Gov. Rick Snyder (R-Mich.) didn’t visit Flint for more than half a year after the city’s mayor first informed him it was in the midst of a severe water crisis, a Democratic congressman said Thursday.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) blasted Snyder, saying he shirked unique responsibility for the widespread lead-poisoning in Flint, given Snyder’s championing of a law that had put wide-reaching municipal powers into his administration’s hands.
“This is a failure of a philosophy of governance you advocated,” Connolly told Snyder at a House Oversight Committee hearing.
“Even after you were warned by the Mayor of Flint—they had problems, and he begged you to come to Flint—you ignored it,” Connolly added. “We have no evidence of you traveling to Flint for seven months, Governor.”
According to a cache of documents released in January by Snyder’s office, then-Flint Mayor Dayne Walling asked the governor on Feb. 1, 2015 for help coping with with widespread lead contamination. Snyder’s staffers brushed aside Walling’s concerns, saying in a memo that the mayor “seized on public panic…to ask the state for loan forgiveness and more money for infrastructure improvement.”
Only by late September did Snyder first publicly acknowledge that Flint’s water supply was dangerous. In early October, his administration took steps toward attempting to remedy the problem.
A bill that put critical municipal decision-making powers into the hands of the governor’s office was passed in 2011 by the Michigan legislature. Although it was overturned in a 2012 referendum, a revised version of that legislation was passed and signed into law by Snyder shortly afterward.
Snyder’s emergency managers contaminated Flint residents’ drinking water in April 2014, after the Snyder administration switched the municipal water supply in a bid to save money. The plan included interim use of the heavily-polluted Flint River.
On Thursday, Connolly illustrated the governor’s unique responsibility by having committee staffers hold up stacks of orders issued by Snyder’s emergency financial managers, “not by the city council of Flint.”
“Do you know how many of those 8,000 pages dealt with meaningful steps to protect the citizens of Flint from lead flowing their pipes, Governor?” Connolly asked. “Not one.”
According an Mlive.com analysis of the governor’s January document release, Snyder staffers “wrote just seven brief emails concerning Flint water during the past two years.”
Snyder has seen his popularity drop sharply since he finally acknowledged the severity of the lead contamination crisis in Flint.
The incompetence of the Snyder’s administration has come up in the national discourse, most notably during Democratic presidential primary contests. Both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called on Snyder to step down before the Michigan held its primaries on March 8.
