the recent session to consolidate multiple permit types into a single general permit category, simplifying the review process for certain regulated activities.

For example, activities under individual permits from DEEP’s pesticides division were combined into one general permit.

“It’s obviously a faster process for applicants, but also it helps conserve our staff time and our staff resources,” Dykes said.

Transfer Act sunset

The crown jewel of the 20BY26 initiative was developing new and less burdensome regulations to replace the antiquated and unpopular Transfer Act.

The Transfer Act requires property owners to conduct site-wide environmental investigations and, if necessary, remediation whenever certain types of properties are sold. The system has been criticized for being overly broad, costly and a major obstacle to real estate transactions and economic development, especially brownfield sites.

The Transfer Act will be fully phased out on March 1, 2026, and replaced by new release-based cleanup regulations, which trigger cleanup requirements by the actual discovery of a hazardous release — not by the transfer of a property or business.

The new system, which has been in the works for years and was green-lighted by the legislature’s Regulations Review Committee in April, is expected to reduce costs, speed up cleanups, and encourage redevelopment of blighted or underused properties.

Connecticut was one of just two states operating under the Transfer Act system.

Dykes said she hopes the changes will help shift people’s perceptions about Connecticut.

“I feel like Connecticut often has this problem of we’re just kind of negative on ourselves,” Dykes said. “We don’t tell our story very well, and focus on those negatives. … We’ve been making these improvements. Now we need to get the perception to change as a result of it.”

CBIA applauded DEEP’s efforts to optimize its permitting processes, but says disparities between the ease of permitting in other states and Connecticut remain.

“When we talk to employers who have operations in multiple states, there are certain permits, environmental permits, that are more difficult in Connecticut, but also in terms of the clarity around permits,” said Dustin Nord, director of the CBIA Foundation for Economic Growth and Opportunity, the business group’s nonprofit think tank. “To the credit of the state, I think that this has been a point of focus for DEEP in terms of making certain permit timelines more clear and trying to speed up permitting overall. But it’s still a challenge for a lot of businesses.”

Some argue that regulatory reforms within DEEP need to go beyond just speeding up permitting processes.

She said lawmakers must also have greater oversight over how agencies are implementing public policy.

“Without the proper accountability, PURA and DEEP have been able to implement flawed policies, mostly expensive and stringent green energy mandates, which have driven up energy costs for ratepayers,” Liebau said, noting that Connecticut has among the highest electricity prices in the country.

“… Regulators justify their existence by regulating,” she added. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

State lawmakers did consider a bill this past legislative session that would have mandated closer scrutiny on existing regulations.

The bill passed the state House of Representatives, but was not voted on by the Senate.

The CBIA said it will lobby for the legislation again in 2026.

More to be done

While Connecticut is working to improve its environmental permitting processes, the reality is, the state’s broader regulatory apparatus affects a much wider range of industries, and impacts businesses and the economy in many ways.

The state, for example, has been known to have one of highest number of health benefit mandates that insurance companies are required to cover, which increases the costs of individual and employer-sponsored health insurance — a major issue for small and midsize companies.

A 2014 study by UConn Health’s Center for Public Health and Health Policy noted Connecticut had 46 health benefit mandates at the time, among the most in the nation. A more recent analysis by the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Research outlined more than 70 health benefit mandates that were in effect as of Jan. 1, 2024.

The report noted recently adopted coverage mandates for infertility diagnosis and treatment, and in-home hospice services.

There is also an annual fight in the legislature over new labor mandates. In recent years, Connecticut has adopted a Paid Family and Medical Leave program and expanded its paid sick leave law. Lawmakers have also expanded prevailing wage requirements and fought for things like eliminating the tipped minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits to striking workers.

CBIA has identified areas in which Connecticut can improve the regulatory strain on businesses, particularly in the manufacturing and construction industries.

“Manufacturers, especially, face a heavy burden on regulations, whether it be environmental regulations or labor mandates, things that really make it difficult for them to compete, both nationally and, quite frankly, for a lot of these manufacturers, internationally,” Davis said.

The CATO Institute, a conservative think tank, consistently ranks Connecticut among the worst states in the country for land-use regulations.

Because zoning requirements can vary widely from one town to another, existing Connecticut businesses face obstacles even when expanding within the state, Davis said.

However, efforts by the General Assembly to ease land-use regulations in local communities often face political backlash.

In June, Lamont vetoed House Bill 5002, a major piece of legislation that aimed to address the state’s ongoing housing shortage. The bill would have required towns to plan and zone for a set number of affordable housing units, using a “fair share” formula to distribute housing needs across municipalities.

Lamont, a Democrat, broke with his own party in quashing the legislation, citing opposition centered around fears that the bill would undermine local zoning control.

“I think sort of a comprehensive attempt to look at regulatory structure would be immensely beneficial, and it could help make us much more competitive,” Carstensen said. “… And you’ve got to do this at the granular level. You got to do it, look at each of these things closely, and you have to do it all the time.”

HBJ Staff Writer Michael Juliano contributed to this story.


Coming to a CT suburb: 440 housing units, shopping plaza, hotel. What to know.

Don Stacom 

Contractors are in the late stages of building the biggest mixed-use development in the town’s history, which is bringing about 140,000 square feet of new retail, 300 luxury apartments and 140 upscale townhouses to the I-691 and I-84 area.

Stonebridge Crossing is transforming a little more than 100 acres of former farmland, fields and trees in Cheshire into one of Greater Waterbury’s biggest combination commercial and retail developments in decades.

Most of the heavy construction is done for The Shops at Stone Bridge, a shopping center anchored by Whole Foods and expected to include a Barnes & Noble store, T.J. Maxx, Shake Shack and others. Florida-based Regency Centers, a major national retail developer, is heading that project.

Several of the apartment buildings at the Riverpointe apartment complex are completed, the first wave of tenants has begun moving in, and additional units are leasing from $2,100 for studios to as high as $3,600 for three-bedroom units. Fairfield-based Eastpointe LLC is the developer.

And as of midweek, 108 of the townhouses and carriage homes at the Reserve at Stonebridge Crossing have been sold.

“We’re crushing it. We’ll probably be sold out by the end of this year or early in the first quarter of next year,” said Matthew Gilchrist, president of EG Home, which is building the townhouses that start at $494,000 and the carriage homes that begin at $669,000.

Still to come is a four-story, 117-room Homewood Suites that’s planned on about 4 acres of the site.

At a time when the nation’s bricks-and-mortar retail segment is largely stagnant or contracting, the prospect of an all-new shopping plaza might seem unlikely.

But Assistant Town Manager Andrew Martelli noted that the plaza and its components are significantly smaller than the big box stores and malls that were popular decades ago.

“The retail market was underserved here; Cheshire hasn’t built a retail shopping area since the 1970s. And the biggest building here is going to be 40,000 square feet. Big boxes aren’t the wave of the future,” he said Thursday. “Even the Barnes & Noble here will be 18,000.”

Whole Foods has a regional distribution center in Cheshire, and its new retail outlet will be its only store between Waterbury and Milford, Martelli said.

Decades ago, Cheshire and Southington were trying to build the Apple Valley Mall around the location of Stone Bridge Crossing. That deal never came together, and was abandoned after Waterbury put up its Brass Mill Center. As recently as 10 years ago, the Tanger chain was eying  Cheshire for an outlet store center of more than 500,000 square feet, but scrapped that plan in favor of building at Foxwoods.

Some longtime Cheshire residents are pleased with how it all turned out, since malls and numerous outlet centers have been suffering financially. The Stonebridge Crossing project is a bit closer in nature to The Shops at Evergreen Walk, an upscale retail center in South Windsor where developers have been adding apartments within walking distance.

Gilchrist said the Stonebridge Crossing model’s commercial element offers another feature to residential buyers.

