If you have been following the water crisis in Flint, Mich., you are aware of how many things had to go wrong for an entire city to be poisoned for 18 months before government acknowledged there was problem.
You’d have to be a big believer in coincidence to think the system could fail in so many different ways simultaneously, with such enormous consequence, without human negligence or malice. Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general, is not that big a believer in coincidence.
Ever since this crisis emerged, Democratic partisans have been looking for a way to pin it on the state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, as revenge for his imposition of a financial manager to fix Flint’s perennial fiscal mismanagement. Although Schuette did not rule out the remote possibility the debacle in Flint was a grand statewide political conspiracy, the charges he filed yesterday offer the beginning of a much more plausible explanation of what happened.
Bureaucratic negligence and a lack of concern for human life led to people cutting corners, whatever their motives. This led government to fail to perform a basic function that everyone agrees it should fulfill.
Schuette filed charges Wednesday against two supervisory employees of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and one Flint city official who supervised the water supply. The officials are charged with several offenses and face fines and significant prison time.
One of the charges is for willfully and knowingly misleading the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Genesee County Health Department about the safety of Flint’s water.
Another felony charge pertains to tampering with and concealing test results that might have made the suspected dangers of Flint’s water clear sooner. There were also two misdemeanor charges, one of them a water testing violation. In an apparent effort to skew results, the bureaucrats in question allegedly directed Flint citizens to pre-flush their taps before providing water samples.
One of the defendants is also charged with misconduct in office, because he authorized a permit for the Flint Water Treatment Plant despite knowing the plant would not be sufficient to provide clean and safe drinking water.
The investigation is not over, and Schuette told the press to expect more people to be charged. Legal experts have already suggested that by beginning with these rank-and-file employees, prosecutors will be able to work their way up the chain of command if there is culpability at a higher level.
Schuette said this prosecution represents “a road back to rebuilding and restoring trust and confidence of Flint families in their government.” We hope so, but that necessarily means taking the investigation as high up as it has to go, even if it leads to places that seem unlikely now.
People across the country have lost a lot of faith in government in recent years because bureaucracies at all levels resist accountability. Just yesterday, the Washington Examiner reported that the federal employees’ union is ferociously resisting attempts by Congress to bring some accountability for the suffering caused to veterans by repeated malfeasance at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. A few weeks ago, we wrote here about the IRS hiding behind taxpayer privacy laws to conceal misconduct by its staff.
Such behavior crosses all party lines and exists at all levels of government. Public servants have jobs and livings only because of the service they theoretically provide to the public. They must be held to higher, not lower standards than the rest of us, because the consequences of their misconduct can be far more dramatic, as the case of Flint has catastrophically illustrated.
