The governor said “I’m kicking myself every day” in response to questions about why the state didn’t act until late a year ago.
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“The right people were raising the right issues, they were sounding the alarms”, said John Truscott, a public relations strategist who was the spokesman for former GOP Gov. John Engler.
Deputy counsel Valerie Brader called it “an urgent matter to fix”, since water from the Flint River was contaminated with bacteria and corrosive enough that General Motors wouldn’t use it to clean machinery, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Snyder, a two-term Republican elected on promises of conservative reform, has said he learned about the problem in October 2015 and immediately took action to get additional testing and water filters to Flint residents.
Gov. Rick Snyder’s newest release of state emails and documents related to Flint’s water disaster appears to indicate that his aides’ reluctance to brief him, his own mismanagement – or both – led to delays in…
The money will cover 65% of the water bills from the past two years. “And that’s something we’re making sure doesn’t happen again”.
State regulators failed to require Flint to treat river water with anti-corrosion chemicals when its water source was switched in 2014, allowing lead to be scraped from aging pipes and into drinking water.
The relief Snyder announced Friday is the result of a $30 million piece of legislation passed earlier by the MI legislature. Snyder said Friday he can’t recall what conversations he might have had with Gadola, who was Snyder’s chief legal counsel and has since been appointed by Snyder to the Michigan Court of Appeals.
“This credit will reimburse residents for payments made since April 2014 for the portion of water used for drinking, bathing and cooking”.
But Muchmore never asked the legislature for a supplemental spending bill to reconnect Flint to Detroit’s water system, concluding that such a proposal would be “dead on arrival”.
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He said it’s kind of a catch 22: you want people to use the bad water so the good water can make its way into the system. In March, after he was forwarded a resident’s threat to city officials about an “environmental racism” lawsuit against the majority-black city, he wrote an email to state officials suggesting potentially buying bottled water to distribute through churches, saying “If we procrastinate much longer in doing something direct we’ll have real trouble”.
