Up until last night, when Rick Snyder’s office released an additional 2,528 pages of emails from his executive staff related to the Flint water crisis, I’d thought that our “let’s run government like a business” governor might possibly be able to escape the consequences of his actions. Now, though, I’m not so sure. Thanks to this most recent collection of emails, and the subsequent comments by former members of the Snyder administration, it would seem as though there’s now more than enough evidence to prove conclusively that he knew exactly what was happening in Flint, and yet chose not to act. And, for this reason, it’s not at all surprising that groups like Progress Michigan are now demanding that he leave office.
The following quote comes from Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan.
“There’s no reasonable person who can believe at this point that every top advisor to Rick Snyder knew that there was an issue, but Snyder knew nothing. At worst he’s been lying all along and at best he’s the worst manager on the planet. Under either scenario he’s clearly unfit to lead our state and he should resign immediately… We knew that there was a reason the Governor was refusing to release these documents and now it is all too clear: to him Flint families weren’t as important as the bottom line on his spreadsheet. There are no more excuses and no more scapegoats. The Governor must resign.”
According to the report in today’s Detroit Free Press, it would seem that these most recent emails prove two things. First, they show that several in Snyder’s staff urged him, as far back as October 2014, to switch Flint back to Detroit water. And, second, they demonstrate that members of Snyder’s staff purposefully communicated about the toxicity of Flint’s water in ways that would keep their concerns private, and undiscoverable by means of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, indicating that they knew how terrible their actions would appear if made public. Here, with more on these items, is a clip from the Detroit Free Press.
…Two of Gov. Rick Snyder’s top lawyers privately advocated moving the city of Flint back to the Detroit water system because of quality problems only months after Flint began to draw its drinking water from the Flint River and treat it at its own plant in mid-2014, according to a review of e-mails made public Friday by the governor’s office.
The governor’s top aides discussed the city’s water-quality problems as early as the fall of 2014, according to a review of 550 e-mails released by the Snyder administration.
Valerie Brader, deputy legal counsel and senior policy adviser to Snyder, raised problems with Flint River water in an e-mail to the governor’s Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore and other top aides on Oct. 14, 2014…
(Braider) wrote in an October 2014 email to chief of staff Dennis Muchmore and other top aides to Gov. Rick Snyder, saying the return to Detroit’s water system for the city of Flint made economic and environmental sense, calling it an urgent matter to fix…
She argued for returning the city to Detroit’s system drawn from Lake Huron, saying it made economic and environmental sense for an “urgent matter to fix.” She cited bacterial contamination in the treated river water and reduced quality that caused “GM to leave due to rusted parts.”
“As you know there have been problems with the Flint water quality since they left the DWSD (Detroit Water and Sewerage Department), which was a decision by the emergency manager there,” Brader wrote to Muchmore and three other top Snyder aides.
Michael Gadola, then the governor’s legal counsel, echoed those concerns in an e-mail responding to Brader and sent to the governor’s top aides. He called the idea of using the Flint River as a drinking water source “downright scary.”
Flint “should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control,” Gadola wrote 12 minutes after Brader’s e-mail…
And that’s not the worst of it. The Free Press tracked down Muchmore, who now works for a law firm, and he confirmed that these concerns had been discussed with the Governor. “We shared them,” he said. But, in spite of this, no action was taken for almost a year. Worse yet, the people of Flint were told repeatedly over this period of time that their water was safe to drink.
When asked why no action had been taken by the Governor, Muchmore, according to the Free Press, indicated that cost was a major factor.
To my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve had people inside the Governor’s office telling us that they had gone to him as early as October 2014, asking him to take action, only to have nothing done. Yes, we knew several weeks ago that one of Snyder’s top aids had been told of a possible link between the deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that had hit the region and the drinking water being pulled from the Flint River, but, at least in that instance, evidence never surface that the Governor had been informed. And, now, we have that… we actually have people going on the record and saying that Snyder not only knew what was happening, but instructed them not to act.
As for the attempts to hide these items from public view, here’s a quote from one of Brader’s emails. “I have not copied DEQ (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) on this message for FOIA reasons,” she said, referring to the fact that, if the MDEQ had been copied, their conversation about the water’s toxicity could be discoverable by the press. (Michigan, as we’ve discussed before, is one of only two states where the governor’s office and state legislature are exempted from FOIA laws. The MDEQ, however, does not share that protection.) So, it would seem, we had an administration that was more interested in keeping their concerns quiet than actually working with the people at the MDEQ who would be best positioned to deal with such things.
As my friend Jim just reminded me, this most recent revelation serves as a good reminder of how incredibly fortunate we are to still have something of an investigative press here in Michigan. If not for the people working for the likes of the Detroit Free Press, we might have had to be satisfied with the narrative of events as put forward by Snyder’s “independent” commission. “Snyder’s response to the ‘What did you know and when did you know it?’ question was to say that he looked forward to reading his commissioned report,” my friend Jim just reminded me. “Thank goodness,” he went on to say, “we have enough of an independent press left that Snyder can’t control this story.”
At the rate things are now happening, I’m not sure how much longer Snyder can stay in office. And, to be honest, I don’t know if he really even wants to at this point, especially as he’s scheduled to testify win D.C. before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on March 17. If I were a betting man, I’d say that he’ll announce plans to step down before then, saying something to the effect of, “Given the fact that the Democrats have chosen to politicize this terrible tragedy in Flint, I feel as though I have no choice but to leave office so that we can put this distraction behind us, and focus on serving those who so desperately need our help.” Up to a few weeks ago I was somewhat torn as to whether or not we should expend our effort attempting to drive Snyder from office, but he’s done very little since then to prove to me that he’s capable of either telling the truth or helping the people who he’s hurt. So, if you’ve got a petition ready, I’m willing to sign… just in case he doesn’t walk away on his own.
[The lead paint portrait at the at the top of the page of Rick Snyder was painted by local artist Michael Dykehouse, who I interviewed here a few days ago.]
