The Poisoned City, page 14
In the spring of 2011, Michigan broadened its emergency management system. Public Act 4, signed by Governor Rick Snyder, became one of the most expansive laws of its kind. It gave the governor’s office the ability to appoint an emergency manager who, for the first time, could reject, modify, or terminate contracts and union agreements—steps that are typically possible only if a city is in Chapter 9 bankruptcy.13 It also lowered the threshold for what would warrant state intervention in the first place. And local governments were expected to pay the salaries of their state-appointed managers.
Even in its new guise, Michigan’s emergency manager law remained focused on finances. “That’s the problem.” The goal is “to balance the books, and if you can try to get something else done, I guess you can try that. But that’s not what you go there for. And then the state’s idea is to get out as soon as possible,” said Michael Stampfler, a former emergency manager for the City of Pontiac.14 It was a short-term strategy for long-term problems. Emergency managers might make real improvements by cutting costs, but they are not necessarily ones that endure. Perhaps the strongest evidence of the mismatch between the problems and the solution is the fact that, despite being approved by the state as the best leader for the job, and with extraordinary powers to act, EMs tend to cycle in and out of the same communities.
Against the argument that this mechanism interrupts the democratic process, supporters of emergency management point out that residents are as much citizens of the state as they are of their city. The governor is an elected leader with jurisdiction over the distressed community. And anyway, emergency management can’t be an encroachment on local sovereignty when the state created that sovereignty in the first place. If the state empowered its cities, then it has the authority to disempower them, or even unincorporate them.15 Also, there is always an effort to choose an EM with local connections, such as Ed Kurtz and Darnell Earley. And—facts are facts—oftentimes EMs have interrupted cycles of corruption in local leadership, including a bribery scandal in the suburb of Ecorse. By the time emergency manager Joyce Parker ended her tenure there, Ecorse had eliminated $14.6 million in debt and had its first positive general fund balance in six years.16 Parker then became the emergency manager for Allen Park, another inner-ring suburb. It was struggling with debt following a bad movie studio deal that eventually led to fraud charges against a former mayor and city administrator. In a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, they were barred from any future municipal bond deals, and the mayor faced a $10,000 civil penalty. Parker, meanwhile, exited her role as EM after two years, leaving Allen Park with a projected fund balance of $3.6 million.
And besides, these cities are in an emergency. It must be named as such. The state would be remiss to let them unravel without even trying to intervene. Emergency management could be described as a late-coming corrective to the state’s apathy over decades of urban distress. Through the EM system, the state is finally admitting that there is a problem in its cities, and it has both the responsibility and the power to do something about it.
However, emergency management in Michigan, and the disenfranchisement that followed, had unmistakable racial overtones. The communities affected were nearly always majority black, including Flint. By 2017, 52 percent of Michigan’s black residents and 16 percent of Latinos had lived in cities governed by unelected authorities. Only 2 percent of white people had the same experience, although there were many other impoverished communities in Michigan that were majority white.17 To put it another way, if you lived in Michigan, there was a 10 percent chance that you lived under emergency management at some point between 2009 and 2016. If you were black, that possibility jumped to 50 percent.18 The statistics reflected the urban decay resulting from institutionalized segregation, just as the Kerner Commission had foretold half a century earlier.
Under the Voting Rights Act, communities of color that have historically been disenfranchised are supposed to be protected from “a broad array of dilution schemes” that could minimize the power of their votes.19 Among those schemes, the law explicitly includes the tactic of turning elected posts into appointed ones. But Michigan circumvented that by instituting an appointed post that superseded the elected position.20 The upshot: white and black voters had different experiences of democracy. It didn’t really matter whether that was the intention of the law’s architects; the results were the same. The appearance of different rules of law for different groups of people bred disillusionment and distrust that extended far beyond the term of any single emergency manager, even if he or she was exceptionally talented and well meaning. Yet another echo of the Kerner Commission’s findings in the 1960s.21
It was too much. Activists were determined to repeal Public Act 4. They gathered enough signatures to get it on the ballot, and in November 2012 voters rejected the expanded emergency management law.22 The count was close, but certain: seventy-five of Michigan’s eighty-three counties voted to take Public Act 4 off the books.
But the reprieve was brief. Six weeks later, a lame-duck legislature passed a nearly identical version of Public Act 4 and Snyder signed it. The simulacrum, Public Act 436, had some tweaks that gave local officials a somewhat bigger role. It newly required that the state, rather than municipalities or school districts, had to pay the salaries of emergency managers. But the scope of their powers remained the same. Significantly, the new law came with funds attached, which made it impossible to eliminate through another statewide referendum.
The rush to reinstitutionalize the expanded powers of emergency managers was probably tied to Michigan’s plans for its largest city, Detroit. Three months after Public Act 436 was signed, a lawyer from Washington, D.C., was chosen as Detroit’s emergency manager. A University of Michigan graduate who had helped Chrysler navigate its brush with insolvency, Kevyn Orr, steered the Motor City through an impossibly complex municipal bankruptcy.
