Park Ridge, N.J., is making a second attempt to hire a contractor to pull lead service lines from homes across the small Bergen County borough, after an earlier round of bidding failed to produce a contract.
The re-bid reflects a tension playing out in small municipalities across the state: New Jersey's 2021 law requires every water system to replace all lead service lines within 10 years, one of the most aggressive mandates in the country, but qualified contractors are in short supply and prices have climbed as demand surges. For a borough of roughly 8,900 people with its own municipal water utility, that means absorbing the full compliance burden with limited staff and engineering capacity.
Lead service lines are the pipes connecting street-level water mains to individual homes. Most were installed before a 1986 federal ban on lead pipes, and an estimated 9 million remain in the ground nationally. Even low-level lead exposure can cause developmental harm in children and cardiovascular problems in adults. Park Ridge's mid-20th-century housing stock puts it squarely in the era when these pipes were standard.
Source: NationGraph.
New Jersey moved to the forefront of the national reckoning with lead water pipes amid Newark's crisis in 2018 and 2019, when the city had to distribute bottled water to thousands of residents. Newark ultimately replaced roughly 23,000 lines in under three years, becoming a national model. The 2021 state law codified that urgency statewide, and the EPA's October 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements added a federal 10-year replacement deadline on top of it. Cities across the country are now working through similar procurements, from Dubuque's Phase 2 replacement push to Minneapolis's effort to reach 500,000 residents.
Park Ridge's Phase 1 work is posted on the borough's bid portal, with bids due June 30, 2026. Whether this second solicitation draws enough qualified contractors to get a shovel in the ground remains the open question, and the borough's ability to meet the state's 2031 deadline likely depends on the answer.
