The Modern American Bureaucracy in Flint

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has exposed the illegitimacy of the modern American bureaucratic state.

Flint is a city that has seen more than its share of hard times in past decades. Native son Michael Moore’s film “Roger and Me” tells the story of how GM moved its plants and jobs overseas in the 1980s, crippling the economy of the city of Flint and Michigan, the former car production capitol of the country.

Since then, the city has continued to decline. Crime is high in Flint. The city’s finances are a disaster. Flint has faced fiscal states of emergency twice since 2000.

[A] city like Flint is particularly at risk for financial insolvency. Poverty is rampant. The tax base has been depleted even as the need for services has increased. It’s not hard to see how the city’s fortunes had been stymied such that state assistance was needed.

When a state takes over a city’s finances, it creates the need for intervention by outside management to get the city’s budget in order. The state of Michigan installed an emergency manager in the city of Flint to represent its interests in reining in spending.

Emergency managers in fiscally distressed cities have one function: they are there to get the municipality out of the red and into the black. That single minded drive to cut spending is based on the assumption that cities must be run as businesses. Other considerations are secondary.

In Flint, even before the water crisis, emergency management was cutting public services in the interest of saving money; public safety, for example, was a “big priority” in principle, but not in action.

[T]his narrow, single-minded focus on the reduction of municipal deficits can lead to catastrophe. As mentioned above, the disregard for public safety in deference to cuts in spending has led to reductions in police and fire departments. In turn, this has led to higher crime rates and greater economic and personal security. But in Flint, it was only a precursor of the crisis to come.

In April of 2014, City of Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley approved a temporary measure to convert the city’s primary water source from Detroit to the Flint River; temporary because the municipality was looking ahead to the completion of a new water pipeline by the Karegnondi Water Authority.

The Karegnondi Water Authority, or KWA, is an attempt by Flint and neighboring municipalities to bypass Detroit’s monopoly of the region’s water supply. Detroit’s water purification program, which feeds from Lake Huron, was the primary water source for Flint since 1963. The KWA pipeline is poised to become the primary water source; to the consternation of Detroit- the city sued the KWA over the pipeline in 2013.

In the interest of saving money in the short term, before the completion of the KWA pipeline, the city of Flint hatched a scheme to shift the burden of the primary water source over to the Flint River. The river, which had traditionally been the city’s secondary water source (after the treated water from Detroit), was obviously inadequately treated to assume the burden of primary water source.

But the city went forward with its plans anyway, in the interest of saving money: a projection of nearly $5 million in less than two years.

[I]t took less than a year for the dangers of the river as a water supply to become apparent. Concerns over toxic water were met with tests in January and February of 2015 that found the water safe to drink. Regardless, Detroit offered to reconnect Flint and waive the reconnection fee. The state appointed emergency manager, Jerry Ambrose, denied the offer.

By March of 2015, the Flint city council voted to move back to Detroit’s water supply. Ambrose disagreed, citing the tests done in January and February of 2015 as evidence that the Flint River water was safe to drink.

In August, those claims were disproven. The tests done on the water, like tests done on many municipal water systems, were faulty. Furthermore, it has recently been reported that state officials were aware of this fact as far back as January of 2015, when state workers in Flint were using trucked in bottled water.

The utter erasure of Michigan’s legitimacy should be apparent after watching this debacle. There is no logical or realistic argument in favor of the state here. At every turn, it abrogated its responsibilities to its citizens, and in so doing it has lost all valid claims of representation and authority.

And as if it were not enough that authorities from the state of Michigan and the city of Flint have sacrificed the health of their citizens in the interest of saving money and knowingly exposed its citizens to lead filled, toxic water for months while keeping its employees safe with bottled water, there was one more violation of common decency for the state to impose on the people.

[P]art of the recovery process for the Flint while the water crisis is dealt with has been the delivery of water filters to affected households in the city. This stopgap measure, which is woefully inadequate and more public relations than solutions, is nevertheless better than nothing. Better to at least give the people of Flint clean water.

In the course of bottled water filter delivery, Flint police have found a way to make helping the people of Flint (again, in the most superficial way possible) a total disaster. Flint police are taking advantage of the unprecedented access to people’s homes and identities to serve warrants and throw them in the Genesee County Jail.

A crisis created by the fiscal mismanagement of the city, and exacerbated by the state, is being used to take people at their most vulnerable and serve warrants on them, then put them behind bars.

And here’s the kicker.

Inmates at the Genesee County Jail drank and bathed in Flint River water throughout the crisis. The jail waited until January 23 to finally bring in bottled water for inmates.

To save money.

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This article first appeared in The American Herald Tribune on February 9.

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