Water Infrastructure Funding Resources

Access to reliable, clean, and healthy water is an undeniable public health need for all communities. However, with financing resources for funding critical infrastructure projects dwindling at both the state and federal levels, Michigan communities are facing a crisis as they seek to implement necessary repairs and improvements, let alone meet the 2035 federal Lead and Copper Rule deadline to replace 100% of all lead service lines.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Michigan faces an estimated $800 million annual funding gap in needed investments for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. For lead service line replacement alone, costs for the state have been estimated at nearly $2.5 billion in total. Michigan communities find themselves in a bind: The costs of repair and improvements are massive but the resources are extremely limited.

Starting in 2022, the MML Foundation and the League implemented a series of pilots to help communities large and small meet the demands of state and federal mandates, navigate funding, and build financial strategies to fund necessary water infrastructure improvements.

What you’ll find on this page are tools and resources built from what we learned through those pilots – strategies that were developed through partnerships and the experiences of communities like your own.

MI Water Navigator

From 2022-2025, the MI Water Navigator pilot assisted over 174 communities as they worked to understand programs like the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF), Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF), and EGLE Source Water Protection Grant application process, among many others. Our team worked with overburdened communities to answer questions and prepare applications. The work highlighted large gaps in community preparedness, reinforcing the need for and importance of comprehensive assistance for overburdened communities to be competitive in securing federal and state water funding. 

The MI Water Navigator whitepaper is the culmination of the pilot and an insightful resource that can help you understand the nuances of water infrastructure policy, the mandates local leaders must navigate, what we learned from the pilot, and recommendations for how both communities and the state can begin to address some of the significant funding challenges for water infrastructure. 

MI Water Navigator has now fully transitioned to its permanent home as part of the MI Funding Hub—an "all-of-infrastructure" expansion of the MI Water Navigator and the ServeMI City programs.  

Lead Service Line Replacement Best Practices

As local leaders, you must balance many financial needs alongside the demands to meet state and federal mandates. One such group of mandates are the Lead and Copper Rules (LCR) which place a deadline of 2035 for 100% lead service line replacement (federal LCR) and 100% of the burden of cost on municipalities and water utilities (state LCR). 

Every community has different strengths and constraints, but many of the challenges you face may look familiar: funding that doesn't go far enough, limited staff capacity, difficulty reaching residents, long agency approval processes, or engineering and construction approaches that slow down replacement efforts. 

In order to help communities face these challenges, we conducted a pilot from 2024-2025 with the City of Dearborn and Bay City and a 100+ experts and local partners. Through this effort we learned what is working for communities, what challenges they face, and what best practices are available to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and build capital stacks. We are pleased to share product of this work with you; the Lead Service Line Replacement Best Practices Playbook. 

What's in the Lead Service Line Replacement Best Practices Playbook? 

• Eight best practices for reducing LSLR costs, increasing efficiencies, and raising capital. 
• Case studies from the MML Foundation-led financing pilot 
• Peer examples from across the nation of best practices in action 
• Tools, resources, and checklists to customize and implement the best practices that best fit your community 

MI Funding Hub

It's no secret, grants can have a meaningful impact on our communities. MI Funding Hub is a free program to help your community track funding and access tools that help you become more grant savvy. We created MI Funding Hub, an "all-of-infrastructure" funding database, to help communities like yours capitalize on state and federal funding opportunities. Get information on available grants, find other tools to help your community become more grant savvy, or get help answering your grant search questions.  

With support from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, MI Funding Hub is here to help. Get started today by exploring grants and other resources available on this site or jump into the Grant Basics Toolkit here. 

"The MI Funding Hub has been an invaluable tool for our city – showing us 3 separate grants in 2025 that we were able to pursue immediately. I'm not sure we would have even found these opportunities if not for the Funding Hub." – Ben Weiland, CEDAM Fellow, City of Saginaw