From John Culhane, at Slate: Residents of Flint have been drinking toxic tap water since late 2014, but only in recent days has this public health and human rights disaster finally gotten the attention it deserves. Hillary Clinton directed angry attention to the problem during the recent Democratic debate. President Obama called it "inexplicable and inexcusable." Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder apologized for what he called a "catastrophe" during his State of the State address Tuesday, but that's not likely to quell calls for his resignation.
An investigation is under way, and those who knew that the water wasn’t safe but actively encouraged the public to continue drinking it could be criminally liable. The sorry situation, in a city with a majority black population and a median income at about half the state average, is a new and powerful weapon in the Black Lives Matter movement — because in Flint, they pointedly did not. It’s a case that practically defines the term “environmental racism.”
And while criminal accountability and political consequences are appropriate, they won’t do anything to help the people who drank, cooked with, bathed in and cleaned with the contaminated water and have suffered injury as a result. Three class-action lawsuits aim for financial redress for Flint residents. The suits present a devastating chronicle of official misconduct by state and local officials, and Michigan lawmakers should take steps to atone for this awful story as quickly as possible. The best way to do that is by establishing a fund to compensate victims for their personal injuries, their property damage, and the decrease in the value of their homes.
A brief account: In early 2014, Flint decided to save money by ending its 50-year contract with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, thereby switching the city’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. This (supposedly) money-saving action was in dumb defiance of a 2011 report, commissioned by the city itself, that declared the river’s water too corrosive to safely use without anti-corrosive agents.
What followed was a course of official misconduct scarcely to be believed. In apparent disregard of the federal Safe Drinking Water Lead and Copper Rule, no anti-corrosive agents were used. Lead leached into the water supply and was measured at unacceptably high levels. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is charged with concealing a threefold spike in the lead levels of children younger than 6. The Environmental Protection Agency measured lead levels in the river high enough to be classified as “hazardous waste,” and a presentation by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan found similar toxicity in a private home.
Lead was not the only toxic culprit. The complaint also points to 10 deaths over an 18-month period from Legionnaires’ disease, a spike attributed to the presence of legionella bacteria in the water supply.
The lawsuits claim that state and local officials ignored these and other red flags, and that Flint’s “emergency manager” (who effectively ran Flint when the state wrested control of the city from local officials some years earlier) refused to reconnect to the Detroit Water supply long after it became clear that this was the only responsible course of action. Officials with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality are also charged with flat-out lying to the public about the safety of the water.
After this gruesome story oozed out, Flint’s new emergency manager finally approved reconnecting Flint to water from Lake Huron. It’ll take time for the water to “recover”; until then, the National Guard, along with state and local officials, have been going door to door with filters, lead test kits and bottled water. …
Gov. Snyder recently called the Flint water disaster “my Katrina,” belatedly creating a chillingly apt term for a crisis made worse by government inaction. As I argued several years ago, the negligent actions of the government in creating and then failing to respond to the Hurricane Katrina disaster justified a compensation fund for victims. That such a fund was never created — while two very expensive funds for the victims of Sept. 11 were — speaks loudly about whose lives matter, and whose don’t. The Flint River Compensation Fund would be a way of starting to talk back.
FROM THE CENTER: Time now for long-term thinking.
From Mark Schauer, in the Detroit Free Press: A health crisis requires immediate action, a laser-like focus on protecting the public health, and a hands-on leader who will work doggedly to hold people accountable.
Tragically, the people of Flint never had such a leader in Gov. Rick Snyder. And his administration’s dangerously slow and incompetent response to the Flint water crisis made this catastrophe even worse.
This man-made disaster actually started in December 2012, when the governor ignored the will of the people by signing a new emergency manager law to replace the one that voters had just repealed.
The infamous decision to switch Flint’s water supply in 2014 occurred under Snyder’s emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who had near-total control over city government.
Flint residents started complaining almost immediately about the disgusting yellow sludge pouring from their faucets. But instead of responding promptly, Snyder’s chief of staff said Flint residents were “basically getting blown off.” The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality not only ignored warnings of increased lead levels from the EPA and nationally-respected water researchers, but Snyder’s administration tried to discredit a local doctor in the press after she exposed the high lead levels in the blood of Flint children.
In August, Snyder’s office quietly facilitated the donation of 1,500 water filters from anonymous donors. It took another two months before the governor publicly acknowledged there was any lead in the water, and another three months of growing national news attention to ask the federal government for aid.
The governor likes to call himself a “tough nerd,” but this crisis has shown — as I said during the 2014 campaign — he’s missing a column from his spreadsheets, and it’s called “people.”
What Flint needs now are answers and long-term solutions: Refunding Flint water bills for the entire period the water is contaminated, and providing free cartridge replacements for water filters; pledging to replace all lead pipelines in Flint by the end of next year and statewide by the end of this decade; committing long-term funding to mitigate developmental challenges faced by children who were poisoned by lead-tainted water.
FROM THE RIGHT: Democrats caused this problem.
By the Editors of the National Review: What we learned from Hurricane Katrina: No matter what happens, it's never the governor's fault.
What we’ve learned from the contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich.: It’s always the governor’s fault. A bit of background first. Flint has relatively high levels of lead in its drinking water, a cause for legitimate concern. This is a result not so much of the source of its drinking water, the Flint River, as of the city’s failure to treat the water, which, without the proper additives, leaches lead and other contaminants from pipes.
Prior to and separate from the current water crisis, Flint was in a state of financial ruination. In one of the most liberal cities in the United States, Flint’s Democrat-dominated government did what Democrat-monopoly governments do in practically every city they control: It spent money as quickly as it could while at the same time carpet-bombing the tax base with inept municipal services, onerous regulations, high taxes, and the like.
As a result of this, a bankrupt Flint entered into a state of receivership, meaning that an emergency manager — or emergency financial manager, depending upon Michigan’s fluctuating fiscal-emergency law — was appointed by state authorities and given power to supersede local elected officials in some matters, especially financial ones. The contamination happened while Flint was under the authority of an emergency manager who, though a Democrat, had been appointed to the post by Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder. He was, in fact, the most recent in a long line of emergency managers, Flint having failed for years to emerge from its state of fiscal emergency.
Because the Democratic emergency manager was appointed by a Republican governor, the people from whom one expects cheap theatrics of this sort have declared the situation in Flint to be a Republican scandal. Not so fast. Before the appointment of the (Democratic) emergency manager, Flint’s elected mayor and city council (Democrats) had decided to sever the city’s relationship with its drinking-water supplier, which was at the time the Detroit water authority. Flint intended to join a regional water authority that would pipe water in from Lake Huron, a project that was scheduled to take three years to come online.
In a fit of pique, Detroit (a city under unitary Democratic control) immediately moved to terminate Flint’s water supply, leaving the city high and literally dry. Flint is a mess made by Democrats, made worse by the Democrats in Detroit, and ignored by the Democrats in the White House. At this point, somebody — no one will quite admit to being the responsible party — decided to rely temporarily on the Flint River.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality — no hotbed of covert Republican activity — seems at the very least to have suppressed worrisome findings about Flint’s water supply, and may have done worse than that. The federal Environmental Protection Agency — whose Democratic chief was appointed by our Democratic president — knew for months that there were concerns about Flint’s water, and did nothing.
In sum: The Democratic government of a Democratic city destroys that city’s finances so thoroughly that it must go into state receivership; a Democratic emergency manager signs off on a consensus plan to use a temporary water source; the municipal authorities in that Democratic city responsible for treating and monitoring drinking water fail to do their job; a state agency whose employees work under the tender attention of SEIU Local 517 fails to do its job overseeing the local authorities; Barack Obama’s EPA, having been informed about the issue, keeps mum. Republican scandal.
Gov. Snyder, of course, does bear some responsibility here and, to his credit, has acknowledged as much. No, no reasonable person expects the governor to show up in Flint with a white glove and personally eyeball what the local water-treatment plant is up to, but the people he appointed did an insufficient job. It is ironic, given the tenor of the denunciations, that Snyder is as guilty of excessive bipartisanship as of any other offense: In his desire to keep Flint under the watch of an emergency manager with whom the locals were comfortable — a Democrat — he may have overlooked better candidates with more thoroughgoing approaches to reform.
If you’ve followed Flint’s history of nearly criminal misgovernance, you know that what was needed was more iron fist and less velvet glove. So while those who fault Snyder are not entirely wrong, what is deeply dishonest is the story put forward by such people as the filmmaker Michael Moore, who enjoys pretending to be from gritty, blue-collar Flint (he actually hails from an affluent suburb nearby), that this is, somehow, the result of the Republican approach to government or conservative governing ideas. That is absurd.
Flint is a mess made by Democrats, made worse by the Democrats in Detroit, and ignored by the Democrats in the White House. The worst that can be said of the Republican on the scene is that he failed to save the local Democrats from the worst effects of their own excesses. But that is the Democrats’ approach to calculating the chain of responsibility: Go up the ladder or down, as needed, until a Republican is located, or a private firm, in which case capitalism can be blamed. The Democratic monopolies in Flint, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Newark? Somehow, somewhere, there’s a Republican responsible for that, even if he has to be brought in on an overnight flight from Oklahoma.
Flint is nothing more than a miniature Detroit. And Detroit is what Democrats do.
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