Janine Jackson interviewed Chris Savage about the Flint, Michigan, water-poisoning for the January 22, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Chris Savage: “This finger-pointing at local officials is quite laughable, quite frankly, because these people really had no power.” (photo: Eclectablog)
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JANINE JACKSON: Representing some of the insult added to the grievous injury inflicted on the people of Flint, Michigan, whose water was poisoned with lead: a video explaining how to install a lead-reducing filter that pointed out that those filters were distributed “at no charge to the citizens of Flint by the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services.”
Well, money is in many ways at the core of this story of man-made disaster in Flint, but it’s also a story about democracy. Our next guest has been following the events closely. Chris Savage is owner/publisher of the news and commentary site Eclectablog.com, tracking Michigan and national politics. He joins us now by phone from Dexter, Michigan.
Welcome to CounterSpin, Chris Savage.
CHRIS SAVAGE: Thank you very much. Good to be here.
JJ: Well, there is a painful irony that when many are to blame for a problem, sometimes that means no one is held accountable. Let’s start to peel the onion here. Decisions were made in 2014 about water-sourcing, but why those decisions were made, by whom, the way those decisions were made—that has its roots in earlier events. If you had to isolate some of the key moments that brought us to where we are today, what would those be? Where would that start?
CS: Well, the whole thing really began in 2013. Prior to that, Flint had been considering changing where it got its water. It was at the time getting its water from the city of Detroit, through the Detroit Water & Sewage Department; they had a nearly 50-year contract with them. However, the water was very expensive; they had some of the highest water costs in the country, actually, in Flint, Michigan.
They joined up with other regional concerns, like Genesee County and other groups around the area, and decided to form what was called the Karegnondi Water Authority. And they’re building a pipeline and a water treatment plant to provide their own water, rather than purchasing it from Detroit. That happened in April of 2013. Several days after they did that, the Detroit Water & Sewage Department exercised its option to cancel their current contract with the city of Flint, which meant they had to give one year advance notice. This was done, by the way, with Detroit being under an emergency manager as well. So both cities were actually under the control of emergency managers at the time, who were making all of the decisions for the local government.
So what transpired in the following year was that Flint had to make some decisions about where they were going to get their water, or if they were going to renegotiate their contract with Detroit. Just prior to when Detroit’s contract ended with them, in April of 2014, the Detroit Sewer & Water Department sent Darnell Earley, who was at the time the Flint emergency manager, a letter saying you can stay on our system, you’re not being kicked off, but they were going to renegotiate the contract. And of course, because of this, their water rates were going to go even higher. And I find some brutal irony in this, that both cities were under emergency managers, and yet you have one city basically exploiting the other city for higher water costs.
JJ: Right.
CS: So Darnell Earley at that point just sent them a letter back, saying thanks but no thanks. He had made the decision they were going to go to the Flint River. And in April of 2014, that is when that happened. And that really was the fateful decision, that decision not to remain on Detroit water, but to switch to the Flint River in the interim while the Karegnondi pipeline was being completed. And it will not be completed until this summer, so for about a year and a half they were going to have to pay exorbitant rates to Detroit, and decided to go to the Flint River.
And this, I should say, is—the idea that they would go to Flint had been considered in the past, and a report was sent to the state of Michigan in 2013, telling them that going to the Flint River would require considerably more water treatment, including phosphate treatment to prevent the mineral scale and biofilm on the insides of people’s pipes from being eroded away and revealing the lead solder underneath. And it’s that lead solder in the pipelines going from the main water line in the street to people’s homes that is the source of the lead in people’s drinking water.
JJ: Well, if i can just reprise briefly the political part of that….
CS: Sure.
JJ: Flint ended their contract with the Detroit water system because they were building a new one. But in the interim they could have continued getting water. Before that new pipeline came on line, they needed to get water from somewhere. They had the option of continuing on with Detroit at higher prices or—
CS: Yes.
JJ: —going to Flint. And the irony or whatever is that these are two cities under emergency managers, and they’re basically having—you called it a pissing match. You know, these two—
CS: Yeah.
JJ: —these two emergency managers are saying, well, sure, you can use our water because you can’t get your new Lake Huron water yet, but you’ve got to do it at these rates. And these are both—I mean, they’re emergency managers for a reason, supposedly because they’re trying to save these communities money.
CS: Theoretically, yes. And that’s accurate except for one thing, and that is that Detroit was the one that made the decision to end that contract, it was not Flint. Flint had intended to stay on their system until they flipped the switch over to their new pipeline. It was Detroit that said, you’re going to be cut off in a year unless you renegotiate the contract.
