Flint and America's corroded trust Charlie LeDuff, Special to The Detroit News
It's not just about pipes. And it's not just about a city in Michigan.
It's been the subject of protests and debates, but if anything is improving in
Flint it's hard for any of us on the ground to see. One of the city's lead
pipes has been replaced for the benefit of the press, but more than 8,000
additional service lines are likely corroded and still leaching toxic lead. It
took a mom, a pediatrician, and a professor in Virginia to discover Flint's
children were being poisoned. It took cable television to get the nation to
give a damn. Sabrina Hernandez bathes her granddaughter, Hazel, with bottled
water. And that's not all. An outbreak of Legionnaires' disease has killed
at least 9 people and infected 87 others over the last two years. The state
knew. The city knew. The county knew. The federal government knew. But the
public was never told. Legionella bacteria may still be in pipes and hot-water
heaters, waiting for warm weather to spawn. People are frightened in this
hardscrabble town of 99,000 about an hour's drive north of Detroit. And still,
the government tells them nothing. The city's pipe inspector at the water
plant won't return calls. The county health director won't come to his door.
The mayor is busy in a meeting with Jada Pinkett Smith. Republican Gov. Rick
Snyder gives interviews assuring citizens that the water is now safe for
washing and tells me he would bathe his own grandchildren in it. The governor
has no grandchildren. The iconic Vehicle City sign hangs over the entrance to
downtown Flint. On Feb. 19, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led more than 500 people
past abandoned General Motors plants to the Flint water tower in protest of the
water crisis in Flint. That irony is not lost on Sabrina Hernandez, a
39-year-old
bartender who is helping raise her one-year-old granddaughter, Hazel. In
January, state health inspectors came to the downtown bar where Hernandez works
and instructed staff not to serve ice cubes or rinse lettuce with city water.
Hazel, on the other hand? Well, go right ahead and rinse her off, the governor
declares. "It's like living in a Third World country," Hernandez says. "What
are they going to do to us next? It makes you think, was this because we are
poor? It would be easy to blame Snyder for this man-made catastrophe. And he
does deserve much of the blame. Flint is the consequence of his bookish
managerial
style, his insistence on "relentless positive action. And it was Snyder who
stripped Flint's mayor and city council of power and replaced them with a string
of emergency managers who had absolute authority over Flint's finances and
political decisions. It was Snyder's emergency manager who, in a cost-saving
measure, decided to go off the Detroit water system and pipe in water from the
notoriously polluted Flint River instead. Snyder knew the water was bad.
Everybody knew the water was bad. E. coli and boil notices and mysterious
rashes were immediately the stuff of headlines. Michigan officials began
secretly
trucking in water for a state building in Flint. The water from the Flint River
was so corrosive that General Motors workers noticed it rusted their parts.
After six months, GM switched its plant back to using Detroit water. The Flint
City Council soon voted to do the same, but the vote was ceremonial. The
city council had no real influence anymore. Jerry Ambrose Flint's fourth
emergency manager in less than four years vetoed the resolution, calling it
financially
"incomprehensible. In fairness, Flint has a long history of being financially
incomprehensible. In 2002, hollowed out by three decades of industrial decline,
Flint had a $30 million operating deficit. The mayor was recalled and an
emergency financial manager was installed. Even though power was returned to
elected
officials, the books were never balanced and the city routinely blew
multimillion-dollar holes in its budget. The new mayor, accused of bribery and
lying
about the city's finances, resigned for "health reasons. Enter Snyder and his
band of bean counters. All the while, Detroit's water utility was fleecing
Flint, charging one of the poorest cities in the United States an average of
$910 a year per household, nearly three times the national average. It is
worth remembering that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to
28 years in federal prison for, among other things, bid-rigging in the water
department. So in 2013, Flint's civic leaders pushed for the construction of
their own water system running parallel to Detroit's. It wasn't necessary;
Detroit's water was perfectly fine, if overpriced. But think of the jobs. Think
of the money. The chamber of commerce wanted it. The trade unions wanted
it. The contractors wanted it. The Democratic City Council rubber-stamped it.
So did the Democratic mayor. And so, the Republican governor's people signed
off on the new multimillion-dollar water system even though Vehicle City was
broke. How would Flint pay for this redundant infrastructure when it had no
money? Simple, borrow the money from Hazel's future. Then raise her
grandmother's water bill charging even more for the substandard Flint River
water than
for the Detroit water. The savings to the city would be funneled back into
upgrading Flint's mothballed water treatment plant as well as provide a revenue
stream toward the new water system. Just one problem the necessary upgrades
weren't made to the old plant before people were served water from a river
known as a dumping ground for corpses and car batteries. After 18 months of
denials from Snyder's bureaucrats, Flint went back on Detroit's water system
in October last year. Hazel's grandmother is still being overcharged. Of course
she is: Those bond payments begin this year, and if Flint defaults it could
create another financial emergency, and the city might once again go back into
the hands of a Snyder-appointed emergency manager. On April 22, Michigan
Attorney General Bill Schuette indicted three mid-level managers for covering
up the extent of the problem, and Synder promised to drink the water for
a month to assuage fears. But public trust is already corroded. Flint's water
crisis has become a symbol that resonates across America but a symbol of
what? Of working-class decline? Disregard for a majority-black population?
Bloated government? The push to cut and privatize public services? Even as Flint
became front-page news and federal water safety protocols were exposed to be
laughable, the Obama administration proposed slashing a quarter of a billion
dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency's testing budget to help meet
spending cuts imposed by Congress. Experts warn there are many other cities
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Newark, New Jersey, for instance with water that is
as bad or worse. Is Flint an outlier or a harbinger of a Mad Max future
of crumbling roads, joblessness, and poisoned water? One thing is for sure: The
rage felt by the residents of Flint is little different from the rage felt
in other quarters of America the feeling that you're losing ground, that the
deck is stacked against you and the people on top don't give a damn. "I don't
want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything," Hernandez says. "But it
makes me wonder if it's not intentional. This community, we don't have a
voice. Nobody listens to the poor people that are, you know, barely making it.
