As part of his American employment plan, President Joe Biden has called for 100 percent of the country’s lead pipes to be replaced to prevent the toxic chemical from spilling into our drinking water. Cities should take a page from Newark that treated this like a health emergency and got the job done well in advance.
Not only did Newark quickly replace almost all 18,500 lead pipes – raising the money through a loan to speed things up and make it free for homeowners – they got the local people involved in the effort. The city launched an apprenticeship program that trained 50 Newark residents, 32 of whom are still on duty, and helped local businesses apply for parts of the project.
“We are fixing a problem in our community, so it only makes sense that our employees, especially during COVID, have the opportunity to benefit from it,” said Mayor Ras Baraka.
He stumbled out of the gate, misled the public about the problem by suggesting that the water supply was safe (the fine print said the lead pipes were not safe) and attacked the Defense Council on Natural Resources that was there, To help . This replacement of the lead pipes takes place exclusively on the basis of an NRDC billing.
But the mayor deserves real credit for getting the job done quickly and innovating to engage Newark residents. “They didn’t downplay the risk early on,” notes Erik Olson of NRDC, “they took really aggressive steps to start removing lead service lines – some of the fastest implementations of lead service line removal in the world Country.”
And instead of saying no one locally qualified for the job and hiring a large suburban contractor like Caldwell, the city empowered locals to do the job and wrote right on their contracts for companies to hire Newark people would have to to get the money.
About 80 percent of those trained were previously unemployed, says Kareem Adeem, director of water and wastewater, who started out as a worker in the water department and worked his way up. The city paid for transportation to a training site, where a local union gave instructions. Now dozens of trainees are making up to $ 40 an hour, along with health benefits, to replace the old lead pipes. and they can find future work through the union.
“After the project is complete, we will have some of these people working,” said Dominic Santaite of Montana Construction.
Newark also used $ 2 million to develop a program to pre-borrow money from minority-owned companies so they could lease equipment and take care of payroll. As a result, they won $ 58 million of the $ 158 million in contracts for the project. “We know why we can’t keep up,” explains Baraka. “We don’t have the seed capital. We don’t have the machines and our balance sheets are not where they should be for a medium-sized company. “
Plumber James Reaves, a subcontractor on this project, knows the fight well. “As minority contractors, we don’t really have the option to be that much prime contractor,” he says. “The bigger companies have the $ 10 million bond they can get the job with, and they turn around and hire the minority entrepreneur so he can still have a job. This is me.”
The 60-year-old Reaves started out as an unpaid maintenance worker for his mother, a landlady in Newark, and then trained as a plumber in the Navy. Now he oversees the trainees who are replacing the lead pipes. “A lot of the minorities we work with couldn’t do that kind of service at first, but now everyone is learning and I can just let the guys do the work and they can do the services themselves.” he said.
His dream is to get a big order like this himself at some point. His 22-year-old trainee Talid Broxton is looking forward to receiving his plumbing license and starting his own company under his own name. “We take care of our city,” he said. “When we do the plumbing, it’s like we’re doing a personal job for ourselves.”
Blame Baraka for not only fixing a public health crisis, but fighting unemployment in his city with good, living wage jobs.
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