Today Among Our Benevolent Laboratories of Democracy

Citizens in Flint, Michigan have been drinking, cooking and bathing in poisonous water. The decisions to expose Flint residents to known risks were made by the unaccountable “emergency managers” who are allegedly able to solve the problems created by a city’s declining tax base.  Governor Rick Snyder (R, what a surprise!) almost certainly knew about it months ago and certainly didn’t care:

It would be hard to conjure a more damning piece of evidence than this. Snyder didn’t declare a state of emergency regarding the water crisis until this week, but at least five months ago his top deputy was complaining about the administration having “blown off” the residents of Flint who were “scared and worried about the health impacts” of the water they were being asked to drink.

What needle does the governor conceivably thread here? At best, Snyder can plead complete ignorance—of the decision to temporarily pull water from the Flint River, of the water’s toxicity, of its effect on its consumers, of what his administration may have known. Though that might be the first step to protecting himself legally, it would paint him as a deeply negligent governor, one whose special “emergency manager” program directly led to an environmental disaster and who had no connection with a chief of staff who was trying to stop that disaster from becoming even worse.

The other reality would be that Snyder knew that Flint’s drinking water was perilously toxic but just decided not to do anything about it. Flint ended up pulling from the Flint River for 18 months, starting April 2014 and ending in October 2015, when it once again began buying water from Detroit. In that period of time, the city and state, as directed by Snyder, could have taken any number of opportunities to disconnect Flint’s water supply from its poisoned river, but did not.

Almost immediately, residents of Flint reported that the water looked dirty, smelled foul and tasted bad, a story that local reporters picked up at least as early as June 2014. People who came in contact with the water reported losing hair and contracting rashes. In July 2014, Flint announced it was flushing out hydrants in an effort to make the discolored drinking water disappear. In October 2014, the local GM plant made a deal to privately purchase water because it noticed that Flint’s water was corroding and rusting its parts. In December 2014, a city employee tested the water of a woman whose son had picked up a rash after swimming in a pool and found that the lead level in her water was 104 parts per billion, about seven times greater than the lead level the EPA deems “actionable.”

The Detroit Free Press is shocked, shocked to discover this dime’s worth of difference:

It’s not just derelict — it invokes inglorious comparison to other callous and insensitive official responses to tragedy. Think of the shameful federal response to Hurricane Katrina, where the same lack of urgency delayed life-saving aid. The poverty rate in Flint is 40%; 52% of Flint residents are African-American. And so we are prompted to ask: How would the state have responded to a crisis of such proportions in a community with more wealth and power?

[…]

This newspaper twice endorsed Rick Snyder for the state’s highest elected office — and for his re-election in 2014, it was a close call, tipped in the governor’s favor principally by his first-term record of getting things done. Snyder prides himself on relentless, positive action — his mantra — and moved at a frenetic pace of law and policy-making (sometimes to our liking, sometimes not) that argued more strongly for him than his 2014 opponent.

Heckuva job, Freep!

Anna Clark has more on the journalist who helped uncover what was being done to Flint.