DEBORAH SIMMONS: How to get Flint, Michigan, voters out from under water

ANALYSIS/OPINION

“All politics is local, doggone it.”

— Deborah Simmons

The blizzard that blanketed the mid-Atlantic was no joke, and it’s taught us a chilling lesson: Politics is very local and very personal.

Sure, we expect our mayors, county executives and governors to ensure that our tax dollars are spent on the necessary resources to dig us out of snowstorms and, all along the way, provide the public necessities. For the most part, they have.

Residents of Flint, Michigan, and surrounding Genesee County didn’t have to worry about a blizzard, though, because they had a public health crisis on their minds due to something we humans cannot live without.

Clean water.

Be very grateful if you don’t live in Flint, or have friends and loved ones who live there.

They cannot drink, cook or bathe in the water running through their taps, and while clean, safe water is being donated and trucked in by the gallons, the unhealthy human (and deadly political) consequences have yet to be tallied.

The water that poured in from Lake Huron via the Flint River was corrosive, and it scoured its way through old, lead-lined pipes to flow into homes and schools and offices and shops. Into the mouths of babies and kids, the healthy and the sick, and the bodies of everybody who drank it, bathed in it, brushed their teeth with it and washed their clothes and dishes in it.

It’s criminal what happened — and what happened is that the local people ceded their power.

Flint, like nearby Detroit, ran into financial trouble after the auto industry stop rocking to the booming sounds of Motown. The George W. Bush administration pushed through an auto bailout in 2008, but it was too late. Flint already had lost 56,000 of its residents between 1960 and 1990, and by the time the bailout began kicking in, Flint’s population had dropped to 104,000, according to the 2010 census.

Today, Flint is a majority-black city, with 40 percent of its population living below the poverty line.

Mayors and other city officials have had public discourse about Flint and Genesee’s water since the early 1960s — or more than a dozen mayors ago under various charter and emergency-management situations.

D.C. stakeholders thought their political plight under a federal control authority was to blame too. They were wrong. Although it appeared D.C. voters had been forced to turn over their democratic rights to Congress and the White House, they did not. In fact, voters, activists and the business community became more emboldened, and the nation’s capital is back on solid financial footing.

And that’s because stakeholders flipped the script.

Flint dynamics changed too — but for the worse.

Its stakeholders decided to stop paying Detroit — which had sunk into the toilet by the mid-2000s. Fiscally unsound, voters allowed its lawmakers to vote in 2014 to stop buying water from the Motor City. Instead, they let the Flint River flow through toxic pipes. All in the name of saving a few dollars.

Flint residents and the pundits want to blame Gov. Rick Snyder, but the finger should be pointed at themselves.

They can sue government, but that’s not going to change one doggone thing unless and until they look at themselves.

They can even blame President Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency, as critics are leveling charges of environmental racism.

This is serious though, and voters, other stakeholders and investigators must ask the always-tough questions: What did local authorities know, and when did they know it?

At the same time, if they want Flint River water, they need to make sure the pipelines to their homes and buildings are safe and that the water is clean and safe.

The D.C. region began working on that before its financial control board was in place, and clean water remains a priority.

Voter vigilance is crucial.

• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.