Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Springfield’s city-owned utility, City Water, Light, and Power, continues to get the lead out.

At the city council’s most recent meeting, CWLP’s water division manager, Todd LaFountain, gave a progress update about the ongoing removal of lead service lines. “We’ve replaced and / or eliminated approximately 500 lead service lines from our liability” so far in 2026, said LaFountain. “We did that by attacking our lead liability on four different fronts: the first front is emergency replacement necessitated by failure of the city-side infrastructure. We’ve done seventy of those.”

The other fronts, said LaFountain, are: the planned replacement of more than 100 lines, forty lines which were pinched off because they are no longer used, and an inventory program to dig up lines to determine just what’s being used.

There is also a plan to bring water meters into the future with AMI – “advanced metering infrastructure.” Electric division manager Mike Gorseck said, “It’s a three-year roll-out. We’re close to releasing the installation and bid package.” Benefits, Gorsek said, include “automatically collecting meter readings, detecting power outages, remote reconnects and disconnects, enhanced billing accuracy, and improving customer engagement.”