Joliet outlines $53 million water-main plan for 2026, highlights lead-line replacements

Allison Swisher, the city's Director of Public Utilities, told the council at the April 6 pre-council meeting that the 2026 water main replacement program will cover roughly 20 miles of pipe at a construction cost of about $53 million.

The work is part of a program launched in 2022 that aims to replace roughly 192 miles of water main installed before the 1970s, which the city identified as the segments with the highest leakage. Swisher said the multi-year effort carries a total estimated price tag of about $600 million and is roughly halfway complete.

"The goal is to reduce non-revenue water and to reduce the number of customer water outages due to water main breaks," Swisher said, summarizing the program's twin objectives. She said the 2026 projects are distributed across four of the city's five council districts and that work will be sequenced with other local projects, including Illinois Department of Transportation I-80 improvements.

Swisher outlined the city's funding strategy: construction for this year's tranche is financed through the state's low-interest SRF loan program and the federal WIFIA loan program. She also described operational details: the city assigns inspectors and a resident engineer through consulting partner Burns & McDonnell, posts weekly project updates on joliet.gov/constructionzones, issues bilingual mailers and door tags to affected residents, and uses Everbridge and social media to communicate outages and schedule changes.

Swisher emphasized Joliet's lead service line replacement policy: "When we encounter a lead service line, we coordinate with the homeowner to get inside the home and do that full service line replacement" at no cost to the owner, she said.

Construction on several projects began in April and city staff said they aim to complete the 2026 work by December. Swisher cautioned that site restoration work such as seeding often happens in the fall, so residents may see gaps between apparent completion and landscape restoration.

The city manager noted that loan terms for the 2026 tranche were approved at the prior council meeting; staff said they will continue to coordinate scheduling, traffic impacts and communications as work proceeds.

The council did not take a formal vote on the presentation; the update was provided for council information ahead of construction.