LANSING – Governor Rick Snyder‘s critics, hoping to find a damaging email he sent regarding what he knew and what he did about Flint water, likely came away disappointed from reading almost 300 pages of emails he sent and received on the topic in 2014 and 2015.
In fact, most of the emails – which the governor’s office made public Wednesday, despite his office’s exemption from the Freedom of Information Act – show the governor saying little, often forwarding emails to staff without comment, making a few suggestions regarding an upcoming public event or in some cases signaling he needed better information than what a member of his staff provided in an email.
Snyder did not release emails that his Executive Office staff sent and received on Flint in which he was not the sender or recipient. Democrats sharply criticized that decision.
“One of the things I had to think through … is they also sort of had the perspective that they were under that umbrella and shield personally themselves because they’re part of the Executive Office,” Snyder told WDET-FM’s “Detroit Today” of why he limited the release to himself. “If you go back to this discussion, it was mostly a discussion of me as the elected official, is there some smoking gun or some other issue to indicate I knew about the lead problem and I didn’t do something about it.”
Snyder said he is talking to Lt. Governor Brian Calley about a broader review of the state’s transparency laws.
Angela Wittrock, spokesperson for Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich (D-Flint), was incredulous that Snyder did not receive any email September 24, the day that Doctor Mona Hanna-Attisha announced she had found rising blood lead levels in Flint children.
There were some clear themes that emerged from the documents. What Mr. Snyder received from staff was far more illuminating than what he sent
The most obvious storyline coming from the emails is the implosion at the Department of Environmental Quality
But another interesting dynamic is documents involving Flint’s decision to leave the Detroit water system in favor of joining the new Karegnondi Water Authority that would build a new pipeline to Lake Huron. The documents undermine both Snyder’s attempt to cast that decision as purely local in nature and Democrats’ efforts to pin the blame for the move on the emergency manager Snyder appointed to run Flint.
In fact, the documents show that decision was agreed upon at several levels of the government.
Of course, in some ways the debate is irrelevant. It was not the decision to join the new pipeline that directly caused lead to get into the drinking water at some locations in Flint, it was the decision to switch to the Flint River as an interim water source until the new pipeline was complete without corrosion control treatment. There was little new light shed on the dynamics of how the decision to switch to the river was made.
On the topic of the lack of corrosion control treatment, the documents reiterate what Snyder’s task force already has said: the DEQ’s decision not to require the city to use corrosion control treatment was the most important moment in what caused lead to leach from service lines into some locations’ drinking water.
A November 16, 2015, document marked “privileged attorney-client communication” poses a series of questions, one of which was “Did the DEQ require the city to have corrosion control in place when it switched to the Flint River as its source of drinking water?
The answer was unequivocal: No.
Under state regulations, Flint could demonstrate it was practicing “optimal corrosion control” by showing through two tests at six-month intervals that the system was in the 90th percentile in each monitoring period lower than the sum of the lead in the source and the practical limit for lead of 5 parts per billion. With the source at 0, Flint needed to stay at 5 parts per billion or less. Once the city exceeded that level in the second period, the DEQ sent it a letter August 17, 2015, ordering it to install corrosion control treatment.
The problem was that lead levels in specific locations were much higher than the 90th percentile.
Up until mid-October, the DEQ had defended its application of the rule. On October 18, then-DEQ Director Dan Wyant sent an email to Snyder and other top staff changing the department’s tune.
“I believe we now made a mistake,” he wrote. “For communities with a population above 50,000, optimized corrosion control should have been required from the beginning. Because of what I have learned, I will be announcing a change in leadership in our drinking water program.”
It is in the November 16, 2015, privileged attorney-client communication where one can see why Snyder has vented about the DEQ taking too technical an approach. There is a section marked
“Questions Raised Regarding the DEQ’s Actions.” One question asks what the department’s response was to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inquiry in February 2015 about the implementation of optimized corrosion control treatment by the city.
The response is that the DEQ told the EPA the city was complying with the federal lead-copper rule and the lead level was below the actionable threshold of 15 parts per billion. “It should be noted that once treatment is designated as optimal, there is no requirement in the (lead-copper rule) that lead results be lower than they were before treatment was installed,” the answer says in something of an aside. “The 90th percentile only needs to be lower than the action level in the (lead-copper rule).”
Another question goes to one of the topics that has left outside observers wondering. When General Motors announced it would terminate water service from the city because city water was corroding its equipment, should that have been a sign that there were water quality concerns
The answer in the document: no.
“The level of chlorides in the water treated by the city was not a human health or aesthetic concern,” was the response.
Finally, on December 28, 2015, Snyder received an email from his incoming chief of staff, Jarrod Agen, advising him of preliminary recommendations from the task force he appointed to look into what went wrong that “suggest profound change at the DEQ and openly criticize Director Wyant. If this is the path that the task force is on, it is best to make changes at DEQ sooner rather than later. That likely means accepting Dan’s resignation. It also means moving up the termination of the three DEQ (personnel) previously planned for (January) 4 to tomorrow.”
