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Flint residents protest the city's water quality outside City Hall in October. The tainted water disaster has exposed years of Lansing neglect and the threat to Michigan's economic renewal, the writer argues.
(MLive.com files)
John Austin is president of the Michigan State Board of Education, and director of the Michigan Economic Center, where he is leading the Michigan Blue Economy Initiative.
John Austin
By John Austin
The Flint water crisis is like a fusion bomb of neglect, indifference and bad public policy that -- when drawn together -- exploded in disaster, revealing the true condition of our state, and the corrosive approach of state leadership. The crisis exposed:
* The fruits of years of Lansing neglect, and the gutting of funding to municipalities for basic services like water infrastructure, and Lansing's outright hostility to raising resources (from any source, state or local) for needed investments in water, public health and environmental monitoring.
* A "we know best" state management approach that tosses aside local decision-makers in favor of "expert" financial managers, whose mandate is not to rebuild communities but to cut costs, at all costs. The results have been disastrous whether deciding water sources in Flint or running the schools in Detroit.
* A laissez-faire state environmental regulatory pose -- combined with distrust and callous indifference to the complaints of ordinary community residents.
* The still-growing inequities and a huge power imbalance: As many families and communities still struggle economically, ordinary workers' and citizens' voices aren't heard or listened to -- until it is too late.
The results? Just as we are working hard to get everyone the highest and best education possible as the ticket to economic opportunity, we see potentially irrevocable damage done to Flint school children's learning and life chances.
And just as we were beginning to change our Michigan identity from part of a battered Rust Belt to a leader in the emerging
-- seizing on our natural water availability as one of our greatest economic strengths, marketing our clean, water-rich location as the place to live, work and play, solving the world's water problems with Michigan corporate and technological know-how -- we get this disaster.
This is a reality too horrible to contemplate. The place surrounded by the most freshwater on Earth not only doesn't provide it to its most vulnerable residents, it poisons them, turning attention from our emergence as a global water innovation leader and water lifestyle state -- and making us look like a third-world state and global embarrassment.
The damage is real, and recovery will not come quickly. Michigan citizens love their state, and we want to see our children protected from harm and educated. Our water clean and available. Our communities rebuilt, not falling apart. Citizens and local leaders empowered and given a hand up from Lansing, not humiliated. Let's undo the damage and get serious about rebuilding our state.
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