Snyder Refuses 2nd Request to Testify on Flint Water Crisis

WASHINGTON, DC – Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has turned down a second request to testify at Democrats’ congressional hearings on the Flint water crisis.

Snyder spokeswoman Anna Heaton told The Hill Monday that the governor won’t be able to attend the hearings because he will make his annual budget presentation to the Legislature Wednesday. In it, he’s expected to ask for $30 million to assist Flint residents pay for water they can’t trust to drink.

But the full costs of the repair of public infrastructure that contributed to the public health catastrophe won’t be known before Snyder presents his budget, but they could come anywhere from hundreds of millions of dollars to as high as $1.5 billion, the Detroit Free Press reported.

In a letter to Snyder last week, Democrats on the caucus’s Steering and Policy Committee said that “seeing how it was your administration’s decision that led to this public health crisis, including Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law, we believe it is important to hear testimony from you on this matter.”

“The ongoing Flint water crisis is a terrible tragedy,” they added. “As the governor of the state of Michigan, the families of Flint and all Americans deserve to hear testimony directly from you on how this man-made crisis happened, and what is being done at the state level to make it right.”

In 2014, a Snyder-appointed emergency manager approved the switch of Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to corrosive Flint River water, which caused lead in aging infrastructure to leach and expose an unknown number residents to lead poisoning. In children, lead can cause irreversible brain damage.

Top administration authorities repeatedly downplayed the severity of the problem in Flint, and reportedly said they had installed corrosion controls recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency when they hadn’t. Regional EPA director Susan Hedman resigned over the crisis last month.

Snyder has spent much of 2016 deflecting public criticism about his administration’s handling of the crisis.

Last week, Progress Michigan released an email it had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that showed top Snyder officials knew about a possible link between a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease and bacteria in Flint’s water supply last March.

On Friday, Snyder fired a top DEQ official overseeing the agency’s Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance unit. That follows the suspension of two DEQ employees in January, and the resignation of former DEQ director Dan Wyant in December.

On Sunday, Democrat presidential candidate left New Hampshire for a campaign stop in Flint, where she told the packed House of of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church that “what happened in Flint is immoral” and that “the children of Flint are just as precious as the children of any part of America.”

Clinton called on Congress to immediately pass a $200 million bill to replace Flint’s water infrastructure, and also toured areas of the city with Flint Mayor Karen Weaver.

Clinton has previously called the Flint water crisis a “civil rights issue,” and she repeated statements Sunday that the catastrophe would never have occurred in one of Detroit’s wealthy suburbs.

Clinton and her Democratic rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, will debate in Flint on March 6, two days before the Michigan presidential primary on March 8.

During a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing last week, Snyder appointee Keith Creagh shifted blame for the crisis to Flint officials.

Democrat Weaver is also expected this week, as well as West Bloomfield physician Dr. Hanna-Attisha, the pediatric residency director at Flint’s Hurley Children’s Hospital who released a study released in September showed the proportion of children with above-average levels of lead in their blood had nearly doubled since the city began getting its water from the Flint River.