The Poisoned City, page 31
14. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 110–11.
15. A basic principle of municipal law is Dillon’s Rule. Named after a nineteenth-century judge, it says that cities have only the powers that are explicitly granted by the entity that created them. There are some exceptions, such as New York City and Baltimore, that operate on a home rule basis. Nicole DuPuis et al., “City Rights in an Era of Pre-Emption: A State-by-State Analysis,” National League of Cities Center for City Solutions, 2017; Alisha Green, “It’s Complicated: State and Local Government Relationships,” Sunlight Foundation, February 19, 2013; Jesse J. Richardson Jr., Meghan Zimmerman Gough, and Robert Puentes, “Is Home Rule the Answer? Clarifying the Influence of Dillon’s Rule on Growth Management,” discussion paper, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, January 2003.
16. David Sands, “Joyce Parker, Ecorse Emergency Manager, Credits Public Act 4 with City’s Turnaround,” Huffington Post, March 15, 2012, updated March 16, 2012; and Tracy Samilton, “Ecorse Financial Emergency Resolved … BUT…,” Michigan Radio, April 30, 2013.
17. Brief for the Latino Justice PRLDF and Demos in support of petitioners as Amicus Curiae, p. 16, Bellant v. Snyder on Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, No. 16-1207, May 10, 2017, http://www.demos.org/publication/brief-amici-curiae-latinojustice-prldf-and-demos-support-petitioners-bellant-v-synder.
18. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 109.
19. From the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 1982 report that accompanied the extension and amendment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “Following the dramatic rise in registration, a broad array of dilution schemes were employed to cancel the impact of the new black vote. Elective posts were made appointive; election boundaries were gerrymandered; majority runoffs were instituted to prevent victories under a prior plurality system; at-large elections were substituted for election by single-member districts, or combined with other sophisticated rules to prevent an effective minority vote. The ingenuity of such schemes seems endless. Their common purpose and effect has been to offset the gains made at the ballot box under the Act.” S. Rep. No. 97-417, p. 10 (1982), as quoted in Presley v. Etowah County Commission, 502 U.S. 491 (1992).
20. According to a 2017 report from the National League of Cities, Michigan’s actions were of a piece with a growing tendency of states to preempt local governments on politically divisive matters, such as labor protections or taxing authority. Michigan stands alongside North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Florida as the biggest “preemptor” states in the country, with their power to “preempt” deriving from single-party dominance—that is, Republican control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. To many in Michigan, emergency management also seemed like piling on: voting rights had already been diminished through the state legislature’s gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts. A controversial reapportionment process that basically allows lawmakers to choose their voters had created disproportionately conservative leadership in Lansing—and no one seemed to be stepping up to oppose it or creating a process for fairer representation. Also, in January 2016, Governor Snyder signed a bill that abolished straight-ticket voting in Michigan, even though the practice had been supported in two statewide referendums. The abolishment was passed in an end-of-year amendment with no public hearings. Straight-ticket voting tended to be popular with voters in busy urban—and Democratic—precincts.
21. From the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Kerner Report: “In these cities, the police were compelled to deal with ghetto residents angered over dirty streets, dilapidated housing, unfair commercial practices, or inferior schools—grievances which they had neither the responsibility for creating nor the authority to redress” (p. 288). “The alienation of the Negro from the political process has been exacerbated by his economic and racial isolation” (p. 289). “These conditions have produced a vast and threatening disparity in perceptions of the intensity and validity of Negro dissatisfaction. Viewed from the perspective of the ghetto resident, city government appears distant and unconcerned, the possibility of effective change remote. As a result, tension rises perceptibly; the explosion comes as the climax to a progression of tension-generating incidents. To the city administration, unaware of the growing tension or unable to respond effectively to it, the outbreak of disorder comes as a shock” (p. 289).
22. The final count had 52.6 percent of voters against the law and 47.4 percent in favor of it. In the same election, Michigan voters supported President Barack Obama’s reelection over challenger Mitt Romney, a native of the state and the son of former Michigan governor George Romney. They also rejected a proposal to enshrine a right to collective bargaining for public and private workers in the state’s constitution.
23. The grand bargain was facilitated by Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, acting as a mediator, and U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes. It involved enormous contributions from philanthropists and charitable foundations: Ford, Kresge, Knight, and the C. S. Mott Foundation were among them. That was leveraged to secure a commitment from the state. This unprecedented public-private deal brought new money to the table, helping to resolve a bankruptcy that otherwise would have likely dragged on with legal challenges that some thought was destined for the U.S. Supreme Court. The foundations made it a condition of their contributions that the unions and pension funds endorse the deal with a majority vote. General retirees ended up with cuts of 4 percent to their pensions; police and fire retirees did not have cuts. It was far less than what was expected from the bankruptcy. The bargain also shifted ownership of the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts, whose collection was eyed by hungry creditors, to a charitable nonprofit trust. The DIA also contributed to the grand bargain. To date, the best comprehensive account is Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back by Nathan Bomey, a former Free Press reporter who covered it day by day (W. W. Norton, 2016). The Detroit News has a good rundown, too: Daniel Howes, Chad Livengood, and David Shepardson, “Bankruptcy and Beyond for Detroit,” November 13, 2014.
