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.
As is often the case with water issues it's probably the case that these issues were disputed, water quality is not check as often as it should be, and heavy metal levels are common to fluctuate. We don't know what was known as certain and when. If members of the government knew it was contaminated to dangerous levels and didn't do anything at all that is a problem, right now that isn't a guarantee.
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.
