Last Friday, July 10, a small and stalwart group of water justice activists completed their 70-mile, week-long walk from Detroit to Flint. They marched to publicize the plight of hundreds of thousands of SE MI residents who lack access to safe, clean, affordable water.
For we who live in the Great Lakes region, amidst the bodies of water that collectively hold more than 20% of the entire globe's fresh water, this situation is unconscionable. Unless, of course, you believe in privatization of this essential resource, to make it available only to those who can afford to pay for the privilege of living.
I was there for the beginning and closing rallies in Detroit and Flint respectively. Below the orange water swirl, I offer a few photos of speakers and art at both events. Before that, however, let me attempt to bring you up to date about the current situation in key affected cities.
If you have not yet seen and read this recent reportage in The Nation, "Detroit Is Ground Zero in the New Fight for Water Rights," by Laura Gottesdiener, I urge you to do so. It is not only a succinct overview of the struggle over access to water, it includes one powerful and lamentable result of the water shutoffs: the death of Nicole Cannon, one of the named plaintiffs in the class-action suit brought last year to force an end to that practice. Cannon, a woman with serious chronic health conditions, could not leave her home for a safer residence due to unreasonably high water bills; it seems likely that her toxic living environment played a role in her untimely death.
There is also a documentary-in-progress that is obviously much longer than a Nation essay, but it is well worth your time to watch, in part or in full:
I DO MIND DYING: STORIES FROM DETROIT ABOUT WATER from Kate Levy on Vimeo.
(This is indeed by the same Kate Levy who keeps turning out excellent short videos on related topics, one of which I embed below.)
Detroit:
At the end of June, Detroit City Council members voted 6-2 against raising water/sewage rates for Detroiters, expressly opposing the wishes of Mayor Duggan and the proponents of a new, semi-private water authority. (The latest word is that the council was going to "reconsider" that vote yesterday or today. I have seen no reports yet.)
But let's read the latest by Shea Howell, a leading Detroit activist affiliated with the Boggs Center, on this issue:
Later in the evening after the Council rejection, Mayor Duggan conducted a public meeting in District 2 on the Northwest side of the city. He was confronted with questions about why he is resisting a Water Affordability Plan. Most of the meeting was taken up by the Mayor presenting facts and figures about what he calls blight and his plan to create less expensive auto insurance for the city. In sharp contrast to his carefully thought out and researched efforts to tackle the hospital, legal, and insurance industries, the Mayor seemed mystified about how to approach a water affordability plan.
Perhaps he is mystified because his figures are imprecise and his logic faulty. In the course of the question and answer period, the Mayor told the audience that people should pay their bills, ignoring the fact that people are increasingly unable to pay escalating costs. He claimed that people wanted free water, that there was an assistance plan to help. He completely ignored the fact that his last plan failed miserably and his new plan will not go into effect until January 2016 with the GLWA. He was unsympathetic to the 2000 homes a week being shut off from water. He repeated the same arguments he has been saying for over a year, lacking facts or analysis. ...
The plain truth is the current way of financing the water system is unsustainable. Every time the rates increase, more people will be forced out of the system. Every time more people are forced out of the system, the more rates will have to be raised.
...
The way to a sustainable system is clear. Stop water shut offs. Restore water to the tens of thousands now struggling without it. Turn Detroit water back on for Flint. Adopt the water affordability plan so that everyone can pay a fair share.
Highland Park:
Last week, Ryan Felton published a good overview in The Guardian of the situation now confronting residents of Highland Park, which has been dealing with water wars even longer than Detroit.
Since last year, the tribulations of neighboring Detroit’s water shutoff program have drawn significant attention worldwide, as tens of thousands of residents faced the threat of the city turning off their tap for owing as little as $150 in overdue water bills.
But Highland Park has endured a water war of its own with daunting, if not more severe, consequences. Thrust into financial insecurity after decades of disinvestment, the city has a problem that residents say they simply cannot afford: Years of dysfunctional service – inconsistent billing, faulty meters, a constantly changing staff – have resulted in some receiving water bills as high as $11,000. (The median income in the city is $19,311.)
Flint:
Here's Curt Guyette's latest post on the dangers posed to Flint residents by their water. I'm quoting much of his introduction; the whole post is worth the read.
It took a while for LeeAnne Walters to realize the full impact of the number: 13,200.
Walters—a stay-at home mom with four sons and a husband in the Navy—had seen other numbers reflecting the quality of drinking water at her Flint home that were devastating. But 13,200? She’d never seen anything like this.
The city had tested her water twice in this past March and both times found dangerously high levels of lead....
But it was the result of a third test of the tap water in her home, performed by independent experts at Virginia Tech university, that most stunned Walters.
...
The VT researchers discovered lead levels in Walters’ water reached a jaw-dropping 13,200 ppb—more than twice the amount at which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies water as hazardous waste.
“When I saw those numbers I was shocked,” said Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, a former MacArthur Fellow and respected authority on corrosion in drinking-water systems, who oversaw the tests.
Edwards played a key role in discovering the problem of corroded water pipes and lead in Washington, D.C. drinking water during the early 2000s, in what has been described as one of the worst contamination events ever seen in an urban water system, with resulting increased incidence of childhood lead poisoning, miscarriages and fetal death.
In terms of lead levels, the Walters family’s numbers eclipsed even the worst D.C. homes.
But the condition of Walters’ tap water raises a much more far-reaching question: Since the city moved away from Detroit’s water system and began pumping water from the Flint River, how many other families have been put at risk by the city’s questionable testing procedures and handling of the water supply?
