Hundreds of thousands of homes in the city of Chicago still have lead pipes bringing water to their homes, and the owners of the vast majority of those home owners have no idea.
And Chicago aldermen started to get a picture of what's causing the delay during a City Council committee hearing on Monday.
West side Alderman Gilbert Villegas told his colleagues he's been ringing the alarm about this issue since 2018.
"We are in a crisis," Villegas (36th Ward) said to begin the hearing. "Chicago has the most lead service lines of any large city - or any city in the country: more than 400,000."
But ten months after a federal notification deadline expired, the city of Chicago has formally warned 7% of affected people that their water may come through lead pipes.
Patrick Schwer is the director of water quality surveillance for the Chicago Department of Water Management. He testified that the city missed the deadline in part because meeting it would be too expensive.
"Nine hundred thousand letters would have to be written and mailed to each individual unit," Schwer told the committee. "Spending $10 million to send a bunch of letters that people will throw in their trash seems like a waste of money, especially when that money should be spent on replacing actual lead service lines."
He called that an unfunded mandate -- but Southwest side alderman Raymond Lopez noted that the city's already set aside tens of millions of dollars to help address the issue.
"We've been wasting a lot of time, energy and money - to do a whole lot of nothing," said Lopez (15th Ward).
The city says it has sent out some notifications, it's set up an online database, and Schwer claims the city's making it easy for people to get the water coming out of their faucets tested.