“Cheshire is a desirable town and it’s an easy commute with future access to great retail,” he said.

The company’s marketing pitch emphasizes that, saying “A convenient location offers endless restaurants nearby, myriad shopping options and easy commuting routes.”

Developers are setting aside some acreage as open space, and will be putting in community walking paths.

Gilchrist said most townhouses there sell for under $600,000, while the carriage homes go for $775,000 to $850,000. Solar panels installed in roofs will help constrain the homeower association fees, he said. Buyers range from empty-nesters to young professionals, according to the company.

“The secret for us is we’re production builders You do well what you do often; we have extremely well thought-out homes and we build them over and over agin,” he said. “But we never build the same house twice: Buyers choose their cabinets, their floors, their doorknobs.”


CT has as many as 8,000 lead service lines used in public water systems. In a wealthy town too.

Andrew Brown | CT Mirror, Renata DaouShahrzad Rasekh 

When Jarvis Parker was looking to buy a house in Waterbury in late 2019, he had several basic criteria.

He wanted to avoid properties with leaking roofs and flooded basements. And he needed a place with enough space for himself, his daughter and his now 4-year-old grandson.

The modest two-bedroom home that Parker eventually purchased in Waterbury’s East End checked all of those boxes.

Five years later, however, he’s confronting a problem he never saw coming: a potentially toxic water line. Waterbury’s East End

Parker was informed this year that a small pipe known as a service line, which connects his house to the larger water main that runs under the street, could be made of lead.

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The news stunned Parker, a disabled military veteran. He was so concerned about the water line and what it could do to his family’s health that he stopped using the tap water until he could purchase a filter to install on his kitchen sink.

“I got things going on that the doctors can’t even figure out,” Parker said. “And now you tell me that I’ve got bad water, lead water coming in?”

“That right there really scared me,” he added.

Home builders and water utilities were banned in the mid-1980s from using lead plumbing in order to prevent the toxic metal from leaching into tap water and poisoning children and adults.

But as Parker and thousands of people across Connecticut recently learned, there are a significant number of lead service lines installed before 1986 still supplying homes, apartments and other properties in the state.

New data obtained by The Connecticut Mirror shows there could be as many as 8,000 lead service lines still in use in public water systems throughout the state — though that number is likely to change as water utilities continue to inspect basements, unearth pipes and comb through century-old records to verify how much lead remains in the ground.

The data provides the first public look at how many people in Connecticut could be consuming water that travels through lead lines. And it highlights how that aging infrastructure is not distributed equally throughout the state.

A majority of the suspected lead lines are located in lower-income neighborhoods in Bridgeport, Willimantic, Middletown, New London and Waterbury, places that have significant Black and Hispanic populations and are designated by the state as environmental justice communities.

Still, Connecticut’s wealthier suburbs were not spared entirely. More than 1,500 lead lines are also suspected in Greenwich, one of the state’s wealthiest enclaves.

The push to identify lead service lines in Connecticut is the result of a new federal regulation implemented in the aftermath of the Flint water crisis.

That federal rule, which was finalized in late 2024, requires public water utilities across the country — both large and small — to create an inventory of every lead service line in their systems and to replace all of those pipes within the next decade.

The success of that mission, however, could depend on whether the new federal regulation can survive a legal challenge filed by the country’s largest water utility association and possible efforts by President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans to roll back the new rule.

A team of CT Mirror reporters spent more than six months reviewing records, analyzing data, knocking on doors and talking to residents and experts in order to understand the scope of the problem in Connecticut.

While it is not yet known how Connecticut compares to other parts of the country, the numbers clearly show the state has a lot of work to do before all of the aging lead pipes are out of the ground.

The data on the lead lines was contained in hundreds of reports assembled by the state’s water utilities and submitted to the Connecticut Department of Public Health, which regulates drinking water safety.

The properties flagged in that data include a variety of locations that serve young children, who are at the greatest risk of developmental delays from lead poisoning.

