HUBBARD — Colored flags popped up around the city’s sidewalks throughout April, and Mayor Ben Kyle explained their purpose — as well as what’s next.

Kyle on Friday elaborated further on an early April announcement via social media, regarding the city receiving direct assistance from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency for lead service line identification.

The efforts build upon guidelines from the United States EPA after the organization published its first Lead and Copper Rule in 1991 to monitor the substances’ presence in drinking water.

The U.S. EPA finalized revisions to the rule in 2021, including milestone dates for public water systems to build and document service line material inventories. In 2024, an improvement was added requiring systems to improve monitoring and reduce lead in drinking water.

“There was a company called Arcadis, and they were in the city for a little while, going out and marking random locations throughout the city,” Kyle said.

Kyle said the company would then do “pothole testing” by making a small burrow in the street’s right-of-way near the water valve to determine whether the waterline is made of lead, copper or plastic.

Kyle said approximately 800 residents will be randomly selected and notified to provide data to perform a “predictive model” of all service line materials in the city.

“We have to meet all the guidelines by 2034, so we’ve been actively working on all that,” Kyle said.

He outlined in an email some of the city’s activities to meet the guidelines over the past two years, with the city’s water department being awarded assistance from the Ohio EPA for service line inventory development and material determination in 2024.

The email states the city applied for funding for further material determination in 2025 through Arcadis, which includes customer canvassing, service line excavation and predictive modeling to determine, verify, and document the service line materials within the system, building up to the company’s 2026 activities in the city.

“The real message is that blue flags are popping up in the right-of-ways, and that’s the city marking that water valve,” Kyle said. “There’s gonna be an actual small dig that’ll occur over the next few weeks after the property owner is notified, so they’ll be mailed something.”

Kyle credited the state’s EPA for their additional funding, noting that the funds have enabled the city to “aggressively attempt” to meet the federal government’s deadlines and requirements.

In terms of the city’s plans going into 2027, Kyle said officials plan to continue working with the state’s EPA to find additional funding.