State of Michigan ending discounts on water for Flint residents

[Virginiá]

It wasn't a need for cheap water (another misconception) flint was to join a new water partnership, their current contract was expiring before the new partnership was ready, they chose to utilize their water plant themselves rather then enter into a contract they would break.

The fact that the people at the flint water department didn't realize treatment differences between water types is why people got non-potable water. Period.

What about the issue of Snyder/other officials knowing what was going on long before it was ever announced to the public? How long were they going to let it go on for?

This isn't just some lowly engineers' fault.

[Virginiá]

It's easy to blame the government for this horrible mistake, it's what people do, but the fact that people were working in a water department who clearly didn't know the bare bones basics of water treatment and saw no issue with how they handled things. The government is going to defer to water engineers, every time in every city in every state.

It is easy, because there are emails suggesting state officials knew about this issue back in late 2014 and yet it took, what, over a year for there to be action? And as I recall, even after people were told, they were still being charged for this poison for some time. You can't seriously act like the state owes its citizens nothing in this regard, keeping in mind the amount of time they were charging residents for poison water.

You're talking about the source of the problem here, fine, but it doesn't matter for this. Government officials made these decisions. It is completely their responsibility, even if they made the decisions in good faith that proper treatments would be used.

[Virginiá]

The city of flint was charging them for water, not the state.

The decisions government officials made were not bad ones, switching water treatment was not a bad idea, utilizing lead pipes was not a bad idea. The problem was people who were supposed to execute these reasonable plans screwed up. Every single one of those water department employees working with the treatment plant should be put on trial, either due to negligence or idiocy of supposed professionals thousands of people were poisoned.

Cities are in essence entities of the state, and in a disaster like this the state should step in if the city can't or won't. After all, residents of Flint are residents of Michigan. In fact, in this particular case, it was the state legislature who rammed through an emergency manager bill even after voters vetoed it, this time making it immune to a veto referendum. State-appointed official(s) with control over Flint then proceeded to make decisions that, for whatever reasons, resulted in poisoned water being delivered to residents of Flint for well over a year. Given the state's actions to exert control over this locality, they owe it to Flint to make things right even beyond what would (or at least should) be legally required.