This is just a legal maneuver that can at first seem confusing. After taking office the Attorney General's staff found a room full of Flint documents. The previous team had missed them because they weren't filed where they were supposed to be. According to a buddy in state government they very cleverly were hidden in plain site.
Later the AG made a big press release on how they had 'seized' the former Governor's phone and laptop. But it turns out they were in the room with the missing documents as he'd turned them over as is practice on his last day in office. Stay tuned, it's likely a few people will be going to jail.
As per the other comment, I sure hope it's a clever legal maneuver.
It is absolutely shameful that a city in the richest nation in the world cannot have clean water. I don't understand how no one's been to jail, no one is taking charge, nothing seems to be urgent. Sitting on the West Coast where things are comparatively amazing, it's really sad to see such negligence from the local leaders, due to either incompetence or helplessness. Human beings deserve better. Fix it already.
The pipes were in place for many decades. Jailing decades worth of city officials would be unjust.
Neighboring cities were better run. They struggled to fund pipe replacement without any state or federal help. They did it. If now Flint gets handed money for being irresponsible, shouldn't those other cities get paid the money with interest? We're providing an incentive to be irresponsible if we reward Flint. Voters chose irresponsible people to run the city.
Flint was so badly run that the state had to intervene, sending people to make difficult emergency decisions. If somebody is to be blamed, it should be the people who came before. It should be the people who ran the city into the ground for decades, not the people who got stuck trying to salvage a far-gone hopeless mess.
The emergency state management were the ones that knowingly skimped on water treatment chemicals that everyone knew needed to be used, not to mention there are known falsified water tests. If the water was properly treated, the pipes being old or containing lead wouldn't have been a problem and would have been used for decades more without any problems. The previous local government have little to zero liability for their state-appointed forced replacements fucking up. On top of that, both the people in the state and the local city population voted against the emergency manager takeover.
What actually happened is very simple. They changed the water source, knowing full well that it required treatment, and then the treatment was not done, while the water tests were falsified to make it look like it was treated, and pretty much immediately there was complaints. Within a few weeks the local hospital reported their stainless steel sinks corroding from the untreated water, a local automotive plant shut off their local water source and had their own well dug and water treated because it was so corrosive it was destroying parts, among the endless complaints from residents. Some people even contracted legionnaires and died because of the water. Then when the managers got called out, they started partially treating the water to prevent legionnaires, but continued to falsify water tests and not ordering or utilizing pH balancing treatment chemicals.
There was more than a few people that knew 100% what was going on, even if they didn't fully realize the consequences at the time.
You are demanding to punish people for running a city without money.
The water could not be properly treated. Better water could not be obtained. This is how things go when you are out of money because you squandered it over decades.
So, what would you have the emergency state management do? The obvious choices seem to be...
a. bad water
b. fail to pay for good water until that supplier shuts it off (then NO WATER at all)
c. shut off the water
I guess they could try to steal good water, and then go to prison for that. We all want nice stuff, but sometimes we can't have it. This is how life works.
I suppose there might be one more solution. It's a bit weird. There may be an affordable flavoring agent that would prevent people from consuming the water. We do this with rubbing alcohol. We make it intensely bitter so that people don't drink it. City water with that treatment would still be fine for flushing toilets.
All things considered, I think the emergency state management did a reasonable job with the hand that they were dealt. The city was broken when they showed up to make painful decisions. The city needed some adults to run it.
They had the money specifically because they decided not to renew their contract with Detroit water to save money. If they couldn't afford to treat their water, they shouldn't have ever tried switching water sources from Detroit. Not to mention they had even more money to fund the Huron pipeline project to get off Detroit water which would also need to be treated.
The people who switched water sources was not the Flint local government, it was the state appointed manager, which was against local and state wide voter's wishes. WNot sure what you are talking about with 'stealing water', it makes no sense, it is government owned infrastructure, not private enterprise. They had a literal pipeline already working and connected to the Detroit water supply and had it for decades and they decided to turn it off for cheaper Flint water. The costs of treating flint water was 100% known beforehand.
They knowingly falsified water test results specifically to not pay for water treatment, what are the costs of killing people, destroying an entire city's worth of water infrastructure, and paying off people to falsify water tests?
The water would have been fine if it was treated, it would have been fine if they kept buying Detroit water for another 2-3 years like they had been for decades. If water test results weren't falsified every sanitation engineer in the country would be calling them up telling them the billions of dollars worth of damage they were doing to their pipes.
Okay so you don't want them to drink the water, fine. How does that prevent the acidic water from destroying 50 years worth of water infrastructure in a single year? How does bad tasting water prevent billions of dollars in damages?