JJ: Then, when the problems start to happen, when the water is switched to the Flint River as a source and the anticipated, as you note, problems start to come up, then we talk about response from the governor’s office. Governor Rick Snyder is aware that problems are being reported and does not nothing, but something somehow worse than nothing.
News report on Flint water.
CS: Yes. They made the switch in April 2014. Almost immediately, people in Flint began to report this disgustingly discolored water coming from their taps. The water smelled foul, people are getting rashes, people are getting sick. They found that there were high levels of E. coli, so there was a boil-water alert for some time. They began treating with chlorine to fix that problem. And because of the overtreatment with chlorine, it started creating trihalomethanes, which are a byproduct of disinfection. They exceeded the Clean Water Act’s regulations on those. That had to be treated. So they had a lot of problems before the lead issue manifested itself.
It took a while for that water of the Flint River, which is more corrosive than the Detroit River, to sort of erode away this coating that’s on the inside of these pipelines. And it was basically around January of 2015 that the lead problem started to become manifest. Reports that were being sent to Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, which is in charge of approving all water treatment plants for municipalities, they had been doing testing according to guidelines, and they were using the guidelines incorrectly.
They were supposed to be testing a hundred different high-risk homes at the tap and then, if the lead level in the 90th percentile was above 15 parts per billion, then they were supposed to take action. This is required by federal law. They had only taken actually 72 samples, which they were supposed to take a hundred, and some of those had spiked pretty high, putting them in the action zone in the 90th percentile. And so people that were responsible for that reporting were instructed by DEQ to remove two of the samples, and that brought them down below the action level of 15 parts per billion, and so they could continue on without further treatment.
The ironic part about this, and the really just disgusting part about this, is that that phosphate treatment would have cost them about $60 per day to do. It was very inexpensive to do, this phosphate treatment, which is very effective at maintaining that film that covers the lead, and protects the water from being exposed to lead. But the DEQ signed off on the treatment that did not include the phosphate, and that’s why the Snyder administration—Governor Snyder is our governor—and his administration is complicit in this. Because his department was the one that signed off on this treatment, lack of treatment I should say, in terms of phosphate, so.
Basically, Governor Snyder claims he didn’t know about problems until October of last year. Reports of high lead really began to become manifest in the summer of last year. A couple of people in particular are sort of what I would consider the heroes in this.
One is Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is a pediatrician at Hurley’s Children’s Hospital, who began testing the lead levels of Flint children and seeing astonishingly high lead levels, levels that can result in permanent damage to these kids. Because it goes into their bones, it can actually be passed on to their children as well.
And the other is Mark Edwards, who’s a civil engineering prof at Virginia Tech. He came up and began doing some water-testing of his own, found extremely high levels all over the city of Flint, and he sort of blew the whistle on this.
The US EPA, during the summer last year, had been trying to get Flint to take some action. They have been criticized because they didn’t make it public. These were all internal discussions, and they probably do share some of the blame on this.
JJ: Right.
CS: But the fact that all of this was happening, and DEQ did know what was going on, really puts the bullseye, in my opinion, or the crosshairs on the Snyder administration in terms of culpability.
JJ: Well, headlines like Newsweek magazine from October, “Flint, the Cheapskate City that Poisoned Its Children,” they certainly seem to taking the tone of blaming local officials. What I’m hearing you say is that this really wasn’t a decision made by local officials; it has everything to do with the state-appointed manager. So I’d like to ask you a little bit about the role of emergency managers and what that has meant in Michigan. Michigan has even a kind of turbocharged emergency management law.
CS: Yes.
JJ: It’s even different than other states. Tell us about that.
CS: Emergency management began, actually, during Jim Blanchard’s administration many years ago, back three decades ago now, and continued under Jennifer Granholm. At that time, they were called emergency financial managers, and their responsibility was to come into cities that were facing financial crises and try to get control over their costs and their revenues and that type of thing.
It was when the Snyder administration came in in 2011 that things really changed. They passed what became Public Act 4, and the name changed from emergency financial managers to emergency managers. They removed the word financial, and there’s a reason for that. Partly it’s because school emergency managers were then allowed to dabble in things like curriculum. And these are not necessarily trained educators, so that was very disturbing to a lot of people who are involved in the education realm. But they also did things like allow them to renegotiate or cancel contracts with unions, and things like that. And that was something that was not in their arsenal of tools, if you want to call it that, prior to that.
Essentially, what happened with emergency managers is that they replaced the local elected officials. They were actually able to fire local elected officials if they chose to do so and replace them on their city councils, or whatever the local governing body was, and that did happen in some cities. But it was basically an abridgement of democracy. It was taking away power from elected officials and handing it over to a single person who’s appointed by the governor, and that person made all of the decisions.
