Mich. governor plans $360 million for Flint

Associated Press

LANSING, MICH.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Wednesday proposed spending hundreds of millions more dollars to address Flint’s water crisis from lead contamination and to update pipes there and across the state – a plan that lawmakers from both parties generally welcomed as moving in the right direction with the proper priorities.

Snyder’s plan would direct $195 million more toward the Flint emergency and $165 million for statewide infrastructure needs, at least a portion of which could replace lead and copper water lines elsewhere. He said $25 million of the Flint funding would replace 5,000 known old lead lines running from city streets to houses, calling it a “seed investment” until the state has a better handle on how many of the pipes there are.

The Republican governor cited aging infrastructure as a pressing priority, along with restructuring the troubled Detroit school district and addressing skyrocketing specialty medicine costs.

Meanwhile, A water expert who first raised concerns about lead in Flint’s drinking water dismissed as “contrived” a city official’s suggestion in an email that anti-corrosive phosphates weren’t added to the Flint River because of worries that the chemicals would promote bacterial growth.

Environmental engineer Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the Sept. 3 comment by Howard Croft, the former Flint public works director, was “a hindsight explanation” that came shortly after Edwards and his associates went public with warnings that the city’s drinking water was dangerous. The river already had sufficient levels of phosphates to nourish bacteria and adding more would have had no effect on them, he said.