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The more information that comes out from emails, the tougher it may be for Gov. Rick Snyder to fight off a recall campaign.
The latest:
Two of Gov. Rick Snyder’s top lawyers advocated moving the city of Flint back to the Detroit water system because of quality problems only months after Flint began to draw its drinking water from the Flint River and treat it at its own plant in mid-2014, Matthew Dolan and Paul Egan of the Detroit Free Press write, citing emails released Friday.
Michael Gadola, then the governor’s legal counsel, wrote in an October 2014 sent email to governor's top aides that the use of the Flint River as a drinking water source was “downright scary.”
Flint “should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control,” Gadola advised.
In Lansing on Friday, according to a tweet from Jonathan Oosting of The Detroit News, the governor reacts to the newly disclosed messages by restating this regret: "There were various flags, but the dots weren’t connected the way I wish they were."
Gadola, who grew up in Flint, separately messaged Flint's emergency manager: “My Mom is a city resident. Nice to know she’s drinking water with elevated chlorine levels and fecal coliform.”
In a Michigan Radio commentary Friday morning about the new revelations, Jack Lessenberry says:
We do not yet have confirmation that he was told about the alarms his key aides were raising.
But there are really only two possibilities. One is that Snyder knew and took no action, and the other is that his top staffers treated him like a house plant and didn’t bother to clue him in on the key warning signs of what would become a huge national scandal.
These emails do confirm that his PR staff treated concerns about the water and the people of Flint with condescension and contempt.
