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Dear Reader,
Ron Fonger is not prone to hyperbole, so when he calls something a “bombshell,” you know it’s a big deal.
That’s how Fonger refers to the announcement last week that the state of Michigan is going to pay $600 million to settle claims related to the damages caused in the Flint Water Crisis.
But as the foremost expert journalist covering the water crisis, Fonger is also a realist.
“Optimistically, if the settlement ends up getting accepted by the U.S. District Court and we get to the point where they start to accept claims … and (in 2021) when some of the settlement starts getting distributed, that would be closing one chapter.
“But, we’re nowhere near done.”
This announcement of a settlement is not a settlement itself, and many details remain to be worked out. Eighty percent is supposed to go to children who were victims of exposure to lead-tainted water.
How will claims be made? How will that money be distributed? Where will the state of Michigan get the money? Will it be held in trust? How much will be lost to lawyers, and other costs? And there are scores of other civil lawsuits involving the city, consultants and federal agencies.
There are other “bombshell” questions still to be answered.
Some are about culpability: Who ultimately should be held responsible for decisions that ended up poisoning a city with lead, and causing a bacterial infection that killed a dozen people? State Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped all existing criminal cases after she took office in 2019, and said she was relaunching investigations from scratch. Fonger notes there has been “precious little” inkling of where that stands in the year since.
Some go to the origins of the water crisis itself: The terrible chain of events that began in 2014 was possible only because the city of Flint already was in other forms of crisis – faltering institutions, dysfunctional government, broken budgets. That left the door open for the state to appoint emergency managers, and the disaster that followed.
None of the $600 million will go toward that.
“I don’t know what it’s going to do for the city, because Flint has a lot of institutional problems you see every time you sit through a seven-hour city council meeting,” Fonger said. “All of the problems we had before the water crisis, we’ve still got.”
Still, this settlement is progress in moving past the water crisis itself. And there is other good news. The federally funded effort to replace water service lines into homes is nearing completion, after several painstaking years. The water has been deemed safe to drink for more than three years now.
And this settlement is the beginning of healing the physical damages caused to the lives of people in Flint, as well as a giant, overdue acknowledgement of who bears the blame for the crisis.
“It is an admission of a shortcoming, of a failure, in terms of how the state related to Flint,” Fonger said. “How could it be otherwise? The state is in no position to give Flint $600 million because they like the people here. There’s a reason they’re settling these cases.”
To hear more from Fonger on the status of the Flint Water Crisis, including how the crisis unfolded, the potential for criminal charges against former state officials, and how the settlement process will play out, click here for this week’s Behind the Headlines podcast.
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