Office of the Inspector General Releases Report on Office of Water’s Allocations for LSLs
On Monday, October 21, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report that details their evaluation of the data by the Office of Water (OW) in its lead service line (LSL) questionnaire. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used responses from the 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs (DWINSA) Lead Service Line questionnaire in order to set funding allotments for states to replace their LSLs. The data from this survey, however, resulted in allotments that likely do not reflect the actual needs that the states will have for LSL Replacement (LSLR) due to timing constraints of the DWINSA data collection.
The original DWINSA questionnaire had questions designed to estimate LSLR costs, not to allocate funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). The timing of the BIL funding did not synch up with the initial LSL inventories under the Lead and Copper Rule Revisions (LCRR). The five years of BIL funding are from Fiscal Year (FY) 2022- FY 2026, and the deadline for the initial LSL inventories was last week on October 16, 2024.
The Office of Water corrected some of these data errors for the 2024 BIL funding allotments, but based on its judgement, the OIG still found flaws in some of the data used to allot this funding. This funding issue will continue to have consequences as water systems and states begin to grapple with and pay for the required actions of the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements (LCRI).
