LCA’s CEO Discusses Getting the Lead Out, Sewer System Upgrades on ‘Good Morning Lehigh Valley’
December 26, 2024Liesel Gross takes to the airwaves to talk about the important work Lehigh County Authority is doing to secure the future of safe, reliable water and wastewater service.
LCA CEO Liesel Gross was once again a guest on “Good Morning Lehigh Valley,” where she talked with radio show host Brad Osborne about two of the water authority’s biggest-ever projects: upgrading the aging sewer system (parts of which are nearly 100 years old), and identifying and replacing lead service lines.
Here’s a shortened version of their chat that’s been edited for length and clarity.
Osborne: One of the things in life many of us take for granted is the ready supply of clean, safe drinking water and what is called sanitary sewer service. Who wakes up in the morning wondering whether safe water will be available for our coffee, the washing machine will have the water to do our laundry, the dishwasher will have water to clean, and the toilets will work?
Well, there is one agency in the Lehigh Valley that works days and nights to ensure these things we take for granted are actually there for us when we count on them. That is the Lehigh County Authority.
I have in studio with me this morning Liesel Gross, the chief executive officer of Lehigh County Authority, to help us understand the complicated business and future of water and sewer service in the Lehigh Valley.
Good morning Liesel, thank you for joining me. Liesel, how long have you been the CEO of Lehigh County Authority?
Gross: I’ve been the CEO for about 8 years now, but I’ve been with the authority for 26.
Osborne: So after all these years things are getting easier, right?
Gross: Oh gosh no, things get more complicated and challenging every single day. The folks who work in water will attest to that. A lot of new regulations, and a lot of new requirements, and financially things get more and more challenging because the cost of things, the cost of doing the projects, just keeps increasing.
Osborne: Along with everything else in our lives. So I’d like to get into some of those challenges that you’re facing at the authority, but before we do that can you give us an overview of the roles and responsibility of Lehigh County Authority?
Gross: Absolutely. Lehigh County Authority is a municipal authority, so we’re a nonprofit, quasi-governmental agency, and we provide water and sewer service to about 270,000 people in Lehigh County in Allentown, and then about 15 other municipalities in Lehigh County and actually one community in Northampton County as well.
… It’s complicated, and in Pennsylvania, of course, where every municipality has sort of their own municipal structure and government structure, there’s some unique circumstances that we have to manage.
Osborne: Let’s talk about your sewer plan first. Can you explain the difference between sanitary and storm water sewer, and what’s your plan to address those challenges there?
Gross: Thanks for asking about that, that’s one of the key things we’ve been working on really hard over the past year. Sanitary sewer is the water that you use. After you use it—after you flush, after you do your dishes, after you shower—that water goes down the drain and into a set of pipes that are sewer pipes. The storm sewer is a completely separate, in Lehigh County, a very separate system, and that’s to manage the rainwater, the runoff from the yards and the streets. They go into a stormwater system, which should be separate. In Lehigh County it is physically separate, but in some communities they are combined. In Lehigh County they are two separate systems, and we deal with the sanitary side, and then the municipalities deal with the stormwater side through the street drains and the detention basins and all of that sort of thing.
So the regional sewer plan we’ve been working on—I actually loved your lead in, about imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have water and sewer service. It would be terrible! … One of the things we’ve been really trying to talk with the community about, it is absolutely at a very personal level in your home: your ability to have that cup of coffee in the morning or take that shower. But it’s also the regional impact of having those services; the products that are made with water, the products or the manufacturing processes that use water or need sewer service to create their product or service.
So the regional economy is really driven in a lot of ways by having this safe, reliable supply of water as well as this well-functioning sewer system that we have. So when we’re talking about the regional sewer plan, we’re really focused on renewing the investment in the system that we have today.
That system, you may not be aware, was built in the 1920s through the 1980s. … The treatment plant in Allentown has components that were built in 1928 and they still function, but they’re not sized for today’s flows; they’re not functioning in the way that meets all the regulatory requirements that we face today. And so when we have a system that’s 50 to 100 years old, it’s time to reinvest in that system so that we can continue to enjoy the quality of life and the benefits that we receive from having that system.
That’s the basis for the plan we’ve been working on, and as I mentioned having a system where we’re working with 15 communities on their plans, it’s been a bit challenging to bring all municipalities to the table working on the plan together to create a plan or an approach that works for all 15 communities.