(emphasis added)
The Walters family surely isn’t alone in dealing with the threat of lead-laced drinking water. About half of Flint’s 40,000 homes are a half-century old or older, built at a time when water service lines were typically made of lead.
And according to various experts, including an EPA water-quality specialist, the city’s actions are only exacerbating the threat.
This vimeo, "Hard to Swallow," is produced by Curt Guyette and Kate Levy, who has contributed several powerful documentaries (short and long) about the water crisis. It gives a succinct overview of the situation in Flint.
Hard to Swallow from Kate Levy on Vimeo.
Many long-time water and social justice activists were present at both ends of the march. I captured only a few of them; my photos from Detroit are regrettably sparse.
Rally in downtown Detroit at start of march to Flint, 3 July 2015
Detroit Rally Supporters, 3 July 2015
One of the speakers at the Detroit rally, Maureen Taylor of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, will be familiar to those of us who attended Netroots Nation in Detroit last year, and participated in the Anti-Water-Shutoff March that Ms. Maureen and other activists organized in connection with our presence in town. In case you missed the diary that Egberto Willies published here about Ms. Maureen's panel presentation at NN14,
I link to it here. Not much has changed in the past year for the better. But you can absolutely count on Ms. Maureen for fighting the good fight.
The weather was good in Flint last Friday, so spirits were high, and attendance was good to welcome the weary marchers.
Water Justice Journey arriving at Flint City Hall, 10 July 2015
Good to start them early
Many charming and affecting drawings on the theme, Water is Life, on display:
Artwork by students at the Boggs School in Detroit
Resist further privatization of the commons!
Water wonderland? Or water wasteland?
Attorney Alice Jennings spoke last October with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! about the lawsuit that she has filed on behalf of Detroit residents adversely affected by the water shutoffs.
The video and transcript are available here.
Jennings has been a long-time leader of social justice campaigns, in Detroit and across the country. (You can read her awe-inspiring biography here.) She was one of the featured speakers in Flint.
Alice Jennings, speaking truth to power as always
Tony Trupiano interviewed (audio only) one of the marchers, Kim Redigan, about the issue and her experiences while she was on the route. One quote, paraphrased: When people understand the difference between an assistance plan and an affordable plan for water, they support the affordability plans. Another, verbatim: "We want clean, affordable water for the people of Michigan. And if people think that what's happening in Detroit, Flint, and Highland Park isn't going to come to a suburb near them, I think they're mistaken."
(Link to Kim's blog)
Kim Redigan speaking in Flint
Some other links for more information about water rights activism in metro Detroit:
People's Water Board (link is to organization's website)
People's Water Board Coalition (link is to FB page for the group)
Detroit to Flint Water Justice Journey (link is to FB page for the event)
Detroit Water Affordability Plan (link is to page of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization with PDF of the whole plan)
Many of you will already be familiar with similar threats to a safe, affordable water supply emerging across the country. At the base of many of them is a French corporation called Veolia Environment, which "owns" many municipal water services in the U.S. and is the largest such business in the world. People in the Pittsburgh, PA area are beginning to fight back as well. See this recent article in Truthout, "Residents Fight Back Against Pittsburgh's Privatized Water Authority," for details on the nascent campaign there.
An excerpt:
On June 24, dozens of Millvale [PA] residents have gathered in a community space to learn about a class-action lawsuit recently filed on their behalf against the PWSA [Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority], as well as the private water corporation Veolia Water North America, and the authority's collection agency, Jordan Tax Service. The group behind the lawsuit, Campaign to Reform PWSA, hopes to end what they see as the PWSA's coercive, slapdash attempts to shake down citizens for money. They also hope to alter the PWSA so that it is more transparent and responsive, because right now, they contend, the PWSA has become a smokescreen for France-based Veolia Environment, the largest private water company in the world. Its unbalanced partnership with the PWSA is supposed to represent the company's new approach to managing cities' water systems after a decade of failures with outright privatization, but if the anger in the room is any measure, residents in Pittsburgh may be souring on Veolia, too.
This is, as always, an Open Thread about all things Michigan.
Michigan Democratic Party leadership changes in the works
Members of the Central Committee of the Michigan Democratic Party voted last Saturday to name Brandon Dillon as the new Chairperson of the MDP. Dillon replaces Lon Johnson, MDP chair for two years, since Johnson has resigned to campaign for the US House seat for MI-1.
The evening before, Dillon and his close associate, Lavora Barnes, spent a couple of hours speaking with party activists in Washtenaw County. That stop was one of several the pair had made in the last days before this election, as they sought to introduce themselves around the state.
Dillon and Barnes fielded some tough questions from that audience, anyway, and they said that we were not alone in raising the issues and objections that we did. One of the major criticisms discussed then referred to the whole process through which Dillon was identified as seemingly the only candidate to fill this newly-open position.
We got a sympathetic and appreciative laugh out of Barnes when we encouraged her, a black woman Democratic staffer for many years in a variety of high-level positions, to seek wage parity with Dillon, a white man with several years of elected office to his credit. Barnes and Dillon have proposed that she should become the new Chief Operating Officer for the party, responsible for statewide organization and communication, while Dillon leads fundraising efforts and national party programs.
They presented themselves well and stated that they welcome regular input and feedback. Clearly they recognize the importance of the task they are taking on. They will need support and collaboration with all of us throughout the state at the grassroots level to succeed.