Wyant did indeed resign the next day. However, administration officials have said while other personnel changes are coming to the department, they have not occurred yet. Snyder press secretary Dave Murray was not able to immediately answer whether those employees had been terminated or who they were.
The email that seemed to cause the biggest stir Wednesday was one dated September 25, 2015, from Snyder’s then-chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, to the governor. In that email, a few days before the state conceded it wrongly concluded the water was safe throughout the city, Muchmore says, “I can’t figure out why the state is responsible except that Dillon did make the ultimate decision so we’re not able to avoid the subject.”
What Muchmore was revealing was that former Treasurer Andy Dillon gave the final sign-off to the decision for Flint to join the Karegnondi Water Authority. Many Democrats hammered at this email as the only one that mattered in the batch, showing that it was the Snyder administration that started the chain of dominos falling.
However, other documents show that it was a multilayered decision. While Flint’s city council did approve the switch, as has been widely known, Democrats have downplayed the vote as meaningless because the city’s emergency manager held all the power. But there is a news release included in the documents from the Genesee County drain commissioner praising the council’s vote, noting he had “made a vote by council a condition of Flint joining the KWA so the residents would have their say.”
One theme that emerged was that Muchmore is not a fan of U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Flint).
“Kildee is engaged in his normal press hound routine, which is unfortunate because he’s really a smart, talented guy who needs to roll up his sleeves,” he wrote in an email to Snyder and other senior staff on September 26, 2015.
This email also hinted at frustration Muchmore felt toward the city and those warning of lead levels, in contrast to the July email he sent to Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon asserting that the state was “blowing off” residents’ concerns.
“Now we have the anti everything group turning to the lead content which is a concern for everyone, but DEQ and DHHS and EPA can’t find evidence of a major change,” he wrote. “Of course, some of the Flint people respond by looking for someone to blame instead of working to reduce anxiety. We can’t tolerate increased lead levels in any event, but it’s really the city’s water system that needs to deal with it.”
It was at this time that the state was still in full denial mode as Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards and Doctor Mona Hanna-Attisha made public data showing dangerous lead levels in some residents’ water and rising blood lead levels in children.
Geralyn Lasher, DHHS deputy director for external relations and communications, signaled in a September 25 email to Muchmore and other top staff, which Muchmore later forwarded to Snyder, that DHHS did not see Hanna-Attisha’s blood lead level data as credible.
“MDHHS epidemiologists continue to review the ‘data’ provided by a Hurley hospital physician that showed an increase in lead activity following the change in water supply,” she wrote and went on to say why DHHS believed their data was more accurate.
In the lead-up to the dramatic October news conference in Flint in which Snyder would acknowledge the state was wrong, he was keenly interested in the details, especially on the question of whether to switch the city back to the Detroit system.
“We need Treasury to work with Dan (Wyant) and Flint on a clear side by side comparison of the health benefits and costs of (the Detroit system) vs. a more optimized Flint system,” he wrote to Muchmore and Agen. “Also, we need to look at what financing mechanisms are available to Flint to pay for any higher cost actions. Please get people working on these two issues ASAP.
On October 6, Snyder expressed some disappointment that he had not been told in advance that DHHS would start giving out water filters that day. “This should have come internally with more detail,” he wrote. “I had press questions last night.”
In another instance, Snyder’s liaison to Flint on the water crisis, Harvey Hollins, told Mr. Snyder and top staff that the filters a private donor provided to the Concerned Pastors group had been distributed September 4 to more than 1,500 households with the supply gone in four hours and 200 people still waiting for a filter.
Snyder wanted to know more.
“Factually accurate update, but how did it go over with the residents?” he asked.
Hollins replied it “went over extremely well.”
Then there were the randomly interesting emails, such as one from November 25, 2014, where Department of Treasury lobbyist Howard Ryan told Dick Posthumus, Snyder’s head of legislative affairs, that he was “being told” Snyder had agreed to allow Flint to have a vote to raise its city income tax from 1 to 1.5 percent.
Posthumus then asked Snyder if he had told anybody he would support such a bill.
There is no response from Snyder, but a December 3 email from one of Snyder’s legislative lobbyists, Sally Durfee, signals that Snyder did support it. But she mentions the need to convince Rep. Jeff Farrington (R-Utica), the House Tax Policy Committee chair.
“Farrington, chair of House Taxation, said he would take up this bill over his dead body,” she wrote. “Then he said he would take up if you asked directly. You are having lunch with him today – can you just mention the importance of getting this bill done before we adjourn?”
Snyder did not respond via email. The bill was never taken up
This story was published by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on www.gongwer.com