…
Osborne: I know that you’ve gone through extensive efforts to have forums where residents, contractors, government officials, anyone could come and listen to information that you need to share for this upcoming plan. Can you tell us in detail a little bit more about the cost of the plan and how it may affect residents—and I’m talking about sewer right now.
Gross: The sewer plan includes a series of projects, and I’ll say that first and foremost what we have is an old system, right, and it’s an old system that acts like an old system. So it leaks when it rains, and that means the water is leaking into the pipe, and it’s also leaking every day. It’s a beautiful dry day here today, and we will have millions of gallons of groundwater entering the sewer system because there’s just a lot of groundwater here. And when the pipes are cracking or aging, it allows that groundwater to get into the pipe. So that’s the primary problem that we need to solve. And so in the next five years the primary focus of our plan will be sewer rehab work in the communities. So we have a treatment plant, we have large pump stations, and all this great infrastructure, but at the end of the day we need to have the sewer systems that serve the communities directly in good shape. And working on rehab at the community level first, and then we’ll work toward upgrades at the treatment plant; upgrades to the large pipes—we call them interceptors, those are just large regional pipes that transport all the municipal waste to Allentown and pump stations. All together over the next 10 years we’re going to spend about $300 million on these efforts, but the first block of time, the first five years focusing on those municipal sewer collection projects, about 100 million focusing on that effort.
Osborne: What kind of questions do you get when you have these forums?
Gross: I mean the public’s very concerned about rates, of course, and so we try to talk about what the impact to rates will be, but we’ve been really pleasantly surprised that that’s not the sole focus. When we have these public meetings we have a lot of questions about very specific kinds of problems maybe that a customer is having. Maybe they experienced a backup at one point and they want to understand why that happened, or they want to understand more about their municipalities’ ordinances for basement inspections and those kinds of things. It’s very personal, you know, when you have a backup or you have a problem with your service; you want to really understand what the township or the city or the borough is going to do about that. And so we’ve had a lot of questions about that, and questions about the environment … and more broadly just is the plan going to work. So the feedback we’ve received so far has been encouraging, that the public we’ve been talking to so far seems to understand that the investment is required, and it’s just a matter of getting the right projects going and making sure we solve the problem.
Osborne: If you could break it down per household, what could potentially be the increase in the sewer rate, quarterly rate let’s say, and that may vary depending on where you live but is there a range that we can expect?
Gross: I would hesitate to give actual dollar numbers but I will say that in our system Lehigh County Authority’s rates in 2025 will be going up about 5% to 6% for one year, and we would expect those kinds of rate increases to happen annually for a period of time —10 years or more. So you know we’re going to see water and sewer costs outpacing inflation in terms of cost increases, and that’s because of the investments that are required and the cost to do the projects. Each municipality sets their own rates individually so it’s a little difficult give specific rate projections.
Osborne: Some municipalities may just consider a pass-through expense, some may opt if they can afford to in their super fund in this case to absorb a portion of that, or have no increase at all, but ultimately though I think what you’re saying is that there will be additional cost to each household over time.
Gross: Absolutely we can expect that, and the municipalities themselves may have different levels of investment that they need to make in their sewer rehab programs so that will impact as well.
Osborne: If I’m a home owner and I’m reading this in the newspaper, and I’m thinking to myself, “Well, I didn’t know anything about this,” was some of this attributed to deferred maintenance, have we perhaps not kept up with uplifting our own infrastructure and brought this time forward to us now?
Gross: I think you could say that, yes; however I think you could also say that the framework that municipalities are working under is different than it used to be and the way that the system operates today may have been acceptable to the regulatory agencies in the past, and we’re realizing now that we should be running a tighter ship, so to speak, and so we’re trying to get caught up on that, and there’s probably an element of underinvestment in some of the communities as well that they’re trying to catch up on, too.
Osborne: Well I think that’s an excellent point. I mean our expectations are varied, and one of them is that we become more sensitive, sensitized, to the condition of our environment and those things which adversely impact it. So that’s also a shift in how society is looking at these types of services, right?
Gross: Sure. When you think about the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act were enacted in the early 1970s, and so much of our system was constructed before that time. Now we’re kind of learning as we grow, and those regulations have changed as well, so we’re constantly evolving and keeping pace with what the public is looking for, and what our regulators are looking for, too—that’s important.
Osborne: You were describing inflow and infiltration, especially in this environment where we haven’t had a whole lot of rain, but the groundwater apparently is still at or maybe above the lines, the sewer lines in this case. Has the lack of rain affected the operations at Kline’s island at all?
