The Poisoned City, page 35
“We’re not asking for water forever,” Weaver said. “We’re asking for water until we got through the lead service line replacement and everybody knew the time frame. It would take us three years” (“Flint Mayor to Lobby Snyder on Bottled Water,” Detroit News, April 10, 2018).
22. Tresa Baldes and Paul Egan, “Judge Approves $87 Million Settlement in Flint Water Lawsuit,” Detroit Free Press, March 28, 2017.
23. Editorial, “Michigan Is Forced to Do Right by Flint, Finally,” New York Times, April 3, 2017.
24. ACLU of Michigan, “Flint Water Crisis: Settlement to Launch Groundbreaking Program to Assess Impacts on Flint Children,” press release, April 9, 2018; and Lori Higgins, “Up to 30,000 Flint Kids to Get Screened for Lead Impact Settlement,” Detroit Free Press, April 9, 2018.
25. Among the news outlets trying to untangle the legal bills: Ron Fonger, “Michigan’s Bills for Flint Water Crisis Attorneys Rises above $20 Million,” MLive—Flint Journal, January 15, 2015; Leonard N. Fleming and Michael Gerstein, “Attorneys Defend Costs as Flint Probe Tab Climbs,” Detroit News, October 17, 2017; Chad Livengood, “Law Firm Billings to State over Flint Water Crisis Hits $14 Million and Rising,” Crain’s Detroit Business, June 29, 2017, updated July 2, 2017; and Emma Winowiecki and Mark Brush, “Taxpayer Tab on Flint Legal Battles Is $15.5 Million and Rising,” Michigan Radio, September 8, 2017.
26. The author detailed the charges in the Flint water crisis as of June 2017 in “A Guide to the 15 Powerful People Charged with Poisoning Flint,” Splinter, June 19, 2015. See also: Elisha Anderson and John Wisely, “Records: Falsified Report Led to Charges in Flint Water Crisis,” Detroit Free Press, April 22, 2016; Paul Egan, “These Are the 15 People Criminally Charged in the Flint Water Crisis,” Detroit Free Press, June 14, 2017; and Sara Ganim, “Flint Water Official Says He Could Have Done Things Differently,” CNN, September 7, 2016.
27. It was Earley who got the involuntary manslaughter charge, which was added to his case later.
28. Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, “2 Former Flint Emergency Managers Charged over Tainted Water,” New York Times, December 20, 2016.
29. Schuette’s spokesperson told a reporter that Schuette was aware of the AG office’s signoff on the deal. She said that the assistant attorney general who signed the ACO “did so following a legal review of the document in his role as counsel to the MDEQ. In this case, the signature signifies the AAG made a determination that it met all basic legal requirements as to form, not to content, because no AAG sets policy for a department.” She added that AAGs “are dependent on departmental experts, in this case, DEQ staff, for the factual information used in determining the document was legal as to form. If a department provides false or inaccurate information as the basis for a document like this, the AAG would have no way of knowing.” Paul Egan, “Schuette: ‘Sham’ Order Led to Crisis,” Detroit Free Press, pp. 1A, 6A. See also “Four More Officials Charged in Third Round of Flint Water Crisis Criminal Investigation,” press release, Department of Attorney General, Michigan.gov, n.d.
30. Darnell Earley, “Column: Don’t Blame EM for Flint Water Disaster,” Detroit News, October 26, 2015.
31. Daugherty Johnson, the city’s now retired utilities director, was accused of the same charges as Croft. He would later get a plea deal.
32. Wells’s false testimony charge was regarding data on the uptick in Legionnaires’ disease. Some months later, two new charges were added to her case: involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office. Scott Atkinson and Monica Davey, “5 Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter in Flint Water Crisis,” New York Times, June 14, 2017; Leonard N. Fleming, “Flood Slaps Wells with Involuntary Manslaughter Charge,” Detroit News, October 9, 2017.
33. Atkinson and Davey, “5 Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter in Flint Water Crisis”; and Fleming, “Flood Slaps Wells with Involuntary Manslaughter Charge.” Lyon and Wells were also backed by Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech, who testified for the defense during their preliminary examinations in 2018. At Wells’s exam, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha also testified for the defense.
34. Department of Attorney General, “Schuette Files Civil Suit against Veolia and LAN for Role in Flint Water Poisoning,” press release, Flint, Mich., Michigan.gov, 2016, https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359-82917_78314-387198—,00.html.
35. Steve Carmody, “EPA Target of Latest Flint Water Crisis Class-Action Lawsuit,” Michigan Radio, January 30, 2017.
36. Paul Egan, “Flint Investigator Says Greed and Fraud Led to Drinking Water Crisis,” Detroit Free Press, March 23, 2018. The quotations are from Andrew Arena, the former director of the FBI’s Detroit office who was at the helm of the attorney general’s criminal investigation of the water crisis. Arena was speaking to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government.
