MI to work with U.S. on Flint water issue

Sanders hasn’t been the only person in the public spotlight to call on the MI governor to resign.

Clearly, he didn’t mean the Flint River, which was the source of a health emergency that has grown over the past 21 months and turned into an appalling political scandal that reaches the governor.

In Snyder’s State of the State address on January 19, he unveiled a $28million plan to combat Flint’s water crisis.

Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, who lost his re-election bid in November amid the water crisis, said newly released emails by Snyder showed that the governor’s staffers disregarded Flint’s plight because of the city’s demographics.

The problem, after all, began under Snyder’s orders in 2014 when the city switched from the Detroit’s water system with water Lake Huron to the Flint River, reportedly to save some $5 million. “If it had been a rich white suburb where the water was brown and smelly, people would have come immediately to the rescue of those families”. Soon after, local doctors noticed a spike in children coming in with unexplained rashes and hair loss.

The city was being poisoned.

Lead-laced water supply has plagued Flint, a city of 99,000 residents 60 miles northwest of Detroit, since April 2014. The federal government has rejected state requests to declare the Flint water crisis a national disaster, a technical distinction that would provide the city with almost $100 million more for bottled water, filters, and, eventually, new water pipes. What has become clear, however, is that Kansas’ continuing budgetary squeeze and the anti-government, anti-federal assistance stances of state officials have created a series of personal crises for those individuals – the needy, prisoners and the mentally ill – who have the least power to affect policies that directly affect them.

There has been plenty of blame to go around.

On Sunday, about 30 members of the Genesee County Volunteer Militia held a rally and protest outside of City Hall to demand accountability.

“We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water”. The phosphates build up a mineral layer inside pipes that inhibits corrosion and helps prevent lead from leaching into the water.

So much damage has been done it’s hard to determine which piece of this man-made disaster is most egregious.

Perhaps. As recently as 2011, the city was fielding reports of raw, untreated sewage flowing into the Flint River. Well, yes. That’s what started this mess.

Flint has fallen on hard times since most of its General Motors factories shut down.

Critics say emergency managers ignore the concerns of the local communities and that this played a role in Flint’s water fiasco, since residents had been complaining about the water’s taste and color. Many here, like filmmaker Michael Moore, are under the impression that the grant money was earmarked for Flint’s water crisis.

Long believes it is too little, too late. The internal investigation into further action against the two employees should take a couple of weeks, said Kurt Weiss, spokesman for the state’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget.