Flint water crisis gets no mention at Trump event held in struggling Michigan city

FLINT — For the first time since the water crisis began in 2014, a presidential campaign event was held in Flint Tuesday with no mention of the lead poisoning of the city's drinking water supply.

Former President Donald Trump, during an hour-long town hall at Flint's Dort Financial Center, talked at length about Michigan manufacturing, two assassination attempts on his life, the southern border and nuclear war.

But as for what multiple investigations have branded a massive failure of government at the federal, state and local level that Flint is still struggling to recover from, there was not a word.

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The omission throws into stark relief residents' complaints that not just Trump, but the country, has moved on while they continue to suffer. Government testing shows the water has been safe to drink for some time. But many, if not most, Flint residents don't believe that and thousands continue to buy bottled water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump oversaw from early 2017 through early 2021, and President Joe Biden has overseen since, has never accepted responsibility for its role in the disaster or settled a seven-year-old lawsuit brought against it by thousands of Flint residents . Great progress has been made replacing lead water lines, but even that project is not complete , according to recent court filings.

"You've got someone campaigning for the highest office in the land just ignoring the fact that he's standing in the middle of a city still struggling with all of that, not mentioning it at all," said Melissa Mays, a Flint drinking water activist who did not attend the Tuesday event. "That's terrifying."

Another Flint water activist, Gladyes Williamson, is a strong Trump supporter who did attend Tuesday's "town hall" event. She too said she would have liked to see Trump mention the drinking water crisis, in which government mistakes that included a failure to add corrosion control chemicals when officials switched the source of city residents' drinking water supply to the Flint River from Lake Huron, caused lead — a neurotoxin especially harmful to the developing brains of children — to leach from pipes and fixtures.

"That's a dirty dog that they want to bury," said Williamson, while adding that despite the omission, she is confident that if elected, Trump, a Republican, will "take care of" remaining issues in ways that Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would not.

On Tuesday, spokeswomen for both the Trump and Harris campaigns expressed support for Flint and safe drinking water generally and touted actions their administrations had taken in those areas. But the two campaigns would not say whether their candidates, if elected, would direct the EPA to stop arguing that it is immune from civil liability and make a financial settlement with Flint residents. The EPA is charged with ensuring compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act and a paper trail shows its officials knew about dangerously inadequate treatment of water from the Flint River months before residents were notified.

Flint marked the 10th anniversary of the lead poisoning of its water supply in April.

Tuesday's "town hall" event, moderated by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was Trump's ninth visit to Michigan this year, but his first to Flint since Trump was campaigning for president in 2016 and toured the Flint water treatment plant. Then, he promised to fix the problems in Flint, but said it would take some time, media accounts of the visit show.

Former President Barack Obama was president when the catastrophe happened. Some Flint residents are still unhappy that Obama drank from a glass of filtered Flint drinking water when he visited a Flint high school in 2016 , feeling that he minimized the ongoing risk.

Trump was president in 2017, when thousands of Flint residents brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Federal Tort Claims Act , and in 2018, when a scathing report from the EPA Office of Inspector General said the agency "did not manage its drinking water oversight program in a way that facilitated effective oversight and timely intervention in Flint."

The state of Michigan agreed in 2020 to pay $600 million for its role in the crisis , and the city of Flint settled for $20 million in the same massive lawsuit. But the EPA continues to fight claims against it and Flint residents have yet to receive a dime from the state and city settlements , as the claims administration process crawls along.

"Your administration publicly expressed dismay and shock about what was going on in our city, and yet, to this date, the federal government is the only entity that refuses to take any responsibility for its failures," plaintiffs Jan Burgess, Rhonda Kelso, and Mays said in an April 2024 letter to Biden, calling on him to authorize funding to settle the lawsuit.

In 2019, Harris, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, marked the fifth anniversary of the Flint water crisis with a Twitter post that called it "a shocking example of government irresponsibility and systemic racism."

On Tuesday, the Harris campaign touted an op-ed piece in the Michigan Chronicle by Flint City Council President Ladel Lewis. In the letter, Lewis said Trump tried to undermine efforts to make Flint's water safe to drink. Lewis said he tried to cut funding for the water infrastructure program Flint relied on to rebuild its water system and appointed an "unqualified partisan" to lead the EPA who claimed that Flint’s drinking water was safe before it really was.

Trump's first EPA director, Scott Pruitt, resigned in July 2018 amid a raft of ethics investigations. Trump replaced Pruitt with Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry.

On Tuesday, Trump spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita said Trump delivered $100 million to Flint "to address the water crisis," though she later acknowledged that money was approved by Congress in 2016, during the Obama presidency. LaCivita also pointed to new water pipe certification rules the EPA implemented in September 2020.

Trump wants "to ensure that every American will have access to clean, safe, and reliable water supplies," LaCivita said. That's part of the reason Trump is "in Flint, talking to undecided voters about his vision to make Michigan great again," she said.

In April, White House spokeswoman Sneha Choudhary did not directly address the issue of past federal failings with respect to Flint, when asked for a response to the letter to Biden from the Flint plaintiffs. But she said Biden secured $15 billion in funding for lead pipe replacement nationwide through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, and $5 million for Flint through the Flint Registry, in the 2024 budget, to ensure "families in Flint have high quality health care, education, and proper nutrition as they recover from the crisis."

On Tuesday, Harris campaign officials pointed to $204 million Michigan received from the federal lead pipe replacement money, plus nearly $500 million more for broader water infrastructure projects in the state. They noted that as a senator, Harris in 2019 introduced the "Water Justice Act" to improve access to clean water, upgrade water infrastructure, and help families pay their water bills.

"Vice President Harris is committed to ensuring every community in America has clean drinking water, including Flint," said campaign spokeswoman Alyssa Bradley.

Burgess, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the EPA, said Tuesday she is supporting Harris and doesn't believe Trump cares about what happens in Flint or any other city in which non-white residents comprise the majority.

As for the lack of action in settling the lawsuit under Biden, Burgess said she doesn't think any president has the unilateral authority to settle such a lawsuit. It would take cooperation from Congress, which Biden and his Democratic Party does not control, she said.

Burgess, who did not attend Tuesday's event in Flint, said she met twice with EPA officials during the Trump presidency and they had no interest in settling the case. Trump wanted to dismantle the EPA and was not supportive of the agency expending significant funds on cities like Flint, she believes.

"I would feel a lot better about it if any of the candidates who came to Flint would bring a high-ranking member of the EPA with them and say ... these people deserve to have clean water," Burgess said.

Though government tests indicate Flint's water is now safe to drink, "I will never in my life drink water from Flint," said Burgess, who moved to Owosso in recent years.

That shattered trust will be very difficult to restore, but the EPA could begin by "settling these lawsuits," she said.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on X, @paulegan4.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Flint water crisis gets no mention at Trump event held in struggling Michigan city