By Ian T. Shearn and Alex Hunter. This story was originally published by The Jersey Vindicator. Sign up for their newsletter at The Jersey Vindicator newsletter.

With some fanfare more than four-and-a-half years ago, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy unveiled his $100 million plan to eliminate the alarming amount of lead leaching into the drinking water of public schools in the state. An investigation by The Jersey Vindicator has found the plan never got off the ground, leaving countless thousands of New Jersey students still exposed to the toxic dangers of lead every day. Strangely, no one has seemed to notice.

One day in the fall of 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy took his place center stage at a Bergen County elementary school. He removed a prepared statement from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and placed it on a black podium adorned with the faux-gilded Seal of the Great State of New Jersey. 

The script outlined his new counter-offensive in the state’s war on lead and, specifically, his strategy to address the growing and alarming reports of the toxic metal showing up in the drinking water at public schools throughout the state. 

An impressive supporting cast followed him on stage: Two members of his cabinet (the commissioners of Education and Environmental Protection), one Congressman, two state legislators, and a school principal. Their presence conveyed an all-hands-on-deck sense of gravitas. 

They stood in front of an expansive illustration of an idyllic blue sky sprinkled with wispy, white cirrus clouds. Etched in the sky, directly above the governor’s head were the words “tomorrow.”  It radiated optimism. The optics were spot-on.

By this time, it was becoming apparent that New Jersey was losing the war on lead. Newark was literally digging its way out of a three-year public health crisis after it was discovered that thousands of residents’ drinking water was contaminated with illegal levels of lead. The crisis and widespread media attention rivaled that of Flint, Michigan, where contaminated water had been an enduring national story since 2014.

The main culprit in Newark was the 24,000 service lines that connect its water mains to city buildings. Some of the lines were more than 100 years old. They were aging, decaying, and made of lead. In 2019, Newark had started replacing every one of them – a herculean and expensive undertaking. 

But now it was also becoming clear from a growing body of news reports and legislative clamor that the lead problem was not just a Newark problem, or even an urban problem, as was the common perception. There were unsafe levels of lead cropping up in the drinking water in public schools throughout New Jersey. The problem was pervasive and it was getting worse. 

CRISIS MODE 

On Sept. 25, 2019, the Bergen Record/USA Today dropped a bombshell: Hundreds of thousands of students exposed to lead in NJ schools. Here’s why officials failed to stop it.

More than 250,000 New Jersey students — and likely many more in recent years — were at risk of drinking water tainted with dangerous levels of lead at their schools. An investigation by the Trenton bureau of the USA Today Network found lead-tainted water was detected in nearly a third of the state’s 673 public school districts and charter schools. 

A week earlier, a Monmouth University Poll showed that only 10 percent of New Jersey residents approved of the way Murphy had handled the Newark lead situation, and his overall unfavorable ratings were climbing   

“He has mishandled the lead crisis in Newark,” former NJ Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel said at the time. “This is the first real environmental issue that Governor Murphy has been directly polled on, and he did not do well.”

On Sept.30, the Record published a follow-up story with a blunt headline, “Lead in NJ water: Of 32 ideas to address it, one became law, one Murphy vetoed.”

The Record news stories and the Monmouth poll packed a potent one-two punch. Mishandling Newark was one thing, but now the problem was spreading to the suburbs, where elections are won and lost. Now a political crisis was marching in lockstep with the expanding public health emergency. Murphy’s 2020 re-election campaign was gearing up, and Murphy was also rumored to have White House ambitions. Lead could provide potent campaign ammunition for his Republican opponent.

A CALL TO ACTION

Team Murphy sprang into action at the Bergen County school press conference on Oct. 7, 2019. With his generals and blue sky behind him, the governor laid out his new strategy. Infused with aspiration and determination, Murphy’s script had all the ingredients and the feel of a campaign stump speech. 

First, you identify the severity of the problem (while deflecting blame), then you offer a solution (taking all credit) and then you oversell it. 

In the following short video excerpts, you can see how Murphy laid it out.

 Murphy said his administration would attack the problem on multiple fronts. 

After Newark’s water crisis became a national story in 2016, Gov. Chris Christie mandated that school districts test for lead in their drinking water every six years and post the results on school websites. Murphy said that wasn’t enough. 

