Illinois is in the midst of a public health crisis. Nearly 1.5 million service lines — the pipes that carry drinking water to homes and businesses — contain or are suspected to contain lead, a neurotoxin linked to cognitive, reproductive, and cardiovascular problems. Now, public health and workforce advocates want to turn the state’s long-overdue pipe replacement backlog into a statewide economic engine, creating up to 90,000 jobs over a decade. A recent report proposes a plan to replace the state’s staggering inventory of toxic lead pipes and create tens of thousands of jobs. To do so, the analysis calls on state and local officials to fast-track pipe replacements for communities that have suffered from the most lead exposure and to use the projects to build a more diverse local workforce. It also urges the Illinois General Assembly, which returned to session this month, to help plug a multi-billion-dollar budget gap for lead pipe replacements. “The longer we put off taking care of our water infrastructure, the more expensive it’s going to get, the more that we’re going to be looking at water rates increasing to deal with that, and the more people are going to be in the position where they’re not going to have access to safe and clean drinking water,” said Justin Williams, a senior manager at the Metropolitan Planning Council, one of the policy think tanks that helped develop the plan. “And that’s not a situation we should be in as a state or region.” Several…
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