Mona Hanna-Attisha
My state is screwed up, and the epicenter of the fallout from the dysfunctional mess that is the Michigan state government is the city of Flint. As you probably recall, around the holidays a story that had previously been mainly a Michigan story broke nationally in a big way. It is the story of how a combination of the imposition of an emergency manager on the city, epic incompetence at the level of the state and local government, and outright denial of a problem for several months by the veyr state agency (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) charged with making sure that things…
It's been nearly three weeks since I wrote about how an imperative to save money at all costs combined with gross incompetence to poison Flint's children with lead. In (very) brief, the city of Flint decided to switch from buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to a new water source. Unfortunately, the pipeline from that water authority, which was going to draw water from Lake Huron, wasn't scheduled to be completed until 2016. When DWSD learned that Flint was going to switch water sources, it gave a year's notice that it was going to void its long term contract…