Rick Snyder (After Poisoning 10s of Thousands Of Flint Residents): "I Want To Solve This Problem"

[hatrack]

EDIT

In a wide-ran­ging in­ter­view on the eve of his state of the state ad­dress, Snyder said he knew last sum­mer about his top aide’s con­cerns that Flint res­id­ents were “get­ting blown off” by the Michigan’s De­part­ment of En­vir­on­ment­al Qual­ity. The MD­EQ waved off his of­fice’s con­cerns, Snyder said. He ac­cep­ted re­spons­ib­il­ity for the lack of ad­equate fol­low up, but the twice-elec­ted GOP gov­ernor said he would not heed calls for his resig­na­tion.

“I want to solve this prob­lem,” Snyder said. “I don’t want to walk away from it.” Both MD­EQ’s dir­ect­or and chief spokes­man were forced to resign, and Snyder has taken sev­er­al steps—al­beit be­latedly—to help Flint identi­fy the ex­tent of the con­tam­in­a­tion and to re­spond to it. He said more ac­tion will be re­vealed in Tues­day night’s ad­dress.

The slow and pos­sibly deadly pois­on­ing of Flint, a hard-bit­ten in­dus­tri­al town of nearly 100,000, began in April 2014, when the city switched its wa­ter source from De­troit to the Flint River to save money. Res­id­ents’ con­cerns were ig­nored for 19 months un­til in­de­pend­ent tests by Vir­gin­ia Tech and a loc­al hos­pit­al re­vealed dan­ger­ous levels of lead ex­pos­ure. Only then did Michigan’s en­vir­on­ment­al agency ad­mit to vi­ol­at­ing fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions re­quir­ing the treat­ment of Flint’s wa­ter to avoid cor­ro­sion of the city’s an­cient wa­ter pipes, a lapse that caused the lead pois­on­ing. The fate­ful de­cision to switch Flint’s wa­ter source was made by an emer­gency city man­ager ap­poin­ted by Snyder. In early 2015, months be­fore the lead pois­on­ing was pub­licly an­nounced, an ana­lyst at the En­vir­on­ment­al Pro­tec­tion Agency dis­covered dan­ger­ous levels of lead in Flint’s wa­ter. An ap­pointee of Pres­id­ent Obama for­bade the res­ults from be­ing re­leased to the pub­lic.

Last month, I wrote a flat­ter­ing column about Snyder’s lead­er­ship style that did not ad­dress the Flint wa­ter crisis. ( Ed. - ) We re­vis­ited the is­sue Monday as part of a broad­er column I’ve got in the works. This is an ed­ited tran­script:

EDIT

http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/352793/snyder-calls-flint-his-katrina-catastrophic-failure-leadership

[wilt the stilt]

1. Here is just punishment

All the people involved with the decision must drink that water for 18 months.