Before last night’s Galesburg City Council meeting there was a presentation and hearing for the public to hear how the city will use a $4 million forgivable loan.
The loan is from the Environmental Protection Agency and is to replace lead water service lines into homes.
City Engineer Wayne Carl says that they will start with replacing 500 homes sometime in May.
The replacement will come at no cost to homeowners or taxpayers.
Carl says the city has the goal of replacing all of Galesburg’s 3,000 lead service lines but first there are certain criteria to determine who gets their line replaced first.
The first criteria is homes with lead lines that have children who have tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood.
Then they’ll move to those whose home has tested above the EPA safety threshold of 15 parts per billion.
Next they will move to low to moderate income homes with lead lines.
Those three groups only make up about 200 homes in total.
All told, Carl says that about 3/4 of the Galesburg lead service lines will be replaced with the EPA loan.
