America is a thousand Flints.
—Carl Crow, The City of Flint Grows Up: The Success Story of an American Community (1945)
I.
There was no toast. No congratulatory countdown. No cheers. But on October 8, 2015, almost eighteen months after the celebratory switch to the river water, Governor Rick Snyder announced that Flint would finally be reconnected to the Detroit system. The news came the same day that the Flint River Fest was scheduled to kick off—kayak giveaways, a fireworks show—but the festivities had been postponed due to the “current drinking water crisis.” Snyder salted his announcement with a distinct desire to move on. “Again, this isn’t about blaming anyone,” he said.1 “Right now, I want to stay focused in on the solutions and taking actions to solve problems.”
It was a remarkable turnaround. But by now everyone knew the water was bad. The crisis was undeniable, what with the empty Brita filter boxes piled up at the makeshift distribution centers and people waiting in long lines to receive a free filter, some with toddlers in tow. They took videos on their phones as Home Depot employees demonstrated how to attach the filters to their faucets.
On the south side of the city, LeeAnne Walters was coming to terms with the fact that her home, once a place of shelter for her family, was now known as ground zero.2 “The citizens in Flint are relying on each other” for relief from the water crisis, she said, “because we have no choice.” And there were her kids. Gavin, the four-year-old twin with outrageous levels of lead in his blood, had gained just a few pounds in the past year. He still struggled with anemia. He had developed problems with his speech.3 LeeAnne had worked so hard to expose the toxicity in her house on Browning Avenue. Now she wondered whether she could remain there.
The inequity between communities, long latent, had been made excruciatingly vivid to people who lived outside Flint. For so long, the state had dragged its feet, dismissing the city as if it were too dysfunctional and impoverished for locals to be seen as an authority, even in the matters of their own lives. As Marc Edwards put it, Flint residents had been paying among the highest water rates in the world for “water that was not suitable for anything but flushing toilets,” and they had been “told to like it.”4 The state had reversed course only after immense public pressure, a broadening media spotlight, and two independent water analyses left it with no other option.
“I’m happy that the city is finally doing what they should have done a long time ago,” LeeAnne told a reporter, sounding weary.5 “They should have taken it seriously back months ago when we tried to tell them, but they chose to ignore it.” As Snyder made his dramatic announcement, he was surrounded by the state’s heavy hitters—the mayor, the director of the MDEQ, the president of the C. S. Mott Foundation. Still absent were the community organizers and scientists who had exposed the water troubles.
So the governor’s turnaround was greeted with some bitterness. The $12 million bill for the reconnection to the DWSD would be divided among three parties. Snyder asked the state legislature for $6 million—he got it—and $4 million came from the Mott Foundation.The city was expected to pay $2 million. The matter of the essential length of pipe that had been sold to Genesee County was resolved: Flint would pay the drain commission one dollar per month to use it.6 In less than a year, Flint was expected to cut off the connection to Detroit a second time and begin treating lake water from the Karegnondi Water Authority.
Completed within a week, the switchback was heralded by a Detroit Free Press editorial calling the Flint water crisis “An Obscene Failure of Government.”7 The paper, which had twice endorsed Rick Snyder in his gubernatorial campaigns, noted that he had appeared chastened at his public announcement. “He should,” the editorialists wrote. “In Flint, he failed.”
The consequences of that failure would play out for decades to come. While the lifelong effects of lead poisoning can be mitigated, they can’t be cured. No switch could turn that back. It had affected children in their homes, but that wasn’t all: three Flint elementary schools had excessive lead levels, too, with one of them testing at 101 parts per billion shortly before the return to Detroit water.8 There still hadn’t been a satisfactory explanation for the rashes or hair loss or a number of other health problems that people thought might be connected to the water. It began to sink in that, no, even after the switchback, the water still wasn’t safe. Bottled water and filters were still essential. Another three weeks would have to pass before the remaining river water would be cleared from the pipes, and it would take months, at a minimum, to rebuild the pipes’ protective coating, even with the extra corrosion control that Flint planned to add to the properly treated Detroit water.9 People were cautioned that there would probably be lingering issues with taste, odor, and color. Flint’s infrastructure was in a worse state than it had been eighteen months earlier. The corrosive river water had also ruined hot water tanks and plumbing fixtures all around town, forcing people to pay for expensive repairs.10 And most of all, public trust in the city, already shaky, was gone. It was difficult to imagine residents having confidence in their tap water when thousands of lead pipes still sat in the earth like so many ticking time bombs—and when the institutions that were responsible for fixing the problems were the very same ones that had caused them in the first place.