The EM did a horrible job, they killed people, first via legionnaires disease, then via lead poisoning, not to mention the decades of population with reduces IQ and increased violence, crime, and incarceration costs. Then they cost them Literally billions of dollars destroying the entire pipeline system.
The biggest damage to Flint wasn't the poisoning of the people, which is bad enough, but the destruction of billions of dollars of government property. It is like burning piles of $100 bills so you don't have to pay for your gas to be turned on. If you think the EM did a good job (and the water crisis is only the tip of the iceberg) then I don't think you have been paying attention at all.
What I mean by stealing: If they continued to use the nice Detroit water, but they didn't pay Detroit for that water, it would be stealing. Detroit would shut off the water. If they then reopened the valves or broke into the pumping stations to continue getting Detroit water, that would be even worse.
The savings produced by switching to the bad water shouldn't be viewed in isolation. The rest of the city budget matters too. If they are not in the black, then bills can't be paid. That includes important things like water treatment chemicals.
Basically, bad stuff happens when you are out of money. Budget problems started long before the emergency managers took control.
If somehow the city was in the black, then I'll agree that the emergency managers screwed up. I don't however think that they should be held to a standard of perfection, so "screwed up" doesn't mean anything criminal or even seriously malicious or inappropriate. Mistakes happen.
If the city was still in the red, as I'm led to believe, then disaster of some type was unavoidable. It's just a matter of choosing the disaster. They could have laid off the entire fire department for example, which would likely mean that fires spread from building to building. They could have shut down much of the school system, eliminating school lunches and school buses. Tough choices had to be made.
> We're providing an incentive to be irresponsible if we reward Flint.
Right, contaminating drinking water with lead and letting them go years without help is "providing an incentive to be irresponsible". Give me a break. Arguments like this help nobody and only "incentivize" people to avoid helping those in need for fear of being "unfair" to someone else.
Giving aid to Flint does not harm the neighboring cities in the slightest.
> We're providing an incentive to be irresponsible if we reward Flint
That is the entire point of the prison. If you, as an elected or hired administrator, abuse your power held in trust, the punishment should not be merely losing your job (and letting the residents take most of the pain under some false notion that they are responsible for your bad actions by having had the opportunity to vote), but rather criminal charges and the municipality being made whole by a larger entity.
A similar situation that comes to mind is with Boeing and (previously) with the megabanks - if they're really "too big too fail" (meaning the collateral damage from their creative destruction would be too large), then so be it. But that status should create criminal penalties for the executives for creating a mess that necessitates being bailed out.
They were given $600m to fix it. But they racially discriminated in the hiring process and got a black owned firm with no experience and then wasted the money:
I remember reading about some of the criminal charges that were being filed, and in one instance at least, someone was being charged for "criminal negligence" (or whatever) in the water testing that they did. But after reading about the procedure they used, I thought to myself that AFAIK their procedure seemed valid, so I couldn't understand why they were being charged.
Now granted, it could probably be argued that their procedure could have been more comprehensive. But for the testing they were actually trying to do (determine how much lead was leaching from the main water lines) the procedure they did use seemed to me to be a valid one.
13 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadLater the AG made a big press release on how they had 'seized' the former Governor's phone and laptop. But it turns out they were in the room with the missing documents as he'd turned them over as is practice on his last day in office. Stay tuned, it's likely a few people will be going to jail.
It is absolutely shameful that a city in the richest nation in the world cannot have clean water. I don't understand how no one's been to jail, no one is taking charge, nothing seems to be urgent. Sitting on the West Coast where things are comparatively amazing, it's really sad to see such negligence from the local leaders, due to either incompetence or helplessness. Human beings deserve better. Fix it already.
Neighboring cities were better run. They struggled to fund pipe replacement without any state or federal help. They did it. If now Flint gets handed money for being irresponsible, shouldn't those other cities get paid the money with interest? We're providing an incentive to be irresponsible if we reward Flint. Voters chose irresponsible people to run the city.
Flint was so badly run that the state had to intervene, sending people to make difficult emergency decisions. If somebody is to be blamed, it should be the people who came before. It should be the people who ran the city into the ground for decades, not the people who got stuck trying to salvage a far-gone hopeless mess.
What actually happened is very simple. They changed the water source, knowing full well that it required treatment, and then the treatment was not done, while the water tests were falsified to make it look like it was treated, and pretty much immediately there was complaints. Within a few weeks the local hospital reported their stainless steel sinks corroding from the untreated water, a local automotive plant shut off their local water source and had their own well dug and water treated because it was so corrosive it was destroying parts, among the endless complaints from residents. Some people even contracted legionnaires and died because of the water. Then when the managers got called out, they started partially treating the water to prevent legionnaires, but continued to falsify water tests and not ordering or utilizing pH balancing treatment chemicals.