So this finger-pointing at local officials is quite laughable, quite frankly, because these people really had no power. The emergency manager had the final say on everything, and that’s why we’re pointing the finger at people like Darnell Earley and other people in the Snyder administration, because they literally ran the city. And, you know, you can’t take control of a city and take credit for all of the things that happen that you consider to be good, but then shirk responsibility for any of the things that go horribly wrong. And in this case, this was really the most epically, horribly bad thing that could happen under an emergency manager, is poisoning of the city’s residents.
Cartoon by Politico‘s Matt Wuerker.
JJ: Well, Flint, as listeners know, was hit hard by deindustrialization. More than 40 percent of the residents earn below the federal poverty line. It’s also predominantly black, and it’s been noted that cities under emergency managers, as Chris Lewis in the Atlantic wrote, cities under emergency managers contain just 9 percent of Michigan’s population but about half the state’s African-American residents.
CS: I was actually the person that broke that story, to be honest with you, and I did the calculations. Once Detroit got an emergency manager, literally over half of the African-Americans did not have locally elected democratic government. And it’s a shocking statistic, I think.
JJ: Well, I appreciate that. Because that is—it’s still kind of on the back burner in terms of coverage of this story, but it seems important. It’s hard to miss that this anti-democratic method is being carried out in a place and in places that, No. 1, the state is already disinvested from.
CS: True.
JJ: And then, as you’ve just said, that it’s overwhelmingly African-Americans who are being deprived of political rights.
CS: That’s right. And the people who defend emergency management will point to, you know, corruption and malfeasance and incompetence in these areas. And their position is that emergency managers are needed to sort of cut through all of this corruption and incompetence and make hard decisions that local officials are incapable of making.
But there’s a few things wrong with that. One is that local officials don’t have the ability to do some of the things that emergency managers are capable of doing, like forcing unions to renegotiate their contracts. But it also forces people to have — they don’t have constituents anymore. I mean, these emergency managers are only responsible to the state, and they’re only armed with tools of what I call destruction, instead of construction and renewal. They’re not able to do things that will increase revenues, for example, in cities; they can only cut costs. And that’s where corners get cut, and that’s where things happen.
So that’s why we see a lot of privatization happening, and we see union contracts being broken. And this idea that they’ve come in and replaced all this corruption and incompetence has been put to lie by the fact that many of these cities have been under emergency managers for many years, they have been under emergency managers, in some cases like Flint, more than once. And in the case of Detroit public schools, that’s been under an emergency manager for many years, they have a bigger budget deficit now than they have ever had. It’s almost a half a billion dollars. So it’s very clear that this emergency management concept just does not work.
JJ: No.
CS: They are not fixing these problems. And it just shows you that the problems are not related to corruption and incompetence, at least in all cases, but rather it’s due to their circumstances. And like you say, it’s disinvestment, it’s the collapse of the automotive industry in Michigan. If you look at these cities, most of them are former automotive cities or cities that had a major industry that left. So, for example, in Benton Harbor, they had a flight of local jobs because of plants closing.
When you crater an urban center because you remove the jobs, you’re left with a population that still has all of the same needs from its government, things like water and fire protection and law enforcement and things like that. But they’re operating on a budget that is just dramatically reduced.
JJ: Right.
CS: These are not things that you can fix by cutting costs and by renegotiating union contracts. They require investment, they require urban renewal, and they require us to build these cities back up to what they were at one time.
JJ: Well, what can you do but laugh about the fact that Rick Snyder now says he wants to give Flint back to local control?
CS: Yeah. It’s a little ironic that they’ve created this giant catastrophe in Flint, and now all of a sudden he wants to return control to the local mayor.
JJ: Well, Rick Snyder is now releasing his emails, and they’re showing that they were dismissive of critics, certainly. We saw that in a story yesterday.
CS: Indeed.
JJ: But do you think there are really any substantive surprises to be found there? Do we need more information? I’m sure it will shed light, but are we really missing the key ingredients to move forward with trying to fix this?
CS: One of the striking things about the emails that he released is that they’re only for 2014 to 2015. And as I described earlier, many of the decisions that were made that led up to this catastrophe in Flint were in 2013. And he’s also not requiring his staffers and other administrators to release their emails as well. And so we really don’t know the full story, and a lot of the decisions that got made happened before 2014. So there’s still quite a hue and cry over this.