Gross: Honestly, you hate to say it in in a drought, but it’s helped us … on the wastewater side, when we have a lot of rain or we have a very wet year, we see our flows constantly increasing to the plant, because more and more rainwater and groundwater is getting into the sewer system. In fact, earlier this year—this has been a weird year for precipitation because we started out with a number of very wet months at the beginning of the year—so we had flows coming through the system much higher than normal earlier in the year, and now they’re below normal, so we’re kind of normalizing for the whole year. But we’re definitely seeing lower flows of sewage because of the drought, primarily because there’s less groundwater getting into the pipe.
…
Osborne: Let’s jump to our water supply; you also supply water to our community as well.
Gross: Well on the water side there’s so much going on right now, and we just mentioned the drought that’s been really top of mind for all of us lately in terms of when is it going to rain and how much and are we going to get enough to get us out of the drought. But we’re in a drought watch currently, so that’s been really top of mind for us right now.
Osborne: I’d mentioned that Lehigh County Authority has made an appearance in our local media for a couple topics. … There’s also a concern about lead pipes and what we may need to do about them. Can you talk to us about lead pipes?
Gross: I sure can. That’s been a really hot topic, probably even hotter than the drought to be honest, because on the drought side we are in a drought watch but our supplies are holding, so we wait and see on that. The lead pipe issue, just going back to a comment I made earlier about the Safe Drinking Water Act being enacted 50 years ago; in fact this is the 50 year anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act. It’s constantly evolving, and in recent years there’s been a much greater focus on lead in drinking water, and EPA has issued new regulations regarding how water systems must deal with the lead in their systems. Most recently, the latest regulation that came out indicates we will need to remove all lead service lines in a 13-year-period. That’s a huge undertaking for all the cities and towns in America, to be undertaking all at the same time.
Osborne: I would assume you don’t have a complete inventory about all the pipes that have lead in them, or even locations.
Gross: That is our currently our biggest issue, because we don’t have records of pipes that either we didn’t install or that we don’t own, because the customer actually owns half of the service line from the curb into the house, and we don’t have records on the material for all of those. We have some, but not a lot. So one of the requirements from EPA is that we issue these letters—which you’ve probably been hearing about—letters to all customers that have a lead service line or that have a galvanized steel or iron service line. Or, if we don’t know what the service line is made of, we also have to send that notice to those customers. The vast majority of the letters that we sent out were to customers where we don’t know what their service line is made of, and trying to work through a process of gathering that information is going to be very time consuming and challenging in this case.
Osborne: Is LCA responsible for the lateral even though you didn’t put it in?
Gross: If it’s connected to our public system, we will be responsible for it. The EPA rule requires that all lead service lines be removed, including the private side, and so we would need to work very closely with each and every customer individually one-by-one to understand what they have and how to get it out of the system. If the customer has a lead service line and wants to replace it on their own faster, that’s great; they should do that. But if they can’t do that for financial reasons, then as we go through the next 13 years we will be replacing them through a series of annual projects, and we’ll get to every home eventually.
Osborne: So in that case the individual homeowner does not need to be proactive in doing that they can wait for the Authority to come in and do that work?
Gross: They could; that’s how LCA is handling it. Every community may be handling it slightly differently, but the requirement from EPA is that we remove both sides—both the public side and the privately owned side, so we’re going to fold all of that work into our regular annual projects to remove lead service lines. But again, if you’re, you know, mom and dad with small kids in the house and you find out you have a lead service line and you have the wherewithal to replace it, certainly you’re welcome to do that, and we would encourage that, and we would like to hear from customers that they’re doing that, so we know where the lead is being removed.
Osborne: Questions related to that: How does the homeowner determine what the composition of the lateral into their house is?
Gross: There’s a couple of different ways to do it. Most of the time it’s just a visual inspection. If you go into your basement or crawl space or wherever you think the water line comes into the house—look for your water meter; it’s usually located in that general location—and just look at the pipe coming in.
The pipe that’s coming through the basement wall or through your foundation, that’s the pipe that we’re concerned about. Most people know what copper looks like, or plastic looks like. If it’s a shiny copper color like a penny, it’s copper; if it’s plastic, you know that. But it’s the other types of materials that you have to maybe investigate a little more. Lead has a certain feel to it; it’s a little softer, you can actually nick it with your fingernail. And galvanized steel would be magnetic, so you could put a magnet to it and see if it sticks, and then report that information to us with a picture. A picture is worth a thousand words, so that would be another way. We’re also inviting customers to schedule inspections with our team, so we can do that, too.
