Lead poisoning. The words strike fear into the hearts of every parent of a young child. Lead poisoning has been linked to not only diminished IQ, but to violence and increased crime rates. In fact, one of the key factors credited with the massive drop in overall violent crime rates in the past quarter century is the elimination of lead additives in house paints and gasoline. Lead poisoning of children in the US in the 21st century is now almost unheard of. Well, except for the thousands of children in Flint, Michigan, who were unwittingly poisoned by drinking the city tap water in the past 2 years.
How did this happen? Before Republican Governor Rick Snyder begged President Obama to declare a state of emergency in Flint (which only came months after local pediatricians raised the alarm that an epidemic of lead poisoning in Flint’s kids was happening), Snyder appointed one of a series of “Emergency Managers” to over-rule Flint’s locally elected municipal government. Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz signed an order on March 29, 2013 to contract with a company that the municipal government never approved, to start using the Flint River as a temporary source of drinking water, until a pipeline to a different water authority that the city council had approved could be completed.
Two subsequent Emergency Managers who followed Kurtz upheld and continued the implementation of the Flint River as a drinking water source. At no point was the elected municipal government ever consulted or given the opportunity to exercise their right to uphold the will of the people of Flint who elected them, not the appointed Emergency Manager, to run the city’s affairs. Now, a generation of helpless children are going to pay the price of a Republican governor’s hubris.
I had lead poisoning as a baby, the result of lead paint dust in the century-old Victorian house which was my birth home. At the time of the results, I was just under the cutoff for treatment. Since then, guidelines have changed and my toddlerhood lead levels are now considered fairly acute. I’m understandably livid about what happened to these children in Flint. For decades, people have been advised against fishing or swimming in that river because it was so polluted. It was painfully obvious from the start this was a bad idea.
The Emergency Managers and Governor Snyder need to be held accountable. If evidence shows that people in his administration knew of the risks and then covered them up, he should resign. The damage done to people he’s charged with helping is irreversible in many cases.
I wish I could say that we don’t have to worry about our state meddling in local government causing disasters here, but, unfortunately, we do. Since the Republican takeover of our state government in 2010, there’s been a litany of examples of state interference in local municipalities on an unprecedented scale. They have not just gerrymandered legislative and Congressional districts; Over and over again, Republicans in Raleigh have targeted local governments across the state to restructure city councils and county commissions to reflect their views, not those of local residents. In virtually every instance, they’ve targeted municipalities where the people have been electing Democrats, or where the seats were run as nonpartisan elections. In virtually every instance, the calculated net effect was to force gerrymandering, punish these elected governments by removing their authority or revenue sources, and reconfigure the rules to favor packing those local governments with Republicans instead.
For example:
SB 279, which was a bill about counseling that got a sneaky last minute amendment that sought to strip municipalities of the right to regulate employment, housing and institute nondiscrimination ordinances.
SB 181, which arbitrarily redistricted Wake County’s commissioners to favor Republicans.
HB 263, which gerrymandered the Greensboro city council to favor Republicans and disenfranchise the local black community.
HB 189, which reduced the number of districts and representatives of the Rockingham county Board of Education substantially (and of course, in such a way to favor more Republicans).
Never mind the power play to strip control over the Charlotte airport from the city of Charlotte. At least the FAA was able to step in on that debacle.
Also, scarily reminiscent of Flint, 2013’s HB 488, which effectively stripped Asheville’s rights of authority and ownership over its own water system and handed over administration to an unelected board of appointees. Something tells me this won’t end well.
Finally, 2014’s SB 786 allowed fracking to happen pretty much anywhere in NC. Democrat Gene McLaurin tried in vain to secure an amendment to protect property owners and give local governments some say in how it goes down, but predictably, this failed on a party line vote. Raleigh’s Republicans have little respect for local control.
The party that loves to grandstand about how much they love “freedom” sure doesn’t seem to respect the freedom of the local people to decide much for themselves, especially when those citizens aren’t voting reliably Republican. As Flint has shown, usurping local control can have disastrous consequences. North Carolinians should be warned that voting Republican could be dangerous to our health.
April Bundy lives in Union County, North Carolina
Fear of the Black President and his executive orders revealed by the Governor in a Facebook plea for support through an online petition charging horrific undue undefined unspecific orders was unseemly and in my perception racist. It is not just NC but, all of the C.S.A. that takes up this theme regarding the executive and the Federal Government until they want something from it, our government. The petition then was followed with some notice of outrage concerning supposed Federal overreach in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency. That agency has a mission to protect us from polluted water and other environmental poisoning.
I saw nor do I expect to see outrage that there are 10 military bases in NC that control much of what is and can be done on our coast. David Price as much said that we’ll get the all important superhighway from Morehead City to I-40 and I-95 if the Military wants to let us have it.
Informative and well written. Thanks, April for sharing. Please submit more.
Thank you, April, for writing this.
The state of Michigan and its governor are mainly at fault. Snyder appointed that emergency manager (apparently an incompetent one). The state’s DEQ, an executive agency under Snyder, has been found in the overwhelming number of reports/accounts on this matter, to have failed in the nature and timing of its water testing, and in its public pronoucements and advisories on the problem. That agency is under investigation by the federal Attorney General for its handling of the issue. Snyder has accepted, in public, at a news podium, most of the blame and offered his apologies—an admission of his and the state’s mismanagement.