There also had been problems with Christie’s lead testing rollout. There were numerous omissions in lead testing reports, and some schools simply did not participate. There was little effort to hold them accountable. There were also widespread complaints from parents and the public about the difficulty of finding lead testing results on school websites.  

Murphy had an answer in the second prong of his plan. The state would create “a single, central database” containing all of the testing results from every school. 

Murphy added that the Department of Education would have new direct enforcement powers to ensure schools are transparent about their lead testing results.

However, testing and reporting alone would not solve the problem. The schools needed money to repair their aging water infrastructure. Murphy vowed that the state would provide $100 million to school districts to get that process going.   

And if it wasn’t enough to make every New Jersey school lead-free, Murphy asserted his plan could be adopted across the country.  

The press conference was successful. Most of the state’s news outlets – television, radio, print, and online – reported his plan with headlines like this one in NJ Spotlight News: “Murphy Answers Critics, Lays out Plan to Get Lead Out of Schools.”

Environmental activists, including Tittel, attended Murphy’s press conference. 

 “You have to understand that by 2019, there was a growing lead safety movement in New Jersey,” he told The Jersey Vindicator in a recent interview.  “Murphy was not helping to move those bills. Instead, he simply wanted to beat the legislators to the punch. He wanted to steal a headline. The problem is once the headline fades, the ability to do anything about it fades with it.” 

A 0NE-PRONG FORK

Now, three-and-a-half years later, an investigation by The Jersey Vindicator has discovered that Murphy’s plan never got off the ground. 

As for the $100 million promised for remediation work (Prong 3), The Vindicator found that only $6.6 million has been spent, which was confirmed by Treasury Spokeswoman Danielle Currie. In July 2021, Murphy signed a bill that allocated those funds to 26 school districts for repair work. The lion’s share of the 2021 expenditure — $4 million — went to Jersey City schools for new plumbing fixtures with a filtration system. 

“A lot of money has been left on the table,” says Peter Chen, a policy analyst with New Jersey Policy Perspective and former counsel with Advocates for Children of New Jersey, where he advocated for lead safety. Chen credits Murphy with doing more about lead than previous administrations, but on the whole, he says, “we haven’t done enough.”

 A request to interview Gov. Murphy was declined. Instead, the governor’s deputy press secretary, Maggie Garbarino, emailed a statement to The Vindicator:

“The Governor remains committed to lead remediation efforts in communities across New Jersey. Addressing this issue in schools is an important component of the broader Statewide Plan to Address Lead Exposure. We were pleased to make funds from the Securing Our Children’s Future Bond Act available to New Jersey schools in 2021 and will continue to work with schools to support remediation efforts.”

All other questions were referred to the New Jersey Department of Education. There, communications director Laura Frederick also declined a request to interview an official from the agency and instead provided written responses to Vindicator questions. Questions like:  Why has $93.4 million earmarked for lead remediation sat fallow for three years? The Department of Education spokeswoman says it’s the schools’ fault. 

“The onus is on the school districts to seek funding from the state to remediate any identified problems. …The Department could not speculate on reasons why individual districts have not applied for funding,” Frederick wrote. Asked why the Department of Education didn’t make any grants available since then, Frederick said only that “the Department anticipates facilitating another round of water infrastructure grants following required lead testing during the 2024-2025 school year.” 

But Tittel, who was a persistent voice in the lead safety movement, says the onus is on the State of New Jersey to protect children’s health by enforcing environmental and health safety laws. “They don’t have to wait for districts to apply for grants.”

The press conference was successful. Most of the state’s news outlets – television, radio, print, and online – reported his plan with headlines like this one in NJ Spotlight News: “Murphy Answers Critics, Lays out Plan to Get Lead Out of Schools.”

Environmental activists, including Tittel, attended Murphy’s press conference. 

 “You have to understand that by 2019, there was a growing lead safety movement in New Jersey,” he told The Jersey Vindicator in a recent interview.  “Murphy was not helping to move those bills. Instead, he simply wanted to beat the legislators to the punch. He wanted to steal a headline. The problem is once the headline fades, the ability to do anything about it fades with it.” 

A 0NE-PRONG FORK

Now, three-and-a-half years later, an investigation by The Jersey Vindicator has discovered that Murphy’s plan never got off the ground. 

As for the $100 million promised for remediation work (Prong 3), The Vindicator found that only $6.6 million has been spent, which was confirmed by Treasury Spokeswoman Danielle Currie. In July 2021, Murphy signed a bill that allocated those funds to 26 school districts for repair work. The lion’s share of the 2021 expenditure — $4 million — went to Jersey City schools for new plumbing fixtures with a filtration system. 

“A lot of money has been left on the table,” says Peter Chen, a policy analyst with New Jersey Policy Perspective and former counsel with Advocates for Children of New Jersey, where he advocated for lead safety. Chen credits Murphy with doing more about lead than previous administrations, but on the whole, he says, “we haven’t done enough.”

 A request to interview Gov. Murphy was declined. Instead, the governor’s deputy press secretary, Maggie Garbarino, emailed a statement to The Vindicator:

“The Governor remains committed to lead remediation efforts in communities across New Jersey. Addressing this issue in schools is an important component of the broader Statewide Plan to Address Lead Exposure. We were pleased to make funds from the Securing Our Children’s Future Bond Act available to New Jersey schools in 2021 and will continue to work with schools to support remediation efforts.”

All other questions were referred to the New Jersey Department of Education. There, communications director Laura Frederick also declined a request to interview an official from the agency and instead provided written responses to Vindicator questions. Questions like:  Why has $93.4 million earmarked for lead remediation sat fallow for three years? The Department of Education spokeswoman says it’s the schools’ fault. 

“The onus is on the school districts to seek funding from the state to remediate any identified problems. …The Department could not speculate on reasons why individual districts have not applied for funding,” Frederick wrote. Asked why the Department of Education didn’t make any grants available since then, Frederick said only that “the Department anticipates facilitating another round of water infrastructure grants following required lead testing during the 2024-2025 school year.” 

But Tittel, who was a persistent voice in the lead safety movement, says the onus is on the State of New Jersey to protect children’s health by enforcing environmental and health safety laws. “They don’t have to wait for districts to apply for grants.”

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

The promised centralized database with all test results from every school (Prong 2) never materialized. 

Frederick deflected an explanation to another state agency, even though Murphy said at his press conference that the Department of Education had direct enforcement powers.

A state database does exist that contains school district summaries of annual testing compliance, but it does not contain test results from every school, as Murphy had promised.  

This is a failing that should not be glossed over. A comprehensive database of test results could be a valuable tool for all stakeholders – parents, the public, watchdogs, and education and health officials. 

A database would not only provide parents with test results from their kids’ schools, but it would also facilitate a strategic analysis of problems. For example, a few keystrokes could spit out a list of schools with the worst problems, and from that, one could compile a smaller list of elementary schools where students are the most susceptible to the effects of lead poisoning.  

The database could track remediation efforts and determine spending priorities and grant-seeking strategies. Over time, the database would show progress, or a lack thereof, on the micro and macro levels. That means anyone interested in the issue could see if New Jersey is winning or losing the war on lead. It would enhance accountability at all levels, short-term and long. 

 “It would allow the public to monitor their individual schools, and then allow teachers and parents to pressure their local school boards to fix the problem,” Tittel says. “It’s how an informed populace works in a democracy.”

D-DAY

Only one of Murphy’s three prongs was implemented — increased water testing by school districts, which by itself has limited practical value. Nonetheless, a deep-dive analysis by the Vindicator was able to extract some meaningful data. 

In 2020, the New Jersey Department of Education adopted new regulations to conduct water testing every three years instead of every six years. Any result showing lead levels at 15 parts per billion had to be reported and remediated.  

Accordingly, during the 2021-22 school year, an army of private lab workers fanned out across the state to collect and analyze drinking water samples from each drinking water faucet in the state’s 2,500 schools. 

At face value, the test results reported on the state’s scaled-back database were unsettling. Of the state’s 593 school districts, 355, or 60 percent, had unsafe levels of lead, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. The total number of schools and incidents was not reported. That number dropped slightly in the 2022-23 school year.

“That’s horrendous,” says Tittel, “That says we haven’t made a dent in a very serious problem. It’s not about numbers; it’s about all those children being poisoned.”

DISCLOSURE ISSUES PERSIST

In the Vindicator’s analysis of the 2021—22 school lead test results, we found more than 60 school districts, including schools for students with disabilities and charter schools, had incorrectly reported to New Jersey Department of Education officials that they had no incidents of excessive lead levels, when in fact they did.

