Flint Water Crisis: 2 Former Emergency Managers Charged

(Updated) FLINT, MI — Two former emergency managers appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder — Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose — were charged with felonies Tuesday in the ongoing investigation into Flint’s drinking water lead-contamination investigation, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said at a news conference.

Also charged were two former Flint city employees, Howard Croft, who was the public works superintendent, and Daugherty Johnson, who was the utilities administrator.

All four defendants face felony charges of false pretenses and conspiracy to commit false pretenses, both punishable by 20 years in prison. Additionally, Earley and Ambrose face charges of misconduct in office, a five-year felony; and willful neglect of duty, a misdemeanor.

The emergency managers are the highest-level officials charged so far in the investigation. Asked by a reporter if Snyder himself might be charged, Schuette didn't answer directly, but said: "It’s serious. We’re going up and we’re going broad. We read the emails and put two and two together. If there’s sufficient evidence, we charge. Nobody’s on the table; nobody’s off the table."

Schuette said the conspiracy involved borrowing about $85 million to clean up a so-called calamity — one of the few instances in which governments under emergency management may borrow money — at a lime-sludge lagoon that Schuette said had already been largely remediated. Instead, the money was used to develop the Karegnondi Water Authority, which ended the city’s longtime relationship with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, which gets its water from Lake Huron.

Special prosecutor Todd Flood, vowing to take the new charges to the courtroom for trial, called the use of the money for the plant “a classic bait-and-swich where the citizens of Flint got the shaft.”

The lead crisis is believed to have contributed to an outbreak of Legionnaires disease that killed 12 people and exposed countless children to dangerously high levels of lead in their drinking water, Schuette said.

“That cannot be swept under the rug,” he said.

“All too prevalent and very evident in this course of investigation has been a fixation on finances and balances sheet that cost lives,” he said. “It’s all about numbers over people, money over health.”

The investigation so far has revealed that Flint is a “casualty of arrogance, disdain and failure of management, an absence of accountability, a shirking of responsibility.”

Schuette was also joined at the Tuesday news conference at the Riverfront Banquet Center in Flint by chief investigator Andrew Arena and Genesee County Attorney David Leyton, who have been looking into how residents of the southeast Michigan city were exposed to toxic lead when the city began getting water from the Flint River in 2014.

Eight state workers and one city of Flint employee were previously charged in the investigation, which was launched last January.

Schuette said when the first individuals were charged in April when the first individuals — two mid-level state workers and the city of Flint employee— that they were only the “first wave” of charges and more would be coming.

Six more state workers in two departments were charged with felonies in July for allegedly covering up reports of high lead levels in the Flint drinking water supply. Whether from “arrogance” or an attempt to support their own narratives that the drinking water was safe, they “viewed the people in Flint as expendable, as if they didn’t matter,” Schuette said at the time.

See More

• Flint Water Crisis: Charges ‘First Wave’ in Investigation
• Flint Residents Treated as ‘Expendable’ by 6 State Workers Criminally Charged

Photo pointing to water pickup sites in Flint by U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr Commons