Two witnesses scheduled to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee Wednesday about the lead water crisis in Flint, Mich., will not be attending, including the emergency manager in charge of the city in 2014 when the water supply was changed.
Darnell Earley was the emergency manager in charge of Flint when the city switched from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Company to the Flint River in April 2014. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, said Earley will not be coming to Congress Wednesday to face the committee.
“We won’t hear from the governor, any of the emergency managers he appointed in Flint, or anyone else from the state who was involved in making decisions that led to this crisis,” Cummings said. “In our search for the truth, we must hear from everyone involved to understand what happened.”
Reports have indicated Earley is working with a lawyer on his options and was likely to plead the Fifth Amendment, the right to avoid self incrimination, if he did appear in front of the committee.
While Earley was the emergency manager when the change was made, he was not the emergency manager who signed off on the switch to the Flint River water. That was Ed Kurtz, who made the call months before Earley took office.
Earley took over as emergency manager of the Detroit Public Schools following his time in Flint and resigned from that position Tuesday, effective at the end of the month.
In addition to Earley, EPA researcher Miguel Del Toral will not appear in front of the committee.
Del Toral was the EPA researcher who found evidence of too much lead in Flint’s water in early 2015. The EPA brought the findings to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, but did not alert the public to the findings and instead deferred to state authorities.
That decision lead the administrator for the Midwest region, Susan Hedman, to resign last month.
In a letter to the committee, Nichole Distefano, associate administrator for the EPA’s Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations, said Del Toral wanted to stay in Flint to work on getting clean drinking water back to residents.
“He has expressed to us his desire to continue with his ongoing response efforts in Flint and not to testify,” she wrote.
In addition, Distefano said the EPA does not want non-management researchers to testify to Congress because they are concerned about a “chilling effect” among career employees.
Cummings is less than pleased at the diminished witness list for Wednesday’s hearing.
“Having such a one-sided hearing undermines the credibility of the committee and subjects the committee to accusations of partisanship,” he said. “No matter who is responsible, the people of Flint deserve a comprehensive investigation that gets them answers — not a partisan effort to protect the governor and others who brought about this crisis.”
