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Street Roots • August 5-11, 2016
Street Roots • August 5-11,2016
BY AMY ROE
have 200,000 people. A very strong
industrial tax base, because it was the
birthplace of General Motors. Because of
the decline of the auto industry, that tax
base was greatly eroded, and it lost half of
its population. But you still have the same
amount of aging, deteriorating
infrastructure that needs to be
maintained. Since the 1970s, the federal
government has cut back by about 75
percent the amount of money it allocates
to support replacing and maintaining
*
infrastructure
so the burden falls on
ratepayers. That’s a big part of it. Also,
Flint loses an incredible amount of water
to water main breaks. So they’re paying to
treat the water, and they’re paying to
treat the water as sewage without even
getting to actually use it. It’s just wasted.
They are paying some of the highest
water rates in the nation: $150 a month
average for a family of four. For water
that’s still not safe to use.
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
t I Xhe American Civil Liberties Union of
I Michigan hired veteran investigative
JL reporter Curt Guyette to document
the impact of the state’s controversial
emergency manager law. The law takes
away the power of locally elected officials
and allows a state appointee to take
complete control of financially troubled
school districts and cities. The ACLU
considers it the the most extreme law of
its type in the United States.
But in the course of reporting on the
law, Guyette identified one of its most
• egregious outcomes: the story of how Flint
residents ended up paying top dollar for
toxic water that poisoned them and their
children.
His reporting on the situation turned
him into a national figure and earned him
Journalist of the Year honors from the
Michigan Press Association in January.
Amy Roe: What brought you to Flint?
Curt Guyette: Flint was under the
control of an emergency manager who
unilaterally made the decision to leave the
Detroit regional water system and begin
using the Flint River as the water source
for a city of 100,000 people, with the
stated intent of saving $5 million over two
years. The switch to the river was made in
April of 2014, and as soon as the switch
occurred, people began complaining about
the quality of the water. It looked bad,
smelled bad, tasted bad. People began
getting sick, their hair starting falling out
in clumps, they started getting these
strange rashes that doctors didn’t know
how to treat. There was a problem with E.
coli. To address the E. coli problem, they
upped chlorine levels. Increased use of
chlorine led to the creation of carcinogenic
total trihalomethane (TTHM), a byproduct
of chlorine. And the TTHM problem
existed for months before the public was
told about it.
A.R.: What is Michigan’s emergency
manager law?
C.G.: Most, if not all states, have some
sort of law to address issues of cities,
school districts, counties falling into
financial distress. Michigan had a law that
was pretty moderate. They used to be called
emergency financial managers. There was
an EFM over Detroit public schools; this
EFM tried to extend their authority to
issues involving curriculum. The school
board sued, said the EFM was overstepping
its bounds, and won. In reaction to that, the
governor and the Republican legislature
passed a new, much more extensive law
that really granted unchecked authority to
what were then termed emergency
managers.
A.R.: I imagine there was opposition to this
law?
C.G.: A grassroots effort throughout the
state — a reaction to how sweeping this law
was, to how antidemocratic the law was -
put the issue on a referendum, and voters
went to the polls and overwhelmingly
rejected the law. The reaction of the state
was to have the Legislature, during a lame
duck session, pass a new law that was very
similar to the one that had just been
rejected by voters. Under Michigan law, if
an appropriation is attached to a bill, it’s not
subject to a referendum. So they took a law
- that was at heart antidemocratic, that had
been rejected by voters because it is
antidemocratic — and passed a new law that
they made referendum-proof.
A.R.: So they just put some random
appropriation on it?
C.G.: Yes, with the intent to make sure
that it could not be rejected by the state.
That strategy was mapped out in the
governor’s office. As soon as they
(grassroots opposition) started gathering
petition signatures, that’s what (the
governor’s office) started to do.
A.R.: Can you talk about the role that
grassroots organizing has played in Flint?
C.G.: Citizen action was the only
recourse available to (Flint residents). The
emergency managers were imposed on
them. Their elected mayor and city council
were effectively rendered powerless. In
March of 2015, the City Council of Flint
overwhelmingly voted to return to the-
Detroit water system, and the emergency
manager overruled them, saying they could
not afford to return to the Detroit system
and there was no need to return to the
Detroit system because the (Flint) water
was perfectly fine. So, shut up and drink it.
But people refused to shut up and drink it.
They refused to accept the lie that their
water was safe.
A.R.: When independent testing revealed
the water was massively contaminated, rather
than try to fix the problem, state officials
denied there was a problem and attacked thod
who were attempting to point it out. How did
the emergency manager law play into this?
