The proposed legislation, lawmakers said, is in response to “The Water Drain,” a series of stories the Chicago Tribune published in 2017. The Tribune found that residents in the region’s lowest-income communities pay more for their water — as much as six times more — than residents in the wealthiest towns. The series also found that residents of towns with majority African-American populations pay a monthly water bill that is 20 percent higher than towns with majority white populations. At the same time, some of those towns lose more than a third of their water to leaking infrastructure.