37. “The Governor had adequate legal authority to intervene—by demanding more information from agency directors, reorganizing agencies to assure availability of appropriate expertise where needed, ordering state agencies to respond, or ultimately firing ineffective agency heads—but he abjured. Flint residents’ complaints were not hidden from the Governor, and he had a responsibility to listen and respond.” Peter D. Jacobson, Colleen Healy Boufides, Jennifer Bernstein, Denise Chrysler, and Toby Citron, on behalf of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, “Learning from the Flint Water Crisis: Protecting Public Health During a Financial Emergency,” January 2018, p. 30.
CHAPTER 12: GENESIS
1. This took place on August 22, 2016, and the tour went from a put-in point at Bray Road to Vietnam Veterans Park.
2. C. S. Mott Foundation, “Rediscovering the Flint River,” YouTube video, 4.33 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO82Dk1LgQs&feature=youtu.be.
3. C. S. Mott Foundation. “Exploring the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge—a Three Minute Tour,” YouTube video, 3.00 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DecS0XAcCas.
4. Rebecca Fedewa, interview with author, Flint, Mich., August 3, 2016.
5. Ibid. “Michael Moore was one of them. It really pissed me off. You can print that. You don’t even know!” Fedewa also heard the “toxic Flint River” phrase in the introduction to the Democratic presidential debate in Flint on March 6, 2016. “I threw my remote.”
6. Ibid.
7. “Amended Resolution to Approve Master Agreement Between the City of Flint, Department of Environmental Quality, the Genesee County Drain Commissioner, the Great Lakes Water Authority, and the Karegnondi Water Authority,” Resolution 170354.1, presented November 15, 2017; Nora Colomer, “Flint City Council Approves 30-Year Water Contract,” Bond Buyer, November 22, 2017; “What Has Changed, What Remains in Proposed 30-Year Flint Water Contract,” MLive—Flint Journal, November 21, 2017; Oona Goodin-Smith, “30-Year Flint GLWA Water Deal Gets Final Stamp of Approval,” MLive—Flint Journal, November 29, 2017; and Oona Goodin-Smith, “Some Promises to Entice Flint into 30-Year Water Deal Not Yet Fulfilled,” MLive—Flint Journal, January 30, 2018.
8. Rick Snyder, letter to Craig Glidden, general counsel and EVP Law and Public Policy, General Motors, January 17, 2018, https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/Letter-from-Gov-Snyder-Requesting-GM-Return-to-Using-Water-from-City-of-Flint.pdf.
9. In October 2015, researchers at the University of Michigan–Flint took on the job of identifying and mapping Flint’s lead pipes, with help from a grant from the C. S. Mott Foundation. Over the next year, it built a semi-complete digital database. Nic Custer, “As City-Wide Lead Pipe Mapping Begins, UM-Flint Prof Explains How to Test Your Water Lines,” East Village Magazine, January 30, 2016; Robert Gold, “Mott Grant Advances UM-Flint GIS Center’s Data Mapping Mission,” UM-Flint NOW, October 29, 2015; Robert Gold, “UM-Flint GIS Center Mapping Flint Water System’s Lead Service Lines,” UM-Flint NOW, January 28, 2016; “New UM-Flint Research Shows Location of Lead Pipes in Flint,” UM-Flint News, February 22, 2016; “City of Flint Lead Service Line Connections,” UM-Flint GIS Center, updated November 7, 2016, https://www.umflint.edu/sites/default/files/groups/GIS_Center/leadconn_11_7.pdf.
10. Natural Resources Defense Council, “What’s in Your Water? Flint and Beyond,” 2016, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/whats-in-your-water-flint-beyond-report.pdf. Also, ambitious reporting by USA Today and Reuters detailed high lead all over the country. Alison Young and Mike Nichols, “Beyond Flint: Excessive Lead Found in Almost 2,000 Water Systems Across All 50 States,” USA Today, March 11, 2016; and M. B. Pell and Joshua Schneyer, “Off the Charts: The Thousands of U.S. Locales Where Lead Poisoning Is Worse than Flint,” Reuters, December 19, 2016.
11. “At the end of the day, it creates two universes of people,” Yanna Lambrinidou told the USA Today reporters who investigated this. “One is the universe of people who are somewhat protected from lead.… Then we have those people served by small water systems, who are treated by the regulations as second-class citizens.” Laura Ungar and Mike Nichols, “4 Million Americans Could Be Drinking Toxic Water and Would Never Know,” USA Today, December 13, 2016.
12. Steve Serkaian, phone interview with author, June 15, 2016. This material about Lansing first appeared in slightly different form as “The City That Unpoisoned Its Pipes,” Next City, August 8, 2016.
13. Ibid. “Communities across the country have made decisions to not replace lead service lines because phosphate control is an effective way to meet state and federal standards,” said Serkaian. “The community has to have political will and financial wherewithal to sustain funding to replace all the lead service lines. The Board of Water and Light, without any special assessments or funding, chipped away year by year.”
