Former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley will be part of the first hearing tomorrow.
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Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Hedman “dismissed” Del Toral’s warnings.
Amid withering criticism, Susan Hedman sought to defend the EPA’s actions to deal with the contamination in the predominantly African-American city. The mayor subsequently said the report’s author didn’t speak for the agency.
Chaffetz told Hedman that “this is where you’re fundamentally and totally wrong”.
EPA responded within the “cooperative federalism framework” of the Safe Drinking Water Act, Hedman testified, which assigns states the legal authority to implement drinking water regulations. “To me it just sounded like a lot of people protecting themselves and their own interests – a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blame, but not a lot of concern for the residents of Flint”, she said.
“And, while I used the threat of enforcement action to motivate the state and city to move forward, we found that the enforcement options available to us were of limited utility last fall, due to the unique circumstances of this case”, she told the committee.
State hearings began in Michigan on Tuesday, the latest in a series of examinations that have identified numerous missed opportunities, or worse, by government agencies – particularly the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. She’s a mother of three in Flint and has been protesting since the city switched water supplies in April of 2014, while Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. Lead contamination has been linked to learning disabilities and other problems. A longshot recall effort is under way in MI for Snyder, who has been widely blamed in MI and nationally for the crisis.
The governor is scheduled to appear before the committee on Thursday, along with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
Now the water is unsafe because lead is leaching from the pipes.
Earley said he was given a variety of explanations for coliform bacteria detected in the city’s water in 2014.
He also said, “It would have been unreasonable … to reject their guidance and attempt to make independent rulings on a highly sophisticated and scientific subject matter”, but added that in hindsight he should have done more to push back at those experts who claimed the issues were harmless. She also said that no one at the EPA was at fault for the situation in Flint, but that some things clearly could have been done differently. And for Flint, a city of almost 100,000 people where almost 42 percent of the population lives in poverty, there seems to be no direct route or method for holding any of the people above accountable.
“The regulators provided false assurances to us”, former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling testified.
Michigan Democrats have since proposed a bill to stop governors from appointing emergency managers, amid critiques of the “government as business” models that some say take important decisions out of the community’s hands.
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In prepared remarks, Earley, Flint’s emergency manager from September 2013 until January 2015, said he was “unjustly persecuted, vilified, and smeared – both personally and professionally – by the media, local, state, and federal officials, as well as by a misinformed public” for his role in the crisis.