While a quick reconnection was a public health necessity, researchers at both Virginia Tech and Wayne State University in Detroit worried that there hadn’t been enough sampling of the river water—it was important to know exactly what the city had been drinking since the spring of 2014. Up until the last minute before the switch, a number of people were scrambling to sample as much as they could, particularly in large buildings, including hospitals.11 They were looking for the kinds of bacteria that would thrive in the conditions of Flint’s water. Lead was not the only toxin keeping the scientists awake at night. They were right to be worried.
II.
Much as Governor Snyder wished to face forward, there was a reckoning to be done. How had an entire city been poisoned by its own water? The first efforts toward accountability came on the heels of the switchback, and they were modest: Howard Croft, Flint’s public works director and a lifelong resident, quit his job, saying that his resignation was necessary for the department to regain public trust.12 One person at the MDEQ (Liane Shekter-Smith, the top drinking water official) was reassigned.13 Her boss, Dan Wyant, said he was “convinced our program staff believed they were doing right,” but they had made a mistake in Flint by failing to follow federal rules for developing a corrosion treatment program.
“All who brought this issue to the department deserve credit,” Wyant said, giving nods to the EPA and Virginia Tech, though not to the community leaders.14 Around the same time, though, he mysteriously claimed that Flint water had corrosion control all along. The water was treated with lime, he said, and although that proved to be insufficient, it was done with the best of intentions. (According to Marc Edwards, lime actually makes corrosion worse.)15 With its mixed messages, the MDEQ was doing little to build back the trust it had broken.
The EPA’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., interceded by distributing a memo about Michigan’s mishandling of Flint’s water, stating unequivocally that large drinking water systems must use corrosion control at all times. But it also said that this kind of citywide contamination “rarely arises,” and noted—in an implicit acknowledgment of the gaps in its own regulations—that the Lead and Copper Rule “does not specifically discuss such circumstances.”16 And the EPA in Chicago released its final report about lead-saturated water in Flint, more than four months after Miguel Del Toral submitted his draft version. The memo accompanying the report blithely stated that “most of the recommendations” Del Toral had set out several months earlier were now being implemented.17 That is, the report declared itself redundant.
It would take a bipartisan, independent investigative task force to start the real work of accountability. About a week after the switchback to Detroit water, Governor Snyder announced that five experts in public health, water management, and the environment would come together to scrutinize what had gone wrong. They were asked to produce “an unbiased report” that included recommendations to “ensure all residents have access to safe, clean water.”18 There were reasons not to invest too much hope in the task force: it had no subpoena power and, like the Kerner Commission in the 1960s, it could not make binding recommendations. And, because it reported to the governor, whose office was exempt from transparency laws, none of its internal work would be open for public review. As it turned out, though, the panel took its job very seriously.
Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, after three months of interviews, the study of countless documents, and several trips to Flint to meet with residents, health providers, water management experts, and public officials, the governor’s task force released its preliminary report. It was unsparing. Most of the blame went to the MDEQ for one failure after another, including a culture of “minimalist technical compliance” that took a bare-bones approach to water regulation and public safety; the agency’s explicit instruction to Flint officials to not use corrosion control; and its response of “aggressive dismissal, belittlement, and attempts to discredit” those who were concerned about the water. “In fact,” the evaluators wrote, “the MDEQ seems to have been more determined to discredit the work of others—who ultimately proved to be right—than to pursue its own oversight responsibility.”19
Given the MDEQ’s central role in the crisis, department emails and documents had already come to light through Freedom of Information Act requests by the media and the Flint Water Study team at Virginia Tech. The exposure confirmed the department’s persistent mistreatment of both Flint’s water and those who had worried about its safety. District supervisor Stephen Busch’s false claim to the EPA that the water was treated with corrosion control drew attention, as did the fact that he had hedged on an offer of expert help from the EPA.20 Michael Glasgow’s early warnings about the treatment plant’s readiness were also made public, along with details about the MDEQ’s response to complaints and unsatisfactory test results, which the department had treated as if it simply had a public relations problem.21
Many people were traveling the week of the report’s release, or absorbed in their holiday traditions, or simply trying to stay warm through the darkest days of the year. But the report, preliminary though it was, shook people up. The day it came out, Dan Wyant, who had served in the administrations of three different governors, resigned.22 So did Brad Wurfel, the communications director. On his way out, Wurfel told reporters that he felt the MDEQ’s communications team had a difficult task in dealing with very technical information that changed over time and that “the human element” of their work “got lost in the press account.”23 The two men were the first at the environmental agency to lose their jobs.