24. “Frequently Asked Questions: The Suspension of the Emergency Manager Law and Its Implications,” Michigan State University Extension, August 14, 2012.
25. Ibid.; and Ann Zaniewski, “DPS Board Loses Court Battle over Emergency Manager,” Detroit Free Press, October 1, 2014.
26. Gerald Ambrose, Emergency Manager Gerald Ambrose to Governor Rick Snyder, Flint, Michigan, April 28, 2015. Regarding the parting order mentioned in the following sentence, this refers to Order No. 20, dated April 25, 2015, and signed by Ambrose. It had a number of stipulations. Among them, in addition to restricting the city leaders from funding the Office of the Ombudsman, it also forbid them from funding the Civil Service Commission. The Civil Service Commission had been established about eighty years earlier to investigate labor disputes between employees and the city and at Hurley Medical Center. Both offices were mandated by the Flint City Charter, and their existence had been supported by voters (though Mayor Walling had been among those who had proposed their elimination, due to budget challenges).
27. On the strike: Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Russell B. Porter, “Strikers at Flint March as Victors,” New York Times, February 12, 1937, pp. 1, 15; Louis Stark, “Peace Pact Signed,” New York Times, February 12, 1937, pp. 1, 19; and “The Flint Sit-Down Strike Audio Gallery,” matrix at Michigan State University and Walter P. Reuther Library, http://flint.matrix.msu.edu/strike.phphttp://flint.matrix.msu.edu/strike.php.
28. Melissa Mays’s website had a form for people to describe their water, their health issues, and the cost of their water bill; with their permission, the information was sent on to the government.
29. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, October 21, 2015.
30. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, September 12, 2017.
31. Marc Edwards, Amy Pruden, and Joseph Falkinham, “RAPID: Synergistic Impacts of Corrosive Water and Interrupted Corrosion Control on Chemical/Microbiological Water Quality: Flint, MI,” p. A-1, submitted July 2015, http://flintwaterstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/rapid-proposal-final.pdf.
32. Ibid.
33. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, September 12, 2017.
34. “Sampling Water for Lead in Flint MI—Instruction Video,” Flint Water Study, YouTube video, 5.34 minutes, August 14, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEQDaPws2xk.
35. This meant that the samples generally had to be collected first thing in the morning or, if nobody was at home during the day, in the early evening. According to the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Task Force, the six-hour minimum of stagnation time “is used rather than a longer time so as not to discourage people from volunteering to take lead and copper samples” (Task Force Comments on Flint’s Residential Drinking Water Lead & Copper Sampling Instructions, November 23, 2015).
36. According to released emails, the MDEQ defended this lead-clearing practice to the EPA that summer, saying that it wasn’t going to change its position unless the agency issued stricter regulations. To date, that loophole has not been closed, though upon review of the sampling protocol that had been used in Flint, the EPA’s Flint Safe Drinking Water Task Force said that it “agrees with the removal of pre-flushing” (ibid). For discussion on the potential revision of the Lead and Copper Rule by the EPA’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) working group, see its August 2015 report (https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-01/documents/ndwaclcrwgfinalreportaug2015.pdf) and also the dissenting statement by one of its members, Dr. Yanna Lambrinidou (Yanna Lambrinidou, letter to the EPA National Drinking Water Advisory Council, October 28, 2015, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-11/documents/ndwaclcrstatementofdissent.pdf).
37. The parallel sampling done directly by the Virginia Tech team also helped the citizen sampling to withstand scrutiny. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, September 12, 2017; and Marc Edwards, email message to author, February 17, 2018.
38. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, October 21, 2015, September 12, 2017; and “Here’s to Flint,” Democracy Now!, March 8, 2016.
39. Ibid.
40. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, October 21, 2015.
41. On August 23, 2015, Edwards emailed Adam Rosenthal of the MDEQ; Rachel Ptaszenski of the Genessee County Health Department; and Brent Wright, Flint’s water plant supervisor. He told them that Virginia Tech would be studying Flint’s water, launching a website, and had already visited the city to collect samples from the distribution system. He also said that they were doing a lead study with residents. “Dependent on what we find, it might be desirable to touch base, in advance of our releasing certain findings. We also intend to collaborate with all parties, in an open manner, to the extent that is possible, as our study progresses.” The following morning, Rosenthal forwarded the message to Stephen Busch, who forwarded it to Richard Benzie and Liane Shekter-Smith. Jennifer Dixon, “How the Crisis Unfolded,” Detroit Free Press, January 24, 2016, p. A14.
42. That website was WASAwatch, http://dcwasawatch.blogspot.com. Yanna Lambrinidou referred the author to it in a phone interview, November 2, 2017.
43. According to the Virginia Tech researchers, 269 were legitimate samples. Those that were excised had not waited for six hours of stagnation, for example, or had used a different faucet for one of its samples. For the complete data set, see Siddhartha Roy, “[Complete Dataset] Lead Results from Tap Water Sampling in Flint, MI,” FlintWaterStudy.org, December 1, 2015. See also “Lead Testing Results for Water Sampled by Residents,” FlintWaterStudy.org, n.d. (but appears to be early September 2015).