14. Or they could try a partial-line replacement but, as research has affirmed, this causes a disruption that makes lead contamination worse.
15. “21st Century Infrastructure Commission Report,” prepared for Governor Rick Snyder, November 30, 2016, p. 13, http://www.michigan.gov/snyder/0,4668,7-277-61409_78737—,00.html.
16. “For transportation and power investment, $1 returns $4.24, while $1 of spending on water and sewer assets returns $2.03 in revenue” (Ibid., p. 12).
17. Ibid.
18. Rebecca M. Slabaugh, Roger B. Arnold Jr., Sean Chaparro, Christopher P. Hill, “National Cost Implications of Potential Long-Term LCR Requirements,” Journal-American Water Works Association 107, no. 8 (August 2015): E389–E400. On New York City schools: Kate Taylor, “Lead Tests on New York City Schools’ Water May Have Masked Scope of Risk,” New York Times, August 31, 2016. In a related story, dating back to the D.C. lead-in-water crisis: Carol D. Leonnig, “Parents Demand New Tests of School Water,” Washington Post, April 29, 2007.
19. Oliver Milman, “US Authorities Distorting Tests to Downplay Lead Content of Water,” Guardian, January 22, 2016.
20. Joel Beauvais, “EPA Sample Letter Sent to Commissioners,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., February 29, 2016.
21. Michael Hawthorne and Peter Matuszak, “As Other Cities Dig Up Pipes Made of Toxic Lead, Chicago Resists,” Chicago Tribune, September 21, 2016.
22. Harold C. Ford, “Village Life: Encountering a ‘Child of God’ in Resurgent Civic Park,” East Village Magazine, March 1, 2018.
23. Paul Egan, “Flint Report: Fix Law on Emergency Managers,” Detroit Free Press, October 20, 2016, pp. 1A, 3A.
24. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 2.
25. Ibid., p. 3.
26. Ibid., p. 12.
27. Ibid., p. 13.
28. Ibid.
29. Derrick Z. Jackson, “The Goldman Prize Missed the Black Heroes of Flint—Just Like the Media Did,” Grist, April 23, 2018; and Derrick Z. Jackson, “Environmental Justice? Unjust Coverage of the Flint Water Crisis,” Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, July 11, 2017, https://shorensteincenter.org/environmental-justice-unjust-coverage-of-the-flint-water-crisis/.
30. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, p. 88.
31. Laura Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (July 2016): 1–16.
32. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Resegregation of Jefferson County,” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2017.
33. Meghan E. Irons, “Hyde Park Residents Get Rightful ZIP Code,” Boston Globe, March 27, 2012.
34. Amy Hybels, “Next Step in Changing Flint Township’s Name Put on Hold,” ABC WJRT-TV, April 3, 2017, updated June 16, 2017.
35. Andrew R. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and and Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 103, 117.
36. Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Big Picture: America’s Real Estate Developer in Chief,” Public Books, November 27, 2017.
EPILOGUE
1. For this, and throughout the epilogue: Sherman McCathern, phone interview with the author, March 20, 2018; and Todd Womack, interview with the author, Flint, Mich., April 6, 2018. The community, with the support of the university, was working to expand the Ubuntu idea not only philosophically but economically. That meant, for example, experimenting with a barter system so that people who didn’t have money could still participate in communal exchange.
2. McCathern noted that the church was mindful of the tradition of engagement modeled by the Presbyterian Community Church that was originally housed in its building. Residents had good memories of the church, he said, even if they weren’t members, which went a long way for Joy Tabernacle as it worked to build trust.
3. The church created a model of reaching people who fell through the gaps, particularly those who didn’t have televisions or had social phobias or otherwise weren’t connecting to the resources at the distribution centers. For two years, they kept their water site open every day, aided by volunteers from around the city, state, and country.
4. Steve Carmody, “New Preschool Aimed at Helping Flint Kids Exposed to Lead,” Michigan Radio, December 11, 2017.
5. As for McCathern himself, he said that he was still a student of learning how to take care of himself, even as he ministered to the neighborhood. For him, that meant prioritizing his spiritual life. Every morning, he said, he prayed and meditated for up to an hour and a half “to prepare myself personally for the perils I know I’m going to face during the day.” And along the way, there was room for fun, too, like Joy Tabernacle’s Halloween parties and annual Easter Egg hunt. It was a pleasure to see the kids run and play.
6. Infrastructure spending is also known to create jobs, which of course is a great need in cities across the country. Kristina Costa and Adam Hersh, “Infrastructure Spending Builds American Jobs,” Center for American Progress, September 8, 2011; Joseph Kane and Robert Puentes, “Expanding Opportunity through Infrastructure Jobs,” Brookings Institution, May 7, 2015; and The Boston Consulting Group and CA/LA Infrastructure, A Jobs-Centric Approach to Infrastructure Investment, April 2017.
7. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), p. xiv.
