At this point it seems the only person in the governor’s office who didn’t know about the deadly state-created slow-motion train wreck that has become known as the Flint water crisis was the governor himself, Rick Snyder, Mr. Relentless Positive Action.

[Full disclosure: I voted for Snyder for governor not once, but twice. I have come to regret it.]

But is it really plausible that Snyder didn’t know about the tainted, corrosive Flint River water being piped into residents’ homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals?

Is it plausible he didn’t know about the lead leaching from the city’s antiquated infrastructure, poisoning residents?

Is it plausible Snyder didn’t know about the two Legionnaire’s Disease outbreaks which sickened nearly 90 people, killing nine, after Flint, under the control of state-appointed emergency managers, switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River?

Let’s consider some of the possibilities:

• Snyder is lying and knew all along. He’s playing dumb now in an effort to avoid political and potentially criminal accountability.
• Snyder was so out of touch with what was happening in his own office that he legitimately didn’t know.
• Snyder naively believed subordinates who told him that everything was under control and he never bothered to follow up despite mounting public outcry.
• Snyder cultivated a management style in which subordinates were afraid to give him bad news and so hid the facts from the governor.
• Snyder created a climate in which he only wanted to hear about solutions, not problems. Since his subordinates had no solutions, they kept their mouths shut about the Flint debacle.
• Snyder put in place a management system in which responsibility was delegated to key advisors and bureaucrats, but mechanisms to hold those officials accountable were never developed, and the governor never bothered to do so personally.

So take your pick. Snyder is either criminally negligent, personally out of touch, or administratively incompetent. No matter which description fits, the man is unfit to continue to serve as governor. He should resign.

If Snyder won’t, and should the recently approved recall petition make it on the ballot in November, Michigan voters should remove him from office. Given the chance, that’s how I’ll vote.

 

 

Buried at the bottom of today’s stories in the Detroit News and the Free Press on who knew what, when, and what they did about the Flint water crisis as it was developing was this revelation:

Gov. Rick Snyder’s environmental policy advisor, Valerie Brader,  purposefully kept the state Department of Environmental Quality out of an email discussion in which she and other top aides to the governor were expressing deep misgivings and anxiety about the state of Flint’s water more than a year before any public acknowledgment of the crisis.

Why? To specifically prevent the truth from coming out under state Freedom of Information laws.

Let that sink in for a minute.

On Oct. 14, 2014, after learning that the GM plant in Flint had decided to stop using city water because it was corroding and rusting newly manufactured engine parts, Brader sent an email to other top Snyder advisors in which she described Flint’s water quality problems as “an urgent matter to fix.”

And then she appended this:

P.S. Note: I have not copied DEQ on this message for FOIA reasons.

You see, DEQ is subject to FOIA, which means that had the agency been included in these email discussions, the public could potentially learn what was being said behind closed doors while their own concerns were being denigrated, dismissed, and ignored.

But in Michigan the governor and his administration are exempt from FOIA.

So while the public was being told that all was well with Flint’s water, in the background officials in a position to warn city residents about their own fears concerning the dangers of bathing in, cooking with, and drinking the city’s tainted water, intentionally kept residents in the dark.

For more than a year, officials at the highest levels of Michigan government kept their own misgivings about Flint’s water from reaching the people with the most at stake. The Free Press story sums it up this way:

By early 2015, higher lead levels were showing up in the water. The DEQ initially dismissed the reports, until September when a pediatrician showed that blood lead levels in Flint children spiked after the water switch. After months of telling residents the water was safe, state officials finally acknowledged they had applied the wrong standard to Flint when they supervised the switch — and did not do the necessary corrosion control.

But until this week, the public did not know about the early anxiety voiced by the governor’s top aides.

Part of the reason may have been because Brader did not include an agency subject open records laws.

Welcome to Michigan, where the citizens have no right to know their own government is poisoning them.

In an editorial this morning, Tne New York Times unloads on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder for his culpability and lack of action in the negligent poisoning of residents of the city of Flint, who for a year and a half were forced to drink noxious, lead-tainted water so the city, under the control of an emergency manager appointed by Snyder, could save a few bucks.

The governor, a Republican, did virtually nothing to help the city until an outpouring of rage from Flint residents, city leaders, journalists and independent researchers forced him to wake up and focus on the calamity, which started more than a year ago.

While local news media has been instrumental in breaking this story, especially Michigan Public Radio and the Detroit Free Press, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing this man-made disaster brought to national attention in such blunt terms:

This was a catastrophe caused by failures at every level. A task force appointed in October by the governor put the primary blame on the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, whose director resigned in late December. According to the task force, the state health department apparently had early knowledge about elevated lead levels in the blood of children, but kept silent and did not warn the public. And one or more of the successive emergency managers appointed by Mr. Snyder to control spending in Flint signed off on bad decisions.

In September, an outside expert reported high levels of lead in the water and a local medical center found high levels of lead in the blood of many children, who are especially vulnerable to long-term brain damage. State environmental officials belittled these findings, criticized the researchers, and told the public to relax, the water was perfectly safe. Of course, the researchers were right.

And the already bad news may still get worse. Between June 2014 and November 2015, Flint and surrounding Genesee County have seen an unexplained spike in cases of Legionnaires disease, with 87 reported cases, 10 of which were fatal. The norm in previous years was between 6 and 13 cases. The region’s tainted water supply is strongly suspected to have played a part.

The Times editorial is equally blunt about who is responsible for fixing this disaster:

Mr. Snyder has appointed one task force to investigate how this problem occurred and another task force to find long-term solutions. Whatever fix is required, the buck clearly stops with him. This disaster occurred on his watch and he has to find the money, either within the state budget, from private sources or by begging for a handout from the federal government. Given his indifference until forced to act, outsiders will need to monitor the state’s response to make sure it protects the health of the residents of Flint now and in future years.

Maybe now that his indifference has been called out in front of a worldwide audience, Snyder can bring some of his vaunted “relentless positive action” and actually do something for the people of Flint.