'Kicking Myself' Over Flint Water Crisis: MI Gov. Snyder

LANSING, MI – Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Friday began releasing two more batches of e-mails his office received regarding the Flint water crisis from 2011, when he took office, through Jan. 5 of this year.

Also on Friday, Snyder signed a $30 million water bill relief package at a news conference in Flint, where he admitted he and his staff failed to “connect the dots” of early warnings about the safety of Flint’s water.

“I’m kicking myself every day,” he told reporters. “I wish I would have asked more questions. I wish I hadn’t accepted the answers.”

Shortly after the switch was made to water from the Flint River in 2014, two of Snyder’s former top legal advisers, Flint native Michael Gadola and Valerie Brader, citied water safety concerns and prodded the governor to reconnect to the Detroit water system, which draws from Lake Huron, the Detroit Free Press reported.

The newspaper also said that Snyder was told of a possible link between the Flint River water and a spike in Legionnaires’ disease in early 2015, but the governor claims he didn’t know about it until last month.

The legislation Snyder signed Friday credits residents for 65 percent of their water bills from April 2014 through April 2016. The portion not picked up by the state is for sewer services, which were not affected by the switch to Flint River water.

In a statement announcing the the release of more e-mails, Snyder said again that the public health catastrophe in Flint, where an unknown number of residents have been exposed to dangerously high levels of lead in their drinking water, is “the result of failures at all levels of government — city, state and federal.”

The e-mails can be viewed here and here.

Snyder previously released a batch of e-mails on Jan. 20, but they were a selection of 550 deemed most interesting to the media and public by the Snyder administration, the governor’s chief of staff, Jarrod Agen, told the Free Press.

Agen said Snyder plans to release all emails related to Flint during his tenure in office, except those that may contain privileged attorney-client information.