Flint water crisisSimultaneous, Reinforcing Policy Failures Led to Flint Water Crisis

Concurrent failures of federal drinking water standards and Michigan’s emergency manager law reinforced and magnified each other, leading to the Flint water crisis, according to a University of Michigan environmental policy expert.

Flint’s experience offers lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated local financial challenges while highlighting the importance of access to clean, safe drinking water, said U-M’s Sara Hughes, an assistant professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability.

“As we wrestle to combat the coronavirus, we should keep in mind that building healthy communities starts with a renewed commitment to investing in 21st-century drinking water systems and supporting cities as they navigate systemic financial challenges,” Hughes said. “Learning from the Flint water crisis requires counteracting and confronting the marginalizing effects of infrastructure underinvestment and urban austerity measures.”

The Flint water crisis resulted from simultaneous failures of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and Michigan’s Local Financial Stability and Choice Act, Hughes writes in an article published July 13 in the journal Perspectives on Politics. Also known as Public Act 436, the Michigan law places cities deemed by the state to be experiencing fiscal distress under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager.

Both policies rationalize complex problems—safe drinking water and municipal financial distress—by providing purely technical solutions, and the weaknesses of each reinforced and magnified the harmful consequences of the other for the residents of Flint, according to Hughes.

For nearly 18 months, from April 2014 to October 2015, the city of Flint delivered inadequately treated Flint River water to residents, exposing thousands to elevated lead levels and other contaminants. Poor children and families were particularly affected.

At both the state and federal levels, the primary response to the Flint water crisis has been to strengthen drinking water safety standards and monitoring practices, Hughes said. But providing safe drinking water to city residents is only partly a technical problem.

Much less attention has been paid to funding and supporting local governments in ways that ensure their capacity to build and maintain infrastructure, provide reliable services, and sustain meaningful dialogue and engagement with their residents, according to Hughes.

Failure to address these longstanding problems will complicate efforts to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, especially in hard-hit places like Southeast Michigan, which has the state’s highest concentration of COVID-19 cases.