The CT Mirror found examples where in-home daycares, a local Boys and Girls Club and older elementary schools were listed among the properties with suspected lead lines. That includes Waterbury’s Margaret M. Generali and Frank Regan elementary schools, which predominantly serve students of color.

The number of lead lines located in minority communities was expected. In fact, officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicted much of the country’s leftover lead plumbing would be found in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, where there is older housing stock and a lack of investment.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal referenced that reality during a press conference in New London last year, arguing that the state and federal government had a “moral obligation” to remove every remaining lead service line.

“There is a real environmental justice issue here. It’s the dark side of this problem,” Blumenthal said while brandishing a lead pipe that had just been pulled from a home. “Much of this danger is determined by the ZIP code where a child lives, and all too often it’s a ZIP code that affects children of color.”

Questions and concerns

The leaders of some of Connecticut’s largest water utilities said that further inspections and investigations will be required before they can get a true count of how many lead service lines remain in their systems.

They also emphasized that they treat their water with what are known as corrosion inhibitors — compounds that help prevent service lines and older plumbing from leaching significant amounts of lead into people’s drinking water.

Even so, several engineers and former regulators interviewed for this story warned that the aging lines pose a risk to people’s health. And they noted that treating the water supply does not guarantee that lead from older service lines won’t end up in the tap water. That’s especially true if the pipes are disturbed during sidewalk and road repairs or when the water in a building isn’t used every day, like in the cases of schools and daycares.

“Corrosion control does help reduce the amount of lead that gets into water. It does not prevent lead from getting into water,” said Elin Betanzo, a professional engineer who helped uncover the Flint water crisis in 2014, which set off a public reckoning over lead contamination in drinking water.

You can’t see, taste or smell lead in water. So the best way to ensure lead service lines aren’t poisoning people, Betanzo said, is to remove the pipes from the ground.

That’s exactly what the new federal drinking water regulations, which were enacted under President Joe Biden’s administration, are expected to do.

The EPA set a deadline late last year that requires any water utility serving at least 25 people to identify and remove every lead service line within the next 10 years — a monumental undertaking that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars.

In the meantime, utilities in Connecticut are sending out notices advising customers with confirmed or suspected lead lines to purchase water filters or to flush their sinks for several minutes before consuming the water.

Those notices have ignited concerns and sowed confusion among some Connecticut residents, like Parker. The Waterbury resident doesn’t understand why he is just learning that the water line for his home is potentially made of lead.

“How can you give certain people lead-filled water and not even come and test the water or do nothing?” Parker asked.

“Who’s checking? Who’s doing rounds and telling us?” he added.

Gaps in communication

The CT Mirror spent months knocking on doors at properties with suspected lead service lines, and the reactions from residents at those locations varied from town to town and street to street.

Some said they’d recently been notified that their service line might need to be replaced, while others said they’ve known for years that their property was supplied by a lead service line.

Bill Flaherty, a Willimantic resident, said he learned about the lead line supplying his house in the southeast end of town after utility crews unearthed it during a water main replacement years ago. But he said utility officials repeatedly told him not to worry about it because the water was being treated to prevent corrosion.

Flaherty said he began to question that, however, after he received a notice in the mail last year informing him that utility officials wanted to replace his service line and the more than 300 other lead lines that remained in town.

Denise Deleon, a 48-year-old Waterbury resident, said she did not receive a notice that her apartment had a suspected lead service line, and she would remember seeing that type of information, since she has a history of dealing with lead exposure.

Years ago, while she was living in New York City, Deleon said her daughter began struggling to concentrate in school, and doctors found elevated levels of lead in her blood. As a result, Deleon said her family moved out of their home in the Bronx to prevent her daughter from being further exposed.

While her daughter is now grown, Deleon was troubled to learn that her community may be home to hundreds of lead water lines. She worries what effect those lines could have on the kids she sees playing in her neighborhood.

“I see a lot of children around here, and I’m concerned because I went through that,” said Deleon. “I think about the children around here and if it’s going to affect them the same way it affected my daughter.”