Another big change had come to Flint. In November, soon after the reconnection to Detroit water, the city held its first election in four years free of the oversight of an emergency manager. Mayor Dayne Walling campaigned hard for a full-length term of genuine mayoral responsibility. He called for the state to invest tens of millions of dollars into Flint’s infrastructure, especially for the replacement of the lead service lines. “Governor Snyder and the emergency managers caused this problem, plain and simple,” he said, “and we’re making sure they fix it.”24
But in the end, Walling couldn’t shake the image of him toasting the original switch at the plant off Dort Highway—“Here’s to Flint!”—and drinking the water on television while swearing that it was safe. People felt betrayed. As one person told a reporter, “I was steady drinking it. My mother and them said, ‘Don’t drink it,’ but I saw the mayor drinking it so I thought it was OK if he was. But then all of a sudden, last summer, I got a bunch of red bumps.”25 Walling lost by about eighteen hundred votes. The city chose Karen Weaver as its new mayor, a psychologist by training who was backed by Flint’s influential church leaders.26 She was also the first woman elected to run the city. One of her earliest acts was to declare a state of emergency. It was the trigger for a chain of events to bring not only state aid to Flint but federal assistance, too. “Do we meet the criteria?” Weaver said at a council meeting in December. “I don’t know. I’m going to ask and let them tell us no.”27
III.
An entire city had been exposed to toxic water for eighteen months and the State of Michigan had even acknowledged it, yet national media had only intermittently taken notice.28 That was about to change, thanks in large part to Michigan Radio. The public radio station, which had made an impact with its coverage of Miguel Del Toral’s memo, continued to doggedly report on each development in Flint—the denials, the data, the reversals, the switchback. But the story was complex, and when it was delivered in one piecemeal dispatch after another, listeners weren’t able to put the whole event together.29 Statewide, many people were only just awakening to the news that something was up in Flint, and the back story couldn’t easily be summarized in each news brief.
Now that the governor had confirmed the worst, the station created an hour-long documentary. “Not Safe to Drink” focused on LeeAnne Walters’s story, and it made good use of what reporter Lindsey Smith called “the intimacy of the audio narrative” while losing none of the technical background. LeeAnne showed Smith her family’s “water stash”—40 gallons that they replenished once a week for drinking, cooking, and bathing the twins, filling the tub with one heated pot of store-bought water at a time. It was so time-consuming and expensive, especially on top of the water bills that they still had to pay, that the family did baths only once a week for the boys. Otherwise, they relied on baby wipes. The older kids showered at their grandmother’s house outside of town, and LeeAnne’s husband could shower at work. “How does this happen in the United States?” LeeAnne asked. “I mean, you hear about it in third world countries, but how does this happen, specifically in a state that is surrounded by the Great Lakes?”30
The documentary aired in the middle of December. Thanks to the station’s partnership with the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces the radio show and podcast Reveal, it was broadcast around the country. This was one of the first complete narratives of the Flint crisis to reach national audiences. And then MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show began covering the city and its water, drawing from the work of local reporters.31 The rising national attention brought home the painful truth of the disaster. Jan Worth-Nelson, a poet and the editor of East Village Magazine, watched Maddow’s show from her home in the College Cultural neighborhood. She and her husband, Ted, lived in a gorgeous wood-paneled house on Maxine Street that she had made into a sanctuary; in a loving gesture, they rang a bell in their backyard every evening at the exact moment the sun set. It was one of Flint’s denser neighborhoods—her water had never turned brown—and when she saw young families moving into the area, she felt hopeful. “This is not a dying neighborhood,” she said. “There are kids here.”32 So that midwinter night, when Jan heard Maddow ask, “Is Flint, Michigan, still habitable?” she caught her breath. “I felt like everything was falling apart,” she remembered. “My nerves faltered and I wondered how I—how any of us—have managed to be here all this time.”33
IV.
A ready explanation for what had happened in Flint quickly took on the appearance of fact: a flawed and hasty decision motivated by careless and petty cost-cutting to meet a budget. But this was not quite the case. Flint’s move to join the new Karegnondi Water Authority—which is what precipitated its temporary switch to river water—was a long-considered plan, years in the making.34 It was also a strange one, since it involved building an entirely new drinking water system in a state that already had more than any other.
The MDEQ was charged with monitoring all those utilities, but after years of budget cuts and instability its capacity was limited. The MDEQ had lost almost one quarter of its salaried employees—1,224 people.35 The drinking water office and the lab that tested water samples were both strapped, according to an exhaustive federal audit in 2010, even as they were expected to navigate a growing number of regulatory requirements.36 The water office lost 8.7 percent of its budget over the course of a decade, the Detroit Free Press reported, while the lab lost 43 percent of its full-time staff.
Nonetheless, the MDEQ had “one of the largest, if not the largest, number of community water systems to regulate,” Snyder’s investigative task force noted. The KWA would add yet one more to the mix. And while it was touted as a solution to the exorbitant cost of water, the KWA in fact did nothing to address the core structural problems behind the problem of affordability in a shrinking city such as Flint.
“In a state and in a region where we had excess water capacity, why did we think we needed more?” said Chris Kolb of the Michigan Environmental Council, one of the co-chairs of the governor’s task force.37 Why indeed. It’s fairly unusual nowadays for a public water system to be built from scratch. That’s especially true if the water source hasn’t run out or become toxic. But Jeff Wright, Genesee County’s drain commissioner, the leading proponent and eventual CEO of the KWA, lobbied fiercely, on the grounds of savings, independence, and stability. The arguments were persuasive: Detroit charged a premium for supplying water over a long distance, plus there were annual rate increases, and it didn’t allow Flint a seat on its board. The KWA would provide water from Lake Huron (the same source as Detroit’s system), it promised a cooperative model, and it would charge communities a fixed, flat rate. Michael Glasgow, who ran Flint’s treatment plant, saw another advantage: “I viewed the plant as a city asset that should be put to good use,” he said.38
The KWA did not just promote itself as a salvation, however; it was exceptionally involved in steering the politics and financing of the deal. Given the scale of the damage that followed, it prompted a second look at the KWA’s dealings with Flint.
It is worth recalling that when the fledgling KWA applied for a permit in 2009, Michigan was in the depths of the Great Recession, exacerbated by Detroit’s troubles and the auto industry’s near-collapse. So it was especially odd to argue for creating a new water system that duplicated a service that customers already had—and to claim that this was a cost-effective plan. Environmental groups, both regional and national, wrote a joint letter opposing the KWA permit. “We don’t need to drive another wedge between Detroit and the rest of the region,” wrote Nick Schroeck, a professor at Wayne State University’s Environmental Law Clinic. “We should seek to improve upon the efficiency and conservation measures of the water delivery system that we already have rather than spending vast sums of public dollars on projects that are completely unnecessary.”39
But the KWA nonetheless got the permit (it was at that point largely seen as a weapon to wield in negotiations with the Detroit water authority), and by the time the full cost was assessed, it was a $300 million project with considerable financing needs. Sealing a contract with Flint would go a long way to meet them.
The KWA—still just existing on paper at this point—helped devise the strategy to get the disempowered Flint council to vote on the water switch so that the city’s participation would survive emergency management and any legal challenge to that management. Even though the council vote was celebrated as an exercise in sovereignty (which it was not), the emergency manager went on to ignore the council’s stipulations and commited Flint to a greater quantity of water, at a higher cost, than the vote permitted.40 Construction on the KWA began one month after Flint’s contract was signed. The city’s share: about $85 million, with annual payments of some $7 million.