There was more than a few people that knew 100% what was going on, even if they didn't fully realize the consequences at the time.
The water could not be properly treated. Better water could not be obtained. This is how things go when you are out of money because you squandered it over decades.
So, what would you have the emergency state management do? The obvious choices seem to be...
a. bad water
b. fail to pay for good water until that supplier shuts it off (then NO WATER at all)
c. shut off the water
I guess they could try to steal good water, and then go to prison for that. We all want nice stuff, but sometimes we can't have it. This is how life works.
I suppose there might be one more solution. It's a bit weird. There may be an affordable flavoring agent that would prevent people from consuming the water. We do this with rubbing alcohol. We make it intensely bitter so that people don't drink it. City water with that treatment would still be fine for flushing toilets.
All things considered, I think the emergency state management did a reasonable job with the hand that they were dealt. The city was broken when they showed up to make painful decisions. The city needed some adults to run it.
The people who switched water sources was not the Flint local government, it was the state appointed manager, which was against local and state wide voter's wishes. WNot sure what you are talking about with 'stealing water', it makes no sense, it is government owned infrastructure, not private enterprise. They had a literal pipeline already working and connected to the Detroit water supply and had it for decades and they decided to turn it off for cheaper Flint water. The costs of treating flint water was 100% known beforehand.
They knowingly falsified water test results specifically to not pay for water treatment, what are the costs of killing people, destroying an entire city's worth of water infrastructure, and paying off people to falsify water tests?
The water would have been fine if it was treated, it would have been fine if they kept buying Detroit water for another 2-3 years like they had been for decades. If water test results weren't falsified every sanitation engineer in the country would be calling them up telling them the billions of dollars worth of damage they were doing to their pipes.
Okay so you don't want them to drink the water, fine. How does that prevent the acidic water from destroying 50 years worth of water infrastructure in a single year? How does bad tasting water prevent billions of dollars in damages?
The EM did a horrible job, they killed people, first via legionnaires disease, then via lead poisoning, not to mention the decades of population with reduces IQ and increased violence, crime, and incarceration costs. Then they cost them Literally billions of dollars destroying the entire pipeline system.
The biggest damage to Flint wasn't the poisoning of the people, which is bad enough, but the destruction of billions of dollars of government property. It is like burning piles of $100 bills so you don't have to pay for your gas to be turned on. If you think the EM did a good job (and the water crisis is only the tip of the iceberg) then I don't think you have been paying attention at all.
The savings produced by switching to the bad water shouldn't be viewed in isolation. The rest of the city budget matters too. If they are not in the black, then bills can't be paid. That includes important things like water treatment chemicals.
Basically, bad stuff happens when you are out of money. Budget problems started long before the emergency managers took control.
If somehow the city was in the black, then I'll agree that the emergency managers screwed up. I don't however think that they should be held to a standard of perfection, so "screwed up" doesn't mean anything criminal or even seriously malicious or inappropriate. Mistakes happen.
If the city was still in the red, as I'm led to believe, then disaster of some type was unavoidable. It's just a matter of choosing the disaster. They could have laid off the entire fire department for example, which would likely mean that fires spread from building to building. They could have shut down much of the school system, eliminating school lunches and school buses. Tough choices had to be made.
Right, contaminating drinking water with lead and letting them go years without help is "providing an incentive to be irresponsible". Give me a break. Arguments like this help nobody and only "incentivize" people to avoid helping those in need for fear of being "unfair" to someone else.
Giving aid to Flint does not harm the neighboring cities in the slightest.
That is the entire point of the prison. If you, as an elected or hired administrator, abuse your power held in trust, the punishment should not be merely losing your job (and letting the residents take most of the pain under some false notion that they are responsible for your bad actions by having had the opportunity to vote), but rather criminal charges and the municipality being made whole by a larger entity.
A similar situation that comes to mind is with Boeing and (previously) with the megabanks - if they're really "too big too fail" (meaning the collateral damage from their creative destruction would be too large), then so be it. But that status should create criminal penalties for the executives for creating a mess that necessitates being bailed out.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/05/flint-lead-pipe-replaceme...
Now granted, it could probably be argued that their procedure could have been more comprehensive. But for the testing they were actually trying to do (determine how much lead was leaching from the main water lines) the procedure they did use seemed to me to be a valid one.