This essay doesn’t begin tell the whole story. The Flint City Council initially voted 6-1. as a cost cutting measure, to change where the city got its water from the Detroit Water and Sewer Department to a new water authority that is to get its water from Lake Huron. The state emergency manager approved the change AFTER the City Council voted in favor of the change.
The Detroit Water and Sewer Department was incensed that Flint would no longer be their customer and cut off Flint’s ability to get Detroit water two years before the new water authority’s distribution system was to be completed. Flint was left with no choice but to get water, in the interim, from its secondary source, the Flint River.The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tested the new water supply twice found it met drinking water standards.This was later proven to be erroneous.
But local and federal officials are as much to blame as the state. On June 12, 2014, the Mayor of Flint said publicly that “people are wasting their precious money buying bottled water.” On April 2, 2015, the Mayor tweeted that his family used and drank Flint city water every day.
And the EPA regional administrator has been forced to resign for the EPA’s failure to adequately address Flint’s water crisis. So placing all the blame for the Flint water crisis on the Republican Governor is a major distortion. All levels of government were at fault, especially local officials.
And it should also be noted that the state appointed an emergency manager for the City because the City was in receivership. In other words, under local control the city went bankrupt. So much for the idolization of local control. And to link Flint’s problems with the Republican-controlled NC General Assembly Is nothing more than partisan posturing from disgruntled NC Democrats.
You’ve got some errors in your little analysis too my friend. First off, the newly elected Mayor of Flint Michigan is a women, and a Democrat, and she is the one solely responsible for partitioning the State to declare a ‘man-made state of emergency’ in Flint, Michigan. Also, the Governor’s appointment of Emergency Managers negated all discretionary powers of the duly elected city council and city government in Flint; when the people of Michigan voted in a referendum to challenge the Governor’s authority to arbitrary appointment Emergency Managers, the majority Republican Michigan legislature slipped a rider onto budget legislation which allowed the Governor’s continued appointments and overrode the will of the people of Michigan. Whatever your nonsense is about receivership, Flint Michigan is broke because of Bill Clinton’s passage of a bogus corporate trade agreement called NAFTA, which moved the US. auto industry primarily overseas. Funny thing about Bill, during his campaign he had reassured the northern auto industry worker in Minnesota that he would never authorize the passage of NAFTA, yet he did it immediately upon taking his oath of office – same as ‘Hillary the liar’ will do with the TPP.
To be fair Cos…Bill signed NAFTA yes. But George HW Bush had negotiated and promulgated NAFTA during his first term which was going to be his first offensive act upon entering into his second term. Oops. So it was a done deal before Bill took office and he could have refused it and didn’t. It’s been changing the face of the middle class in this country ever since; not for the better either.
I hadn’t given TPP too much consideration until you mentioned it; it not been a topic of discussion…at all. That’s disconcerting and scary. I can see you being right though. Hillary will sign it just as soon as she bounces inside the gate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We know Trump et al will sign it.
The new female Mayor of Flint was not the Mayor in 2014 when the City’s water supply problems were first discovered.
Your comments over look several facts. The take over of the Flint city government by the state started in December of 2011 with the appointment of an emergency city manager by the Gov. The City’s elected officials were essentially left with no actual power.
They did continue to make an effort to deal with both the bankruptcy and other issues, and one of those attempts was a decision to move toward a new water supply. That decision was implemented a few weeks later in April 2014 with no further consultation with the City’s elected officials by the then emergency City Manager to use the Flint River, BUT what the City Council voted for was a new water supply from Lake Huron, not the Flint River. And it was the City Manager handling the City’s negotiations and budget during that time, not the Mayor, nor the City Council.
As for the Mayor’s comments, he depended, as did many, many other public officials, business leaders and sadly, parents, to depend on the reports from the Michigan state various EPA folks insisting that the water was safe. It is a bit disingenuous to place blame on elected officials whose power has been almost entirely eliminated by an emergency City Manage appointed Michigan’s Governor, Rick Snyder.
The comparison to NC local authority being usurped by state officials does not seem far fetched to me, regardless of party affiliation. They just happen to be the GOP.
Norma: You have the facts and chronology of the Flint case correct.
As we’ve seen, highly partisan apologists will try to absolve the state and its governor of central blame, and partition as much of it as they can to the locals and feds (the latter seemingly always done “How can we link and tar Obama with another mess” intent). They’ll refuse to accept that the handling of this sad situation had anything to do with callous and high-handed disregard by the state for all of Flint’s residents.
Buy they need to understand that a state’s executive agency response to any crisis reflects a governor’s appointments, judgment, competence, and approach to governance.
That NY Times article was in the N&O too today. This Flint story is a very sad one, showing how those in power, and having the hubris brought by power, quickly lose empathy and concern about human beings, especially young ones, at the grassroots level—especially when those people are in urban areas, are in larger part minorities, and are too often viewed as “broken”, or too needy, or unlikely to wield worrisome influence. It also reflects the consequences of ignoring the inconvenient facts and truth brought to light by truly unbiased environmental and health scientists.
Here’s hoping that this mess ultimately brings down a callous governor, and helps put a halt to Michigan’s backasswards slide into public program dysfunction.