The KWA got what it needed to move forward. But how was the distressed city going to pay for its part?41 Flint was so broke that when it was offered loans in 2012 to improve its water infrastructure, it had to turn them down, even though half the debt would be forgiven. “When your pockets are empty, further debt is irresponsible,” said the emergency manager at the time. And in January 2013, an MDEQ report had detailed necessary repairs at Flint’s treatment plant but noted that the repairs could not “proceed due to the city’s current bond debt.” The efforts to sign Flint on to the new water authority were especially surprising, given that the state treasury, which approved the contract, was also responsible for the city’s financial well-being through the emergency management program—a system that’s supposed to make tough decisions, such as reducing debts and redundancies.
Flint had hit the maximum debt allowed by law. So the state arranged a work-around: Flint’s share of the money for the construction of the KWA was given a special pass so that it did not count against the debt limit. The work-around was through something called an administrative consent order, or ACO. This is a tool that the state uses to force local governments to fix an urgent environmental problem, even if they must issue bonds that exceed their debt limit to do so. Even among state workers, the ACO raised eyebrows. In December 2013, an MDEQ employee received a call from an attorney “seeking what I’d characterize as a ‘sweetheart’ ACO intended to ease the city’s ability to access bond funding for their possible new water intake from Lake Huron,” as she described it in an email.42 The attorney and “Treasury officials have already been communicating with Steve [Busch of the MDEQ] about an Order of some sort in light of Flint’s financial situation.”
KWA’s bond attorneys exerted pressure on the negotiations. In an email delivered to Earley and future EM Jerry Ambrose about a month before Flint’s 2014 water switch, one attorney said that “we cannot continue with the transaction without the ACO.” If the delay continued, “the KWA will have expended its initial resources and be forced to stop construction and the project will be delayed for at least one construction cycle.”43 Ambrose asked the Treasury for help, and an employee was instructed to “get a call into the Director,” presumably of the MDEQ, “to push this through.”
The ACO was finalized two days later. It was written in a way to account for minor work on wastewater lagoons at the Flint treatment plant’s lime sludge facility—so to appear to address an urgent environmental problem—but it also covered the entirety of the KWA bond debt. To make sure that it would be legally intact, Stephen Busch and Flint’s environmental attorney conferred on the wording: “Steve, I checked with the City’s bond counsel, here is the Language that we MUST include in the consent order so that the City can move forward on this.”44
So the tool that was meant to fix an environmental emergency in this case included language that required Flint to “undertake the KWA public improvement project.” In this way, the KWA could count on a broke city to pay for almost a third of its construction. And it did this through the Treasury, which was the steward of Flint’s financial health. But the KWA actually added to Flint’s debt, and it bent state law to do so. Rather than borrowing to invest in schools or public safety, Flint ended up paying for a pipeline that literally paralleled one that already existed.
In December 2014, The Bond Buyer honored this cleverness by giving the KWA its Midwest “Deal of the Year” award in a ceremony at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The honor was misdirected. As Peter Hammer, a law professor at Wayne State University, described it, the ACO “effectively obligated the City to use the Flint River as the interim source of drinking water during KWA construction. This legal commitment was strategically driven by the need to manipulate rules governing the bond market, not considerations of public safety.”45
Also, as it turned out, the issues with the wastewater lagoon that the order was supposedly addressing were already being remediated when the ACO was finalized. Much later, as the scope of the water crisis was becoming clear, nobody from the MDEQ would respond to inquiries from a Detroit Free Press reporter about the ACO. Jeff Wright claimed that he didn’t know much about it at all. The ACO, he said, was “worked out between the state and Flint.”46
The Flint Water Advisory Task Force noted that the KWA deal cast a shadow over all that happened next: “The influence that KWA and Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright exercised was undeniable. They got exactly what they wanted from Flint City Officials, Emergency Managers and State Officials at DEQ and Treasury. The more difficult question to answer is the source of that influence.” The governor’s task force speculated about how the KWA would end up with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts “to control and hand out.… Whether KWA’s influence is just an extreme and tragic illustration of politics as usual or whether there is something more at work is still unanswered.”47
And then there were the punishing terms of the contract between the KWA and the city. If Flint should miss a single one of its annual bond payments, the KWA could seize the city’s treatment plant, plus 25 percent of its state revenue-sharing money, and it could also force the city to levy a tax to get its share of the money. Meanwhile, just as local authority was returned to Flint, the water problem had become a full-blown crisis. And the first $7 million payment would be due in about a year.