C.G.: One of the flaws of the emergency
manager law is that there aren’t any of the
traditional checks and balances that help
make democracy work. You had the
appointed emergency manager make this
disastrous decision to use the Flint River,
and then the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality, which is supposed
to oversee and ensure that cities are
properly conducting their water tests, unde
the control of another appointee of the
governor, helped to try and cover up the
truth. At one point, when they were doing
the lead tests, the MDEQ sent an email to I
the city of Flint saying we’ve been analyzing
your tests so far and there are a number of
samples that have come back over the
action level; you better hope that no more
tests are over the limit, or else the city
overall is going to be out of compliance.
After receiving that warning, all of the
subsequent tests came back under the
action level, 30 tests in a row, under the
action level. According to Marc Edwards,
one of the pre-eminent water specialists in
the United States, statistically, the odds o
that happening, if the tests are legitimate, I
almost zero.
A.R.: Can you explain how this is a racial
justice and economic justice issue?
C.G.: The way that the emergency
manager law has been applied in Michigan,
the cities and school districts that have
been taken over by the state have been
almost exclusively places with African-
American majority populations and high
rates of poverty. So they are taking over
cities and school districts that are poor and
black.
Initially, on the face of it, it takes away
democracy. At one point, more than half of
the African-Americans living in Michigan
had had their democracy taken away from
them. Unfortunately, Flint is the starkest
example of how terribly wrong things can
go when you deprive people of their
democracy. They got poisoned. The whole
town got poisoned. Because democracy was
replaced by an austerity-driven autocracy.
With all the vast unchecked powers that
these emergency managers have, the law
specifies one thing that they cannot do,
which is miss a bond a payment. So, the
banks get paid at all costs, even if it means
poisoning a town’s water supply.
A.R.: One thing that surprised me is that
Flint residents were actually paying a lot for
their water. How did this happen?
C.G.: It happened because Flint used to
A.R.: Now we’re seeing investigations that
show other cities may have been able to cheat
on their water tests. How widespread might
this be?
C.G.: There’s very high motivation to
cheat on these water tests because if it’s
determined that lead levels exceed the
federal action level, then they have to start
replacing these lead service lines, and
that’s a tremendous expense. It averages
$3,000 to $4,000 a line.
A.R.: In Oregon and Washington, there
have been news reports of lead contamination
found in schools and elsewhere. What do you
tell people who are concerned about their
water safety?
C.G.: You can test the water yourself.
And really, there’s no safe level of lead.
Especially if you have younger children or
are pregnant, absolutely you don’t want
there to be any lead in your water. It’s very
tough for low-income people. Personally,
I’ve been buying filtered water since my
kids were born, in the 1980s, just out of
concern. But not everybody can afford that.
You almost have to, because the costs are
so great. What lead does to kids, at even
very low levels, it causes lower IQs,
behavioral problems, learning disabilities.
In communities of color especially, those
are the kids that end up in the school-to-
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prison pipeline. All moral and ethical
issues aside, the costs to society are
tremendous.
A.R.: A number of nonprofits like the
ACLU are funding investigative journalists
now. Do you think the concept of who is or is
not a journalist is changing?
C.G.:' There’s a lot of great work being
done by nonprofit organizations,
ProPublica, Mother Jones magazine, but
they’re set up to be journalistic operations.
What I’m doing is a step beyond that in
that the ACLU is proudly an advocacy
organization. But that the bottom line is
still the same. If you are calling yourself a
journalist, then credibility is paramount.
You have to play it straight. In some ways,
you have to be even more diligent in terms
of ensuring accuracy and fairness, because
you are going to be under heightened
scrutiny.
A.R.: What’s next for the people of Flint?
C.G.: There are class action lawsuits,
there are individual lawsuits, and there is
relentless struggle. There are health
problems. There are the problems with the
kids who have been affected by lead
contamination. But there are also things
like property values. Try selling a house in
Flint. Who wants to buy a house in a city
that has a poisoned water supply? The
plumbing in their houses has been
wrecked. What do you do if you are living
in a house worth $10,000, but it would cost
$20,000 to replace the plumbing?
A.R.: It reminds me of Hurricane
Katrina, except this is an entirely manmade
disaster.
C.G.: It’s a totally avoidable man-made
disaster. It just goes to show how short
sighted austerity can be. That $5 million
they said they were going to save by using
the river for two years is going to be a
rounding error. It’s almost impossible to
calculate all the costs associated with this.
There is no dollar value on taking away a
child’s IQ points.
Amy Roe is the senior writer for the ACLU of
Washington.
Reprinted from Real Change News in
Seattle.
CURT GUYETTE,
ACLU REPORTER
■ ■■
"Unfortunately, Flint is the
starkest example of how ter
ribly wrong things can go
when yon deprive people of
their democracy. They got
poisoned! The whole town
got poisoned. Because de
mocracy was replaced by an
austerity-driven autocracy."
■ ■IK
"What lead does ip kids,
at even very low levels, it
causes lower IQs, behav
ioral problems, learning
disabilities. In communities
of color especially, those are
the kids that end up in the
^chool-to-prison pipeline.
All moral and ethical issues
aside, the costs to society
are tremendous."