Last month, a special task force appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder concluded that Michigan officials bear primary blame for the tragedy in which thousands of Flint residents were exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water, causing permanent brain damage in children.
“It was a mixture of ignorance, incompetence and arrogance by many decision-makers that created a toxic and tragic situation that produced the Flint water crisis,” task force co-chair Chris Kolb said in releasing the final report.
After reading that report, its findings have a lot to teach us here in Georgia as well.
In general, the panel attributed the Flint tragedy to a refusal to invest adequately in public infrastructure and a decision to prioritize cost-cutting over public health, failings that were compounded by incompetence and bureaucratic callousness. It concluded that state agencies had been more interested in finding ways to get around state and federal law than they were in enforcing those laws to protect their citizens.
The report also documents the failings of the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration. The EPA did not cause Flint’s problems, investigators found, but it did fail to intervene aggressively when state agencies failed to do their job. Wary of being accused of federal interference with state decisions, “EPA was hesitant and slow to insist” that the state enforce environmental and public-health laws.
The investigatory panel was also harshly critical of the Michigan law that allowed the city of Flint to be taken over by the state and run by a series of state-appointed “emergency managers.” By replacing local decision-making, the panel found, the state also removed “the checks and balances and public accountability that come with public decision-making.”
“Emergency managers, not locally elected officials, made the decision to switch to the Flint River as Flint’s primary water supply source …. The emergency manager structure made it extremely difficult for Flint citizens to alter or check decision-making on preparations for use of Flint River water, or to receive responses to concerns about subsequent water-quality issues.”
That’s an important cautionary tale here in Georgia, where Gov. Nathan Deal wants the power to strip locally elected officials of the power to run their schools. The theory behind Deal’s proposed “opportunity school districts” is that state bureaucrats, with no accountability to local citizens or parents and no demonstrated competence at running schools, would be empowered to take over “failing” schools and run them as the state sees fit.
In Flint, when local citizens complained bitterly about the quality of the water coming out of their faucets, the unelected, state-appointed emergency managers stiff-armed critics and in effect concluded that the health of Flint residents didn’t justify the additional spending needed to fix the problem.
“We believe the larger issue is one of accountability” the Flint report concluded. “Who is accountable for the decisions made by the EMs in Flint? We believe the state must assume that accountability. If the state does not assume that responsibility … then no accountability exists at all.”
In short, power without accountability is dangerous.
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