Detroit’s bankruptcy was resolved with an $816 million “grand bargain,” an unlikely deal that involved philanthropic and corporate donations to spare the Detroit Institute of Arts from being pillaged by creditors and to soften pension cuts (which still suffered harsh losses).23 More than $7 billion in Detroit’s unsecured debt was wiped out, making it possible for the city to reinvest in public services. But Detroit was an unusual case. Rather than recruiting the most talented leader possible to serve as emergency manager, more common is for modestly accomplished administrators—they need only five years of business or government experience—to be shuffled from one distressed city and school district to another.24
And state oversight can go on, it seems, indefinitely. Officially, a city council can vote the EM out of office after eighteen months with a two-thirds majority.25 But the state gets around that term limit (imposed by its own law) with a neat trick—the emergency manager resigns before the term expires. A new one is appointed and the clock starts over. Thus Detroit’s public schools were under the control of the state for eight years, and the city of Flint for three and a half years. When the last emergency manager departed Flint in April 2015, the city’s $19.1 million deficit had been eliminated (thanks in part to a last-minute $7 million state loan). But the city had endured debilitating cuts and was in the midst of a life-threatening water crisis. In his exit letter, Jerry Ambrose didn’t address the water quality, but he acknowledged that the aging infrastructure and sky-high rates were “another factor impeding the City’s ability to attract and retain businesses and residents. There needs to be a concerted effort to reduce rates by as much as 50%, but that cannot even be contemplated without the commitment of financial assistance from the state and federal governments.” Though Flint was a founding member of the KWA, “it will not be sufficient to lower water costs.”26 Also, the Office of the Ombudsman, formed decades earlier as a watchdog against mismanagement and corruption in local government, had been eliminated by emergency managers. In a parting order, Ambrose, specifically forbid the city from funding it again, or revising any changes made by an EM until it had been out of receivership for at least a year. (It wouldn’t be until April 2018 that the governor announced Flint’s exit from that form of state oversight.)
What unfolded in Flint revealed not only the limits of austerity, but also the fatal flaw in Michigan’s experiment with expansive emergency management: there is no transparency or accountability when things go wrong.
II.
Flint might have suffered a democracy deficit, but its people found other ways of showing up for their community. The city’s culture of organizing had been passed down through the generations. The United Auto Workers began their historic sit-down strike in Flint. Frustrated with stunted wages, dangerous conditions, and the company’s efforts to intimidate them from forming a union, workers occupied two auto plants on December 30, 1936. Refusing to leave or work, they staged concerts and lectures, while supporters delivered food and picketed outside. The strike spread to a third plant in February. With workers staying inside, it was impossible for the company to hire replacements and get the lines moving again. GM tried turning off the heat to freeze the strikers out, but they remained, burning burlap to stay warm. It took forty-four days, but GM eventually announced a $25 million wage increase and recognition of the union’s right to organize—a first for America’s auto industry.27 It changed lives. Unpaid overtime was banned, wages were fairer, and dangerous environmental conditions were improved, including poor ventilation in the paint department. A few decades later, citizens banded together against segregation and racial discrimination in real estate with the sleep-in on the lawn of city hall, a rally that drew thousands, and a first-of-its-kind fair housing vote. And in the twenty-first century, when emergency management came to Flint, residents founded groups such as the Democracy Defense League to challenge it.
So it was no surprise that when they knew the water switch had gone poorly, the people of Flint got organized. Besides protests, petitions, and public meetings, they kept meticulous notes, collected samples, hosted makeshift water distribution sites, created social media pages to share information, and sought public documents. The volunteer staff of East Village Magazine, one of the oldest community media outlets in the country, tracked the story in each monthly issue. Residents also enlisted environmental justice experts from around the country for their insight on the crisis. At wateryoufightingfor.com, a website set up by Melissa Mays and her collaborators, they shared research and advice from the leader of the Love Canal movement.28
In the spring of 2015, a number of groups banded together as the Coalition for Clean Water to better coordinate their activism. They met in the basement of the Reverend Alfred Harris’s Saints of God Church. When LeeAnne Walters and other families learned the disturbing results of their lead tests, the coalition made sure to reach four thousand homes, distributing information about the dangers of contamination. And in March, after emergency manager Jerry Ambrose overruled the City Council’s vote to get Flint off the river water as soon as possible, the coalition sought an injunction to force the city to act (an effort that died in the courtroom). The activists also repeatedly made the hour-long drive to Lansing to make their case to the governor’s aides and the MDEQ. They invited Governor Snyder to visit Flint—the invitation was declined. In July, the Flint community partnered with activists in Detroit who were facing escalating water shutoffs in their own city. Together they led the Detroit to Flint Water Justice Journey, a seventy-mile march that told the intersecting stories of each city. In short, the organizers did everything they could think of to make their plight—their city—visible.