The gaps in communication surrounding lead service lines did not surprise Arthur Denze Sr., a lifelong Waterbury resident. People in Waterbury, he said, have been dealing with environmental hazards for decades, including concerns about air pollution and other contamination from old industrial sites.

“Years ago, we fought tooth and nail against a lot of companies coming in and polluting the area,” said Denze, 87, head of a council that represents the city’s neighborhood associations. “I used to get out of work at night, and a smokestack was sending plumes up. You could see it all the way down the valley. We probably have some of the highest asthma rates in the state.”

He said the city’s water department could be more proactive in informing residents about lead lines and potential health risks that come along with them.

“That should be discussed within the city. It’s a big item. God knows how much they used [lead lines] years ago,” Denze said.

Bradley Malay, the superintendent of Waterbury’s Water Department, said the city sent out notices to properties with suspected lead lines earlier this year. It also provided information about lead service lines to every water customer in the utility’s most recent water quality report.

Malay emphasized that the city is in the very early stages of identifying potential lead service lines, and he said it was largely relying on historical records, which can sometimes be unreliable or out of date.

The city, Malay added, is currently developing a multi-year plan for how to replace the lead lines it finds, and he said the city intends to prioritize line replacements at schools and similar locations first.

‘What do we have to do to protect ourselves?’

Many of the properties that CT Mirror reporters visited for this story were older, three-story walkup apartments and brick duplexes built in the early 1900s — places where tenants are also at heightened risk of exposure to lead paint.

The EPA published research in recent years that found census tracts where lead service lines are located often have higher percentages of renters, low-income residents and people of color.

Federal officials also produced studies that suggest the owners of rental properties are not always as engaged in the conversations and activities surrounding lead service line replacements, partly because they are not the ones drinking the water.

Aquarion Water Co of CT-Greenwich lead service lines. Source: Department of Public Health, The Lead and Copper Rule Revisions • Map: Renata Daou | CT Mirror

That has not been a problem in Greenwich, however, where most of the suspected lead lines are supplying single-family homes.

The news that hundreds of properties in Greenwich could contain a lead service line drew significant attention in the town, where the median household income is $180,000 per year and more than 60% of the housing is owner-occupied.

Jill Boullin, a homeowner in Greenwich’s southwest corner, said she was surprised by the letter she received from Aquarion Water late last year identifying her home as one the properties with a suspected lead line.

“The next thought was, what do we have to do to protect ourselves?” said Boullin, who has two young children, ages 2 and 5.

Bouillin, who closed on her house in 2024, said she quickly contacted the town’s state-certified laboratory to purchase a water testing kit. But by that point, she said, the lab had already been swamped by other homeowners who were seeking to verify that their water was safe to drink.

“They were overrun with the amount of people calling,” said Bouillin, who is now weighing whether to purchase a water filtration system for her and her family.

Warnings

Many of the lead service lines flagged in Connecticut have been in place for more than a century.

The data collected by water utilities shows many were installed between the 1870s and early 1930s, long before the federal ban on lead plumbing.

Lead was used during that time frame because it’s pliable, which made it ideal for snaking under sidewalks and into basements. It is also durable, which is why the federal government estimates there are still between 6 million to 10 million lead service lines in the ground nationwide.

“Lead service lines and lead bearing plumbing have basically been forced on people,” said Yanna Lambrinidou, a co-founder of the national nonprofit Campaign for Lead Free Water. “People did not go to the store and choose lead service lines.”

“Lead lines in many cases were imposed through local plumbing codes and local laws that made them mandatory, or that made them at least one of the acceptable materials until they were banned,” she added. “People were never really told what the health risks would be in essentially using a lead straw to pull in water to drink and cook with.”

Public health officials and advocates warned for decades about the threat those forgotten lead lines could pose to human health. There were high-profile examples over the years, including in Washington, D.C., that highlighted the damage that can be done to children and communities when lead service lines are allowed to corrode and poison people’s drinking water.