44. Curt Guyette, interview with the author, Detroit, September 12, 2017.
45. The water had a lot of corroded iron in it—51 ppb, for both homes and hospitals. Iron is not regulated the way lead is because it is not nearly as dangerous (and in fact a certain amount of it is essential to human health). But the EPA’s suggested guideline is for iron not to exceed 300 ppb (0.3 milligram per liter) in drinking water.
46. Many people began to look back at the boil-water advisories the previous summer and wonder if they had made the lead contamination worse, because boiling concentrated it. According to Edwards, “brief boiling does not remove lead, and does not concentrate it” while long-term boiling “might, but people rarely boil water to the point that concentration occurs.” Marc Edwards, email message to author, February 17, 2018.
47. Siddhartha Roy, interview with the author, Blacksburg, Virginia, June 6, 2017. But Roy credited his colleague Anurag Mantha, who kept going. Mantha made dozens of calls, answering every question and listening to the families’ fears and fury at the injustice of it all, Roy said. Sometimes calls lasted an hour.
CHAPTER 8: BLOOD
1. Flint Water Study, “Flint Press Conference Sep 15 2015 (One Year Anniversary Release),” YouTube Video, 21.29 minutes, September 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwg5L3mYUEI. See also Ron Fonger, “Virginia Tech Professor Says Flint’s Tests for Lead Are Bad and Can’t Be Trusted,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 15, 2015.
2. Siddhartha Roy, “For the Citizens of Flint,” slideshow presentation at Saints of God Church, Flint, Michigan; Flint Water Study, September 15, 2015, slide 24, available online at http://flintwaterstudy.org/2015/09/distribution-of-lead-results-across-flint-by-ward-and-zip-codes/.
3. Sonya Lee interview by Cherise Lee, April 16, 2016, StoryCorps, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., SC1001065.
4. Brad Wurfel sent this in an email to Ron Fonger of the Flint Journal on September 9, 2015, according to chronologies by the Flint Water Study team and Bridge Magazine. The message was partially quoted in Fonger’s story the following day: “Feds Sending in Experts to Help Flint Keep Lead out of Water,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 10, 2015.
5. Brad Wurfel sent this email on August 27, 2015. Captured in the chronological compilation of MDEQ emails from FOIA requests posted on FlintWaterStudy.org on October 10, 2015.
6. See also Joel Kurth, Jonathan Oosting, Christine MacDonald, and Jim Lynch, “DEQ Official: Staffers Earn Raises for Flint Work,” Detroit News, February 12, 2016.
7. Ron Fonger, “Governor Helped Hush-Hush Delivery of Water Filters to Flint Pastors,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 29, 2015.
8. Ibid.
9. Email sent from Michelle Bruneau to Kory Groestch on September 10, 2015. Meanwhile, internal conversations between the EPA and the MDEQ acknowledged the “further evidence that lead levels in Flint are trending upward.” The agencies were now under pressure by residents, scientists, and, increasingly, Flint’s representatives in Lansing and Washington to deal with the lack of corrosion control soon, “to protect the residents from exposure to high lead levels.” This amounted to a tacit admission that the water concerns were credible, but any validation was undercut by the public criticism of the activists and scientists and the continued defense of the official tests showing the water was safe. It didn’t help that while the MDEQ had agreed to a corrosion control plan in Flint, it kept arguing about it with the EPA. But either way, it was going to take a long time to implement the treatment—long enough that it probably made the point moot.
10. This section relies primarily on the author’s June 20, 2017, interview with Elin Betanzo in Detroit, Michigan, as well as her email responses to follow-up questions; and on Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s testimonies to numerous investigative committees; and on a profile: Robin Erb, “Flint Doctor Makes State See Light about Lead in Water,” Detroit Free Press, October 10, 2015, updated October 12, 2015.
11. Erb, “Flint Doctor Makes State See Light.”
12. “Hurley Doctor Recommends Switching Away from Flint River,” MLive, YouTubeVideo, 1.04 minutes, September 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tELb594WTw.
13. Erb, “Flint Doctor Makes State See Light.”
14. Nancy Kaffer, “When Did State Know Kids in Flint were Lead Poisoned?,” Detroit Free Press, December 17, 2015.
15. Kristi Tanner and Nancy Kaffer, “State Data Confirms Higher Blood-Lead Levels in Flint Kids,” Detroit Free Press, September 26, 2015, updated September 29, 2015.
16. The study was eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Jenny LaChance, Richard Casey Sadler, and Allison Champney Schnepp, “Elevated Blood Lead Levels in Children Associated with the Flint Drinking Water Crisis: A Spatial Analysis of Risk and Public Health Response,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 2 (February 1, 2016): 283–90. See also Sammy Zahran, Shawn P. McElmurry, and Richard C. Sadler, “Four Phases of the Flint Water Crisis: Evidence from Blood Lead Levels in Children,” Environmental Research 157 (2017): 160–72.
