Republican presidential candidate Gov. John Kasich of Ohio suggested he would have alerted residents sooner if the Flint, Mich., water crisis happened under his watch, sending a thinly veiled critique of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s handling of the problem.
“People have to be alert. They have to be alert to problems,” Kasich said when asked how he would have handled the crisis in Flint at Thursday night’s GOP debate in Des Moines. “If you see a problem, you must act quickly to get on top of it, and [when] people at home say they have got a problem to listen to them.”
Snyder has been criticized for not alerting Flint residents after finding out their drinking water was contaminated with lead.
Snyder created the problem by installing an emergency manager to oversee the struggling city’s water supply. The manager decided to take water from the highly contaminated Flint River to save cost, which was so acidic that it corroded pipes and sent massive amounts of lead in the city’s drinking water.
“I don’t know all the details of what Rick Snyder has done. I know there have been people who have been fired … but the fact is every single engine of government has to move when you see a crisis like that,” Kasich said.
“The fact is we work for the people, the people don’t work for us,” Kasich said. “And we have to have an attitude when we are in government of servanthood. We serve you, you don’t serve us.
