Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder told Congress Thursday that failures at one of his own agencies allowed lead-tainted water to flow to thousands of residents in the city of Flint, kicking off a contentious grilling in which partisan camps told the governor and federal EPA chief to resign over the debacle.
Mr. Snyder, a Republican, said officials at the state Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly assured him that Flint enjoyed safe tap water after it switched from the Detroit system to the Flint River. That turned out not to be true.
“Not a day or night goes by that this tragedy doesn’t weigh on my mind — the questions I should have asked, the answers I should have demanded, how I could have prevented this,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Democrats had pushed for weeks to hear from Mr. Snyder, who quickly became the political face of the fiasco in Flint, though he insisted that other levels of government had a hand in the mess.
Republicans at the committee hearing said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy bears some of the blame, saying her agency should have sounded the alarm after a vigilant employee, Miguel del Toral, reported high lead levels in the water in June 2015.
“If you’re not going to resign, you should be impeached,” Rep. Paul Gosar, Arizona Republican, told Ms. McCarthy.
The Flint crisis has unfolded since April 2014, when the city, under control of a state-imposed emergency management board, switched its water source to save money. Corrosion from untreated water caused lead to leach from pipes.
City residents were outraged that state and federal officials did not sound the alarm, even as thousands of children were exposed to lead poisoning that can severely impede physical and mental development. The city also reported a spike in cases of Legionnaires’ disease, which can be deadly.
The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, said Mr. Snyder sought $1 million in public money to defend himself against civil and criminal probes, yet failed to protect the citizens of his state.
“You cannot be trusted,” he said, “and I gotta tell you, you need to resign.”
Mr. Snyder said he reconnected the city’s water to the Detroit system and ordered widespread testing when the extent of the problem became clear to him in October 2015, or roughly 18 months after the initial switchover.
Previously, officials at the state environmental agency told House investigators they got caught up in complying with outdated federal lead and copper rules instead of making sure residents had safe drinking water.
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“The fact is, bureaucrats created a culture that valued technical competence over common sense,” Mr. Snyder said. “And the result was lead was leaching into the residents’ water.”
Ms. McCarthy, meanwhile, blamed the state-appointed emergency manager in Flint who decided to abandon a reliable water source to cut costs.
She said the state environmental agency then “slow-walked” efforts to fix things in mid-2015, when it became clear that Flint’s water supply had a system-wide problem.
“We were strong-armed, we were misled. We were kept at arms-length. We couldn’t do our jobs effectively,” she testified.
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, was outraged by her posture, saying she was unwilling to take a share of the blame.
“You just don’t get it. You still don’t get it,” he said.
Democrats said it was a bit rich for Republicans, who for years have tried to rein in the EPA’s regulatory powers, to suddenly fault it for hanging back now.
“Republicans have been absolutely slamming the EPA for overreaching at every possible turn,” said Rep. Lacy Clay, Missouri Democrat. “Now, they criticize the EPA for not doing more when Gov. Snyder fell down on the job.”
Amid the bickering, Senate Democrats from Michigan are pushing a $220 million aid package for Flint, after their quest for an even larger pool of funding derailed a bipartisan energy bill on the floor. On Wednesday, a Democratic push to earmark more than $450 million for residents of Flint was rejected by Republicans on the House Budget Committee.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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