Despite the activism, the journalism, and the independent monitoring, the state didn’t budge from its position. The MDEQ kept pointing to its test results of 169 water samples, which, it claimed, were proof that there was nothing to worry about. On its side, the community had the samples from LeeAnne Walters’s home that had been analyzed by Virginia Tech, plus a smattering from other residents who had requested free tests from the city. The community argued that Flint wasn’t just facing a lead problem; there had been a pattern of contamination, including E. coli and TTHM violations. And they had Miguel Del Toral’s damning memo, too. But the state said the earlier contamination issues had been resolved, Del Toral’s boss had backed away from his memo, and Flint would be back on Lake Huron water soon enough. The plan, it seemed, was to run out the clock.
The only thing to do was to double down and collect more and better data. Curt Guyette, who saw that the rising media interest hadn’t done much to change the state’s response, had access to grant money at the ACLU that could be used to pay for expert research. He broached an idea to Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech. What about doing an independent test of the water in Flint? Like the analysis done at LeeAnne Walters’s house, but this time spanning the whole city? Edwards liked the idea. It would work, though, only if there were enough volunteers to conduct this massive experiment in a short time. And it would need to be done with the strictest rigor so that the test could withstand all scrutiny—to make it “bulletproof,” as Guyette said: “we knew they would come after us.”29 It would take fifty samples for a scientifically valid test. One hundred samples would be better. Each test cost about $70.
Guyette contacted the Coalition for Clean Water. Could its people collect a hundred water samples from all across Flint—and quickly? No problem. As Guyette remembers it, an energized Rev. Harris said that he and his fellow pastors could do it themselves.30 Guyette then turned to the ACLU: the grant money would need to run to $7,000, at least. But Edwards landed on another option—an emergency stipend from the National Science Foundation. These are usually given in the wake of extreme disasters, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, oil spills, and earthquakes, but Edwards’s research team argued for a rapid response to a looming public health catastrophe in Flint. As they wrote in their application, what was happening in the city was “occurring at some level in many other financially stressed U.S. urban centers with decaying drinking water infrastructure.”31 An independent citywide test could “help inform the current policy debate regarding strategies for dealing with cities that have gone bankrupt, as well as the discussion of access to safe and affordable drinking water as a basic human right.”32 Guyette liked this idea better: unlike the ACLU, the foundation was “not an activist organization,” he said. “They’re pure science.”33 It would be harder for critics to dismiss the citizen-led study as biased.
To staff his side of the team, Edwards recruited a raft of undergraduates, grad students, and postdoc research assistants for a meeting, using free pizza as bait. Many of them had taken the engineering ethics class taught by Yanna Lambrinidou and himself, and the students could see the link between what had happened in Washington, D.C., and what was happening in Flint. About thirty students formed what became the Flint Water Study group.
By August, their test was well under way. The students at Virginia Tech distributed three hundred sampling kits to the organizers in Flint, conducted tests at businesses and homes while visiting the city, and planned tests in Detroit to compare the different water systems.
The sampling kits sent to the coalition were packaged in brown cardboard boxes, each containing three plastic bottles of different sizes, and a set of instructions. All the items in each box were marked with an identifying number to keep them organized.
Grad student William Rhoads hosted an instructional video on YouTube that showed the coalition how to collect samples.34 After filling the largest bottle with one full liter, they needed to pause for precisely forty-five seconds before filling the second bottle. Another two-minute break, and then they needed to fill the last and smallest bottle. This test could be done only after the taps had been turned off for at least six hours—that’s a requirement from the Lead and Copper Rule, though, unlike the instruction LeeAnne Walters received, there was no cap on how long the water had been stagnant.35 (The longer it’s stagnant, the more likely that lead will show up.) There was also no pre-flushing in the Virginia Tech tests, compared to the official rules that said that the tap should run for “at least 5 minutes” before sampling.36 All three bottles had to be filled from the cold tap at high flow (which is when lead is most likely to flake into the water), with the tap remaining open as the collectors filled each sample. By collecting multiple samples from the same tap, there could be more confidence in the results, since lead release can be erratic. These bottles also had wide mouths, like mayonnaise jars, while the city tests used narrow mouths, which meant the bottle was probably filled at a low flow to keep the water from splattering and was thus less likely to pull lead out of the plumbing. The Lead and Copper Rule doesn’t specify what bottles to use. Small-mouth bottles were another opportunity to minimize the lead levels.
Each bottle had to be capped, sealed in a plastic bag, and returned to the cardboard box with the information sheet that identified the source of the water. At that point, the coalition implemented a system to make the samples as tamperproof as possible to answer critics who would surely accuse them of skewing the test results (by deliberately adding lead to the water, for example). When they were later scrutinized, the system proved its worth.37 Before each cardboard box was sealed, residents would initial near the seam of the flaps. The package was then taped in front of them so that the initials were under the tape.38 If somebody tried to open the package after it was sealed, the inked initials would peel off. After this, the box went to a collection point in Flint and from there to Blacksburg, Virginia.
