Darnell Earley, the man who was the emergency manager in Flint, Mich., during the time many of the city's residents were drinking lead-tainted city water, has declined to testify before a congressional committee hearing Wednesday, The Detroit Free Press is reporting.
Earley, who this week announced he will be resigning from his current job as emergency manager for the Detroit Public Schools, has hired an attorney and it is unclear if he will attend the hearings, according to a Detroit television station.
“Mr. Earley was invited to appear before the committee, but he has declined that invitation,” Detroit school district spokeswoman Michelle A. Zdrodowski said in an email to the Detroit News.
The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced the hearing last week and said Early would be called. The committee also called two EPA officials along with Keith Creagh, the new head of Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality, but has not called the state’s governor, Rick Snyder, to testify.
On Tuesday, Snyder said Earley “has done a very good job under some very difficult circumstances.”
Snyder has come under fire for supporting Earley.
Michigan Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, said in a statement that Snyder should force Earley to testify before Congress.
“The governor must demand that he testify before Congress tomorrow and be completely transparent in turning over every document related to what happened,” Ananich said in the statement.
The city's water became contaminated with dangerous levels of lead when officials there decided that the cost of piggy-backing Detroit's water system was growing too expensive and they wanted to establish an independent water system that included their own pipeline to Lake Huron. It would take a while to fund and build the pipeline, so, wanting to save money, officials decided to leave the Detroit system in April 2014, and use the Flint River as a primary water source until the Lake Huron pipeline was completed.
What they didn’t count on was that the Flint River water was more corrosive than the water from Lake Huron and that it would damage the lead pipes that many homes in Flint have, causing the lead to leech into the water supply.
On Tuesday the FBI announced it has joined the investigation into why citizens of the city of nearly 100,000 were allowed to consume water with high levels of lead despite repeated complaints to government officials.
Several local, state and federal officials have resigned since the news of the contaminated water became public.
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