But it wasn’t until after the Flint water crisis that federal officials acted by requiring utilities to identify and replace all of the remaining lead service lines in the country.

Flint was a worst-case scenario. Tens of thousands of children and adults were exposed to high levels of lead after the city switched the source of its drinking water to the Flint River and failed to properly treat the water to prevent corrosion in lead service lines and other plumbing.

In the end, the crisis resulted in a massive spike in the number of children in Flint with elevated levels of lead in their blood.

Betanzo, who now runs a company that consults on drinking water safety, said Flint is a dramatic example, but it is also an indicator of what can happen in any community where lead service lines are allowed to remain in the ground.

“Every time there’s lead in the pipes, there is a risk of lead in the water,” Betanzo said. “There is no need for anyone to drink lead in their water.”

“The issue in Flint is that we used children as our warning system,” she added. “And once you test it in children, it’s too late.”

A quiet threat

Lead is not like iron and zinc, which people need trace amounts of. There is no safe level of lead in the human body.

In adults, lead can affect kidney function and can contribute to cardiovascular problems. And in children, elevated lead levels can cause developmental delays, learning difficulties and behavioral problems.

When someone swallows lead particles, the metal accumulates in the body. It gets stored over time in the blood, bones and organs.

Lead-based paint, which was widely used on homes built before the late 1970s, is the biggest contributor to lead poisoning in children throughout the United States.

More than 66,000 children in Connecticut were tested for lead in 2023, the most recent year that data is available. And more than 1,600 of them had lead in their blood above 3.5 micrograms per deciliter, which is the new reference level for when cases get flagged.

Local health officials also performed inspections on 96 different properties that year in an attempt to identify the source of the lead poisoning cases. None of those cases was attributed to lead in water.

But public health experts said lead service lines represent another potential source of lead exposure, and the EPA estimates that drinking water can make up 20% or more of a person’s total exposure to lead.

Dr. Carl Baum, a pediatrician who has treated lead poisoning cases in Connecticut for more than 20 years, said infants who are consuming baby formula that is mixed with tap water are at the greatest risk from lead water lines. Another vulnerable population is pregnant women.

Baum, the director of the lead poisoning treatment center at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, said the only foolproof way to protect infants and other people from lead service lines is to eliminate the source of potential exposure.

Lead exposure, Baum explained, is often a silent disease, meaning parents and doctors don’t realize there is a problem until lab testing finds elevated levels of lead in a child’s blood. In Connecticut, the state has a universal testing requirement.

All children between nine months and 35 months must be tested annually for lead in their blood. There are further testing requirements for children who are at heightened risk.

“Unfortunately, we use kids as biological monitors,” Baum said. “We are allowing kids to go into homes where there is a probability that there is lead either in the water or in the paint and we wait until they get a lead level checked and then we say, ‘Oh, this kid is lead poisoned.’”

David Cash, the former regional administrator for the EPA in New England, said the quiet threat that lead poses to children is why the Biden administration adopted regulations that require lead service lines to be removed within the next decade.

“If we care about children’s health and neurological development and success in school, then we should care very much about this,” Cash said.

“You know, having a kid who grows up with full mental and neurological abilities is great for that kid and great for their family,” he said. “But it’s also great for the community, great for the economy.”

‘We saw the writing on the wall’

Connecticut’s community water systems, which collectively serve more than three quarters of the state’s population, are at varying stages of pinpointing and eliminating their lead service lines.

In New London, contractors are already in the process of ripping out and replacing more than 500 lead service lines identified in the city. The city was celebrated in recent years — including at an event at the Biden White House — as one of the most proactive municipalities in the country when it comes to addressing its aging lead lines.

“We saw the writing on the wall after Flint that this was going to become a major problem,” said Joseph Lanzafame, New London’s Director of Public Utilities.

Other utilities, however, are just beginning to research how much lead remains in their systems.

Some of the state’s water systems told state regulators late last year that they were not sure what most of their service lines are made of.