With these letters that went out—we sent out 40,000 letters; that’s a lot of customer contact—we’ve gotten a lot [of responses] and definitely over a thousand calls and requests, so we are scheduling inspections out several months now from the response. Our team will go to the home and do the inspection and help the customer find out what their service line is—and that helps us, too, because once we know what the service line material is we can plan our future projects around that where there’s lead. If it’s not lead, it doesn’t need to be replaced.
Osborne: It was reported in one of the articles in The Morning Call that you have 28,000 service lines in which you don’t know what they’re made of. That’s a big task.
Gross: It is, yeah. And in some cases I’ll say that we actually have what we call ‘institutional knowledge.’ So we know, in some cases, what the material is. We know that it was copper going into this development, or we’ve been in homes and we know that it’s plastic or whatever the case may be. Our team has a lot of knowledge inside their heads of what’s in the system, but it’s a matter of verifying it and putting it in a database structure that DEP will accept, because there are certain criteria about what they will accept as a verified copper or lead service line.
Osborne: So I’m homeowner, I’m a parent, and I find out that the lateral into our home is lead or contains lead. What do? I want to preface this a little bit, Liesel, by saying your website is phenomenal. … could your website be used for [reporting a lead pipe]?
Gross: We have used it for that, and part of the challenge with that is what I mentioned before, about actually verifying with a picture. Getting customers to not just report what they see but upload a good photo that we can actually look at and verify it … it’s a little bit challenging to have customers self-report; that’s why we’re really encouraging the inspections and if people can be patient we’ll schedule them out as long as we can to get those inspections done. … There there’s some good information, as you mentioned, on our website that will give customers more of a step-by-step look at how to identify their service line material. So they can use that fact sheet and really get some peace of mind that they know at least what it is.
Osborne: So I’m a parent, and I have young children, and I need to be concerned, especially in the 0 to 3, maybe 4 or 5 years old, about the presence of lead in drinking water in this case. It’s going to take me some time to save up money to replace my line; it’s going to take some time for LCA to assist or do it or whatever; what do I do in the meantime? What measures can I take as a homeowner to minimize the risk of lead getting into our systems, our human bodies?
Gross: That’s a great question; I’m glad you asked that. There’s some very easy things people can do; low-cost things. The lead gets into the water simply by coming into contact with that lead pipe. There’s no lead in the public system out in the street. And so our concern is water that’s been sitting in the lead service line over a period of time …
Osborne: Like even overnight.
Gross: Yeah, overnight. So the easiest thing to do is to just flush the tap out before you use the water. Or—we don’t want to waste the water during a drought—take a shower first. Use the water from the shower to flush out your line, and then you have fresh water coming into the system from the pipe in the street, which would not have lead in it. You could save that water to water plants, or do other things with as well, if you’re flushing every morning. Another thing we like to recommend is to have customers clean out their aerators on their faucet screens, because that’s where we can see some buildup of materials that could be increasing the amount of lead getting into your water. And then, if you’re willing to spend a little bit of money, the pitcher filters that are available commercially are very effective at removing lead. And so for simply drinking water, making coffee, filling your pets’ water, those pitcher filters can be a very effective way of managing the situation.
Osborne: That’s an excellent suggestion. They’re not all that expensive, especially for the benefit that you get from them in this case, as long as the ones you get are designed to remove lead.
Gross: I just want to give a quick shout out to Sue Sampson, who’s our communications manager, who put all this great information on our website, in English and Spanish, so it’s available for a large portion of our community to download and read.
Osborne: I also saw … some of your website can be accessed with Arabic language.
Gross: Yeah; we added the translate tool to it, so that we can reach more of our customer base.
Osborne: In the final minute before we need to leave this conversation, again I want to emphasize how good your website is … a lot of information that that we are discussing this morning they can find written materials on your website to learn more and perhaps generate some questions. I would like to give you an opportunity to share if you have any job employment opportunities.
Gross: Thank you for asking. We are always hiring it seems like at LCA—at any water utility, really—but I’m partial to LCA because I’ve worked here for 26 years. It’s a great place to work; we are very mission-focused on protecting public health and the environment, and we do have openings for people who have that sort of passion for what we do. We’re always looking for treatment plant operators and maintenance staff but we also have some new positions that we’re trying to fill to address these major programs that we talked about; to address our sewer rehab program as a project manager type position, as well as to manage our lead program and helping us get the lead out so we have some project manager positions there too.
Osborne: And those job opportunities are posted on your website as well?
Gross: They sure are.