And the reason for this is because Michigan is one of just a handful of states that shields the governor from FOIA requests. So he did this email release voluntarily, but he was politically forced to do that, I think, because of the national and international attention that’s been focused on this. But he was not by law compelled to do that.
JJ: Right.
CS: And I do give a lot of credit to our local media. I don’t always do that, it seems like. The Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, MLive, these organizations have done a very good job over the last couple of years in following this story and making sure that people knew what was going on. In an interesting turn, the ACLU actually hired an investigative journalist, Curt Guyette, and he’s done a lot of the FOIA work, and has revealed a lot of the information that we have today that has shined a light on the Snyder administration, and the ways that they have so tragically failed the Flint residents.
JJ: Well, we are very grateful to see that media attention now, and it’s obviously very much to the credit of local reporters that they created a baseline of information so that now that national and even international media come in, there’s work–they can trace the story back.
There are some media tendencies that concern me. I just want to ask you, finally–you know, there’s a tendency, as I said earlier, to say, oh, there’s a whole lot of blame to go around here, and that kind of ends up sort of frittering away to nothing.
CS: Yeah.
JJ: When you hear about charging people with “politicizing” the scandal, I think that’s just surreal. I mean, it is a political scandal.
But I wanted to move you on to the protests and what people are doing. Because we know that people aren’t motivated by blood lust; they just think people have to pay for this or there’ll be no downside to these decisions, and it’ll be just kind of a furor and nothing will come of it.
CS: That’s right.
JJ: So what’s been going on protest-wise, and what are people calling for?
CS: We had a very big protest on the capitol steps; well, actually across the street from the capitol at the City Hall on Tuesday. After the press conference was over, they all headed over to the capitol, where the State of the State address was being given by Governor Snyder. They were loud enough that you could actually hear them, if you were watching it on television, you could actually hear the protestors in the background on the television broadcast.
JJ: Great.
CS: That created a lot of tension, of course. There were the protests at Governor Snyder’s $2 million condo in downtown Ann Arbor the day prior to that. And then, over the weekend in Flint, there were a couple of protests there as well, with Jesse Jackson coming to shine some light on it and to bring some attention.
There are also some lawsuits involved. There are at least three, possibly four lawsuits going on right now. Back in August, a class action suit was filed that was related to the costs of Flint water. The thing to keep in mind is that throughout this entire thing, while people were not able to use their water, they were still getting the highest bills in the country for their water–
JJ: Crazy…
CS: –in some cases several hundred dollars a month, $800 a month in one case.
JJ: For this water that was poisoning them.
CS: That you couldn’t drink, that’s right. You couldn’t use it for what it was intended. This past week, there were two more class action suits filed, one requiring the state to take responsibility for the water payments, and to reimburse these people who have been charged exorbitant fees, and in some cases had their water shut off for not paying those fees. Then the second one was filed to hold the state liable for the things that they’ve done in terms of poisoning their own residents.
There are massive water drives happening all over the state, of course. The labor unions have really kicked in big. They’re been delivering semi trucks full of water, and that will continue for some time, I think, until the water again is once again safe to drink in Flint.
JJ: Let me ask you, finally and briefly, what you would say to journalists who are aware that the story is going to be a big story this week, but they’ve got to continue to keep their eyes on it, right? Because some of this is not going to happen for weeks or months or maybe years.
CS: That’s absolutely right. And this is also a problem that probably other cities face as well. It only became manifest in Flint because of the change in the water source. But there are many homes in Michigan, as well as across the country, and particularly in cities that have older homes and things like this, where lead solder was used for many years. This is a problem that we face and needs to be addressed.
But I also just would ask that journalists dig a little deeper. There’s plenty of evidence out there that this decision was made by an emergency manager and by the state of Michigan. Final sign-off, for example, in the Flint River switch, we find out from the emails that were released yesterday, came from the state treasurer, who was in charge of the emergency managers. It’s far too simplistic to just blame the local officials on this. They didn’t have the local control and the ability to make these decisions. And the Flint city council never once voted to go to the Flint River. That was a decision that was signed off on by the emergency manager and by the state treasurer.
So let’s get the facts out there straight. There are, like you say, plenty of people that have dropped the ball on this. But at some point, the buck has to stop, and I hope that Governor Snyder’s statement that he apologizes and is going to make this right, I hope he does do that. But this is going to require over a billion dollars, probably, in Flint to rectify, and we’ve got to find that money. And my biggest fear, really, is that it will come from other things that we value, like education.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Chris Savage. You can find his work on this as well as other issues online at Eclectablog.com. Chris Savage, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
CS: Thanks, Janine. It’s been a pleasure.
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.