RE: Brave blue world8 Dec 2020 09:02
As Flint was slowly poisoned, Snyder’s inner circle failed to act
BY JULIE MACK, RON FONGER AND JOHN COUNTS
May 3, 2016
A year ago, Gov. Rick Snyder was stoking rumors of a presidential bid as a metrics-driven Republican whose ability to run government like a business transformed a troubled state.
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• Health department slow to respond
• EPA played a role in crisis
• Snyder's staff responds to questions
But the leadership style so lauded a year ago -- the emphasis on problem-solving over politics, the laser-like focus on the bottom line, the reliance on emergency financial managers to whip troubled cities into shape -- has proven to be his undoing. Now, he is viewed as the person ultimately responsible for one of the nation’s biggest public-health disasters in memory -- the lead contamination of a water system serving 100,000 people, and a possible link between the water system and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that killed 12 people.
Snyder has apologized repeatedly for the crisis and has vowed to fix Flint. But, to this day, he and his administration push a storyline that diminishes their role.
It has never been fully explained how crucial information didn't reach the governor, or why the Snyder administration allowed the people of Flint to use undrinkable water for so long.
Red flags were being waved furiously for a year before Snyder took action, as Snyder's top aides -- including his chief of staff and his legal counsel -- expressed concern to the governor about Flint water quality reports.
"If they weren't passing along those assessments to the governor, that's a huge problem," said Eric Rothstein, a member of the Snyder-appointed Flint Water Advisory Task Force. "But, if they were passing along those assessments and the governor wasn't taking action, that's a huge problem, too."
Snyder declined requests to be interviewed for this story, but his spokesman Ari Adler submitted written answers to questions from MLive.
"The Governor isn't going to get into playing what-ifs on what staff could have or should have told him," Adler wrote. "His focus is on fixing the problems in Flint and on changing direction on how we are doing things in state government, all the way up to the Executive Office."
Deflecting the blame
A team of MLive reporters conducted an investigation reviewing thousands of emails and other documents and interviewing numerous key players in an attempt to get to the bottom of what exactly happened in Flint.
That investigation shows the water crisis was an unintended consequence of the state's takeover of Flint in 2011, after which a series of four emergency managers were given near-dictatorial powers so they could cut the city's budget and bring the books in line.
Among the cost-saving measures: Change the city's water supply and
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