Rick Snyder's Misleading Claim About Who Changed Flint's Water
The city's leaders didn't start this mess
At his annual State of the State address on Tuesday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) accepted blame for the water crisis in Flint and offered an explanation for how it started.
"This crisis began in the spring of 2013, when the Flint City Council voted 7-1 to buy water from the Karegnondi Water Authority," he said.
It's simpler than that: Snyder's government gave Flint bad water treatment advice, and the city got bad water. And it's also more complicated: City officials did play a role, but Snyder's version of events oversells it.
"The governor's been trying to use that line -- that action that was taken by the city council -- to remove himself from this problem," former Flint City Council member Josh Freeman told "So That Happened," the HuffPost Politics podcast.
As for the decision to join the KWA, it was made even before Flint's elected leaders voted -- by the emergency manager Snyder had appointed to run Flint's affairs because the city was broke. The manager had total control over the city's government and the council only got to weigh in because the director of the new water authority insisted.
"I said, 'I will not accept that,'" Karegnondi CEO Jeff Wright recalled in an interview with The Huffington Post. "I do require a decision of this magnitude to be voted on by the elected representatives of the people."
So on that fateful day, the Flint City Council voted to join the KWA, knowing the new system wouldn't be ready until 2016, because the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department had been raising its rates every year, resulting in some of the state's highest water bills. City and state officials believed Flint could save millions of dollars by joining the new system.
Then the Detroit system, from which the city had been buying its water for nearly 50 years, notified Flint and the surrounding Genesee County that it would be cutting off their service in the spring of 2014.
What could be done between 2014 and 2016, when the KWA came online? Genesee County opted to continue buying water from Detroit, but at a 10 percent higher rate, according to Wright, who is Genesee's drain commissioner in addition to being the CEO of the KWA.
Flint wound up going for the Flint River, though it's not clear exactly how the decision was made.
"At no time had we decided to use the Flint River... as our primary water source," said Freeman, who resigned from the council in December after serving more than 10 years.
Dayne Walling, who served as Flint's mayor until Karen Weaver unseated him in November, told the Detroit Free Press that month that emergency manager Edward Kurtz made the decision not long after the KWA vote. Kurtz also signed an orderhiring a firm "for assistance in placing the Flint Water Plant into operation using the Flint River as a primary drinking water source for approximately two years," though Kurtz wasn't in charge when the switch happened in 2014.
Regardless of whether they had a hand in Rick Snyder's Misleading Claim About Who Changed Flint's Water: