http://www.nationalreview.com/node/430279/print Can the Truth Survive the Left’s Onslaught in Flint?
By David French — January 25, 2016
If you happen to read the left-wing, mainstream press or listen at all to the words of the Democratic presidential contenders, you know that there are few more important stories in the United States than the water troubles in Flint, Mich. Unfortunately, however, to the activist Left, the story is much less important for the sorry, sordid truth of the matter than it is for advancing the Narrative — that racist Republicans care little for the environment, hate the poor, and crush the little guy to save a buck.
At first glance, the Flint crisis is among the stories least likely to serve the Narrative. Flint, like most rust-belt cities, has been run by Democrats for generations. And, like many of those same cities, it has been enduring a slow-motion economic and cultural collapse. Its population has fled, it owes more than a billion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities, and it finds itself unable to afford the basic services its remaining population needs to preserve public safety and public health.
As National Review’s editors noted in their excellent editorial on the Flint disaster, what happened next represented a textbook example of cascading government failures. Flint — desperate to save money and under the the control of an “emergency manager” — decided to buy water from the “Karegnondi Water Authority” beginning in 2016 rather than continue its increasingly expensive supply from the city of Detroit. (Detroit had been raising rates so much that Flint was reportedly burdened with “some of the state’s highest water bills.” The emergency manager — appointed by Republican governor Rick Snyder — made the decision in 2013 to switch, and the Democratic city council voted 7–1 in support.
Democratic Detroit responded by notifying Flint that it planned to shut off service in spring 2014, leaving Flint with a dilemma: Should it renegotiate with Detroit and pay still higher rates until 2016? Or should it seek a different water source? Flint chose a different water source: the Flint river.
It’s easier to find Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster than it is to pin down responsibility for the switch. Vox, in its lengthy “explainer” says it remains a “point of contentious political debate.” A Huffington Post analysis said, “It’s not clear exactly how the decision was made.”
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