A year later, at least 12 of these schools and school districts still hadn’t reported the lead that they’d found. When contacted, school administrators provided a range of explanations.

It is unclear what, if anything, the New Jersey Department of Education has done to ensure that schools properly test and report their lead levels. The agency is now empowered to enforce regulations in multiple ways, including through audits and the denial of funding. However, when asked if they had ever actually audited or investigated a school that failed to report its lead levels properly, officials instead emphasized that the Department “reaches out to school districts and works directly with local school officials to ensure compliance.”

Anthony Diaz, director of the Newark Water Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates for safe water access, was frustrated by The Vindicator’s findings, but not surprised.

“That’s the key issue here, there are no measures of accountability,” he says. “It always requires community groups…to follow up.” Diaz says New Jersey government agencies need to be more proactive. “That’s what always bothers me. Why can’t anyone do the right thing beforehand?”

POSTSCRIPT

Just three days after Murphy’s 2019 press conference in Bergenfield, he upped the ante with another press conference where he announced a new, bigger “comprehensive strategy” in the war on lead. His plan closely followed a task force report issued by Jersey Water Works, a coalition of advocacy groups seeking to improve water quality in the state.

Murphy announced that he would seek a $500 million bond to begin replacing 350,000 lead service lines across the state – a project estimated to cost $3 billion – and also remove lead paint from homes. Again, media outlets dutifully reported the governor’s plan, but there was at least one skeptic in the shrinking New Jersey press corps. 

“For all the fanfare — and the enthusiastic embrace of Murphy by his environmental and public health allies — there are reasons to doubt his ability to succeed or even to launch the campaign,” Charles Stile, a veteran political columnist with the Bergen Record, wrote the next day. “The proposed $500 million makes for a tidy sum and a sound bite, but it still needs voter approval…But it may not be such an easy sell to voters in a state choking in debt.”

Stile’s words of caution proved to be prescient. The $500 million borrowing plan never even made it to the ballot.  

Instead, Murphy signed a bill in July 2021 that requires public community water systems to inventory and replace lead service lines within 10 years. The new law came with no dedicated state funding for the massive undertaking. Instead, the law states that “each public water system be obligated to replace lead service lines …and be authorized to recoup the costs of lead service line replacements from all subscribers of the public water system.”

When contacted recently by The Vindicator, Stile expanded the scope of his observations of the Governor. “Gov. Murphy is good at grabbing the stage in a crisis and offering reassurance of reform, but often fails on the follow-through,” he said. “Murphy is a master at messaging but not particularly interested in rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard, unglamorous work of repairing government. 

“In general, Murphy moves from news cycle to news cycle, projecting a positive image on social media for a short-attention-span electorate,” Stile said.

“Murphy is a master at messaging but not particularly interested in rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard, unglamorous work of repairing government. In general, Murphy moves from news cycle to news cycle, projecting a positive image on social media for a short-attention span electorate..”

In May, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would provide $123 million from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to help New Jersey identify and replace lead service lines. Murphy reacted to the news with delight.   

“We have committed to replacing every lead service line in New Jersey by 2031,” Murphy said, reacting to the announcement. “Thanks to President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the support of the U.S. EPA, the substantial federal resources pouring into New Jersey will put us a great deal closer to this goal.”  

One could reasonably argue that Murphy’s enthusiasm was overstated. New Jersey received $48 million from Biden’s Infrastructure law in 2022. Adding the recent $123 million award is little more than a drop in the bucket for a project that will cost at least $3 billion.

Last year, the EPA did award New Jersey a $500 million loan to modernize wastewater and drinking water systems, though it is uncertain what portion of that will be used for lead pipe replacement. 

The future of Murphy’s enormous water service line replacement undertaking is precarious. When he leaves office in January 2026, he will pass on his multi-billion vow to his successor, who has no obligation to see it through.  

“There’s a question of political will more broadly to make a stronger push…It requires a huge amount of political willpower and a lot of coordination and that hasn’t been at the top of anyone’s priority list,” Chen says. “Can we coordinate the political will? The jury is still out.”

And then Chen brings the discussion to the place it belongs: “It continues to be disappointing to see children being poisoned by lead every year. “

Journalist Deb Howlett contributed to this report.  

The Jersey Vindicator is a nonprofit news organization advancing accountability in the Garden State..