The Southington Water Department, for instance, classified 89% of its service lines as “lead status unknown.” The Manchester Water Department listed 81% of its service lines in the same category. And in Meriden, the city’s water division, said it was uncertain about 84% of its roughly 20,000 service lines.

Dr. Manisha Juthani, Connecticut’s public health commissioner, said those cases highlight the difficulty many utilities are facing, especially when there isn’t historical documentation about each service line.

“For some, it’s very challenging,” Juthani said. “They’re going back to records — literally, paper cards and things — from the 1800s.”

William Norton, Meriden’s director of public utilities, said his team recently asked property owners to help document what their water lines are made of by taking photographs of the pipes where they enter people’s homes. And the utility’s employees are excavating several hundred service lines this year to confirm whether they contain lead.

Many utilities are also using computer modeling and machine learning to help predict where lead service lines are located, based on the age of a home or whether other properties on that street have a confirmed lead line.

Officials with the Metropolitan District Commission and Regional Water Authority, which provide drinking water to more than 800,000 people in and around Hartford and New Haven, said they do not expect to find a large number of lead lines in their systems based on the modeling they’ve done up to this point.

The MDC, which serves the Hartford region, told state regulators that it was confident that roughly 86% of its service lines were lead free. And the Regional Water Authority, which covers all of New Haven, similarly reported that at least 93% of its more than 125,000 service lines did not contain lead.

Meanwhile, Aquarion Water, which serves a large portion of Fairfield County, is estimating it could find nearly 4,000 lead lines in Bridgeport and surrounding towns, based on its current projections.

A financial burden

Identifying the lead lines is difficult enough, but utility officials said replacing all those pipes is likely to be an even bigger feat.

In many systems, water customers own at least part of the service lines — meaning utilities need permission from each property owner before they can begin pulling lead from the ground.

Utility officials said tracking down hundreds or thousands of property owners is an enormous challenge, especially in cities where there are a substantial number of rental properties and absentee landlords.

But the biggest impediment to replacing all of Connecticut’s lead service lines is likely to be money. The EPA estimated in 2019 that it could cost roughly $4,700 on average to replace a single service line.

Lanzafame, who is overseeing New London’s lead service line program, said the price has been even higher in his experience.

Part of the cost of replacing lead lines in New London is being covered by a $6.9 million federal loan, a portion of which will be forgiven. Without that assistance, Lanzafame said, it would be far more difficult for the city to complete the work.

“It is a big financial burden. I think that is one of the biggest challenges, especially being a distressed community,” Lanzafame said. “Without the grants and the funding that we’re getting from the federal government, we wouldn’t be able to carry out this project.”

Federal lawmakers and the Biden administration set aside more than $15 billion through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help utilities across the country to identify and replace lead service lines. Connecticut received $99 million from that pot of money over the past three years, which the state is making available to water utilities through grants and low-interest loans.

But some groups are estimating the price tag for replacing every lead line nationwide could be up to $45 billion or even $90 billion — meaning some replacement projects may not receive federal support.

Lambrinidou, of the Campaign for Lead Free Water, said utilities cannot rely on individual property owners to pay out-of-pocket for the cost of replacing their service lines. If they do, she said, those lead lines will likely remain in the ground.

Many Connecticut utilities told CT Mirror they intend to cover the entire cost of replacement, but in order to do so, they may need to raise utility rates. The Connecticut legislature passed a bill this session that would allow investor-owned utilities, like Aquarion and the Connecticut Water Company, to create a surcharge on people’s water bills to cover the cost of lead removal projects.

Lambrinidou, an affiliate faculty member at Virginia Tech’s Department of Science, Technology and Society, said that is also problematic. It would be far more equitable for the federal government to pick up the tab for service line replacements, she said.

“In many communities, it’s going to be the people — the victims — who are going to be required to pay, at least partially,” Lambrindou said. “If that’s not an environmental injustice, I don’t know what is.”