President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
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The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
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Kind of true, but some lead pipes just aren’t an immediate issue. Like asbestos in a building that isn’t disturbed, it doesn’t hurt anyone until it starts to come loose.
Getting the worst of it solved is a good step.
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Flint actually does have clean water by most metrics and independent measurements, but public trust is reasonably deeply, deeply shaken.
This, and I don’t mean this as a bad thing, isn’t actually a thing Biden started. It’s a massive disbursal of funds allocated by the infrastructure bill to a program started in 1996 for upgrading water infrastructure and specifically removing lead pipes.
So this is something great to do, and we should keep doing more of it (there’s $12 billion more waiting for future rounds), and we can be slightly happy that we’re not complete fuck ups since we actually started nearly 30 years ago.
We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we need to advertise that the people entrusted to be basically competent at managing our public works are doing their jobs, but here we are, and we should probably advertise this stuff better.
It’s in conjunction with state and local funding as well. Your local municipality might be abke to aquire $4 million to replace the main lines through local bonds, while getting $2 million from the state and another $10 million from this federal program.
Your mood is a disgrace.
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Biden: Adds on to the amount he’s already given to replace lead pipes; more than any other president has done
The Uncanny Observer: Yeah but it should have been done 20 years ago so I’m mad 😠
Edit: this brings the total up to 9 billion. Still not enough for everything, but how much has every other president gave? Be a little happy
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Unironically, yes. Big jumps don’t happen without violent revolution and that rarely works out well. Progress happens by baby steps. If you’re waiting for everything to get better all at once, you will be angry the rest of your life.
Explain to me how the United States was created
George Washington did not politely ask for independence.
He and others murdered people for it. A lot of people. And then he won. And now here we all are.
Rarely