Garden City, Mineola land millions in state water grants to replace lead pipes

Garden City and Mineola got a boost in tackling the legacy of lead pipes that deliver drinking water to residents, with $19.2 million in grants recently announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.

Those grants were among 12 totaling $56.7 million awarded to Long Island water providers for infrastructure costs including treatment of volatile organic compounds and 1,4-dioxane.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2024 finalized new regulations called the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, or LCRI, that require water systems nationwide to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years.

“Every provider of water has to identify any services that are lead on the residential side as well as on the provider side; in this case the village’s side,” said Mineola Mayor Paul A. Pereira. “This is something that everyone is dealing with. It is labor intensive. It is costly. It is going to take a long time.”

According to data compiled by the state Health Department in 2024 and 2025, Garden City had identified 1,190 lead service lines and Mineola had identified 552. Pereira said Mineola is continuing its inventory of service lines and to date has identified about 900 that have lead. 

About $11M to Mineola

One of the grants to Mineola is $1.8 million to identify the pipes, while another $9.2 million is for replacement. 

Pereira said the village has reached out to every homeowner to check their connection and has inspected almost every property. Replacing a single lead service line costs about $10,000 to $15,000, he said. 

The grants keep costs down for residents because otherwise the village would have to borrow and pass those costs on to the users, the mayor said.

The village has taken advantage of ongoing roadwork to identify the pipes that have to be dug up. "Then we're already digging up, so then in that case we will identify them that way," Pereira said.

Sometimes property records indicate the type of pipe used, he said. Further identification efforts could lead to hundreds more lead pipes discovered underground, he said. 

"This [grant] is not going to pay for the entire job of the village, but this certainly goes a long way," Pereira said. 

$8.2M to Garden City

Garden City was awarded $8.2 million to replace lead service lines. Village Mayor Edward Finneran said the funds will help residents offset the costs of removing them.

While the water provider is responsible for the service lines it owns, individual property owners are responsible for the cost of replacing lead pipes on their property. 

"We're one of the oldest communities around," Finneran said, adding that the houses built before, around the 1950s, are "pretty good candidates to have the lead lines."

Like Mineola, Garden City has taken advantage of roadwork to inspect water lines, Finneran said. The village also has encouraged residents to get their water tested, which the village does for free, he said. The village is putting together a plan to meet a federal deadline next year.

The LCRI mandates that water providers submit to the state a final inventory of the service lines, identifying which are lead, on both the customer side and provider side, by Nov. 1, 2027. The lead service lines must be replaced in 10 years, by Nov. 1, 2037. 

"I don't think that there's a more important long-term issue here in the village," Finneran said. 

 Some of the grant money the state has offered to municipalities has come from federal funds to clean up the lead problem.

Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, said that in the aftermath of the widely publicized lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, outrage gave way to policy changes. 

"That is where the government regulation and infrastructure money came from," Edwards said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to find — which is the hard part — where are these things; to find these lead pipes and then replace them."