Congressman Dan Kildee Remarks on Flint Water Crisis at White House Water Summit
WASHINGTON, D.C. – March 24, 2015 – (RealEstateRama) — Congressman Dan Kildee today spoke at the White House Water Summit on the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Mich., and the need to invest in America’s aging infrastructure to ensure that all Americans have access to safe drinking water. Below is a transcript of Congressman Kildee’s conversation with Christy Goldfuss, Managing Director at the White House Council on Environmental Quality:
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: Congressman, it’s good to see you. How are you?
REP. DAN KILDEE: “Doing great.”
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: Lots of conversation about technology, research and development, water overall, but I just wanted to take a step back because you are born and raised from Flint, Michigan, and took a trip there recently with more than 20 Members of Congress. Given all the discussion about water quantity I am wondering if we could just spend a moment on water quality, and what you’ve seen in Flint and just your recent experience.
REP. DAN KILDEE: “Sure. First of all, thank you for including me in this important discussion. I’m from Flint, I grew up in Flint, raised my children there. Every Friday when I leave here I fly home to my hometown of Flint, and it’s been really tough lately. I think the story of Flint, in part, is a story about water infrastructure. Because when we have aging infrastructure, particularly in Flint with so many lead service lines, we are at risk.
“But, the other part of the story, which is really the trigger to the crisis in Flint, is a story about the effect or the consequence of a brand of governmental austerity that is really dangerous. Because what happened in Flint happened because the backdrop was aging infrastructure. The backdrop was this old city that once had 200,000 people and now has less than 100,000; has aging infrastructure, in fact, infrastructure that is built for about two and a half times the population that support it and about five times the wealth than anticipated, because not only has it become a smaller city, it has become a disproportionately poorer place. That backdrop, with the overlay of governmental austerity that minimizes the need for robust enforcement of environmental protection, by essentially making it a second almost afterthought at the state level, and essentially defunding direct support for the city itself, created a series of almost unbelievable decisions to go from using the Great Lakes – the greatest surface fresh water source on the planet, which is only a few miles away from Flint – to the Flint river as a temporary water source, untreated.
“It is almost unbelievable that that could happen, but it’s this obsession with austerity. And the result, which we can discuss, is that the cost of solving this problem, of dealing with the crisis and the aftermath of the crisis, is astronomically higher than the cost associated with preventing it in the first place.”
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: When you took the recent visit, what do you think your colleagues took away from what they saw there? There are so many big questions when it comes to water, and I think we are hearing more and more that Flint is not an isolated case and that there are other communities that are struggling with the loss of jobs and changes in industry. What are the pieces that we can take looking forward that we should really focus on?
REP. DAN KILDEE: “Well I think, in terms of what members – and there have been four delegations that have come, one was 26 members, which included the senior leadership in the Democratic Caucus. But others as well, Democrats and Republicans.
“I think their take away for the most part was to see in real human terms, the impact of our failure as a country and the particular failures associated with Flint. Our failure as a country to not invest, and the failures at the state level to really undermine the city itself by making it clearly financially unsustainable.
“The take away, I suppose, is that we are all going to pay. This is what I’m hearing from members. We are all going to pay; we know we are going to pay. Of course the people who are going to pay the most, and it’s sort of an unseen but fully realized cost, are the kids. Nine thousand of them in Flint under the age of six, who for a year-and-a-half drank water with elevated levels of lead. We were looking at one of the earlier presentations, seeing lead levels at like three or four times the action level. In Flint, 5,000 parts per billion – some 13,000 parts per billion – the impact on these kids is going to be dramatic.
“So my hope, my aspiration, in terms of the Flint story, is that it leads to us getting direct support to the people of Flint – because they certainly deserve that. On a scale equal to this crisis. But also can move Congress, and we have to do it on both sides of the aisle, as it has been said. Even if not moved by the human dimension of this crisis; if we were only to look at the economic impact, it will cost– our calculation, the bill that i have introduced to fix this problem in Flint over the next decade or so, is about a billion and a half dollars. Now it would not cost a billion and half dollars for some substantial upgrades to the Flint water system. Simply replacing all the private lead service lines is about a $55 million equation. Simply providing phosphate treatment to the river water was about a $100 a day.
“When I talk about an obsession around governmental austerity, it’s an obsession in some places. It is dangerous, it’s really dangerous and that’s really the lesson we had all better learn really fast.”
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: Looking back as your career, you have also spent a lot of time looking at communities and change when the economics change, industry moves out, and specifically this concept of a land bank. I’m wondering if you could explain, because I think lots of communities once they have an industry that ups and moves, suffers similar problems. How do we lessen that blow, and look for opportunities to make sure there is a more gradual transition that doesn’t lead to a backdrop that’s what we saw in Flint, the full economic impacts of such a change.
REP. DAN KILDEE: “It is a really important issue because for the most part in this country, and really if anyone has attended any of the planning schools you’ll get this, we have been operating on the assumption of growth, ever since we were born as a nation. That good cities are growing. In fact, we don’t even have realistic models to deal with cities that have had significant population loss. The land bank is one of the models I helped to develop, the modern land bank concept in Flint, with the Genesee County Land Bank. It was basically formed in order to rationalize decisions about reuse of vacant land as population declines. On the notion that if we simply present these properties to the market place, the speculator market, the very low end market, will buy and sell properties like they are baseball cards, not like part of a community.
“The corollary of course is we have not done a very good job of figuring out how to deal with communities which are losing population due to the natural ebb and flow of economies. We don’t do well when managing land and we sure don’t do well managing infrastructure. The city of Flint infrastructure as I said, built for 250,000 people, we never got there, but it was built for that population. We have water rate payers that are still paying for 150,000 people who do not live there. 30 percent of the water that we treat goes right into the ground, because this water infrastructure, like the land, is too big for our feet. It’s a real call I think for us to think about how we manage and sustain urban environments and stop operating on the belief, because we are a fairly young country as opposed to other parts of the world, stop operating on the belief that these cities have their birth and their period of growth and expansion, followed by their period of decline as if it’s the birthright and death of a city.
“If you look at the history of cities across the world, cities go through the ebb and flow of changes in the economy. I mean certainly technology has had a huge impact on the way cities function. Manufacturing technology and globalization has had a huge impact on many older industrial cities. But if we operate on the premise that we are going through the final decline of these older places and organize infrastructure systems, municipal finance systems, housing policy, tax policy – all these drivers – if we organize them around the idea that we are always going to only incentivize growth, and that everything we do is about how we make communities grow, we are going to forget that there are great cities that will go through periods of decline, but if we simply think of that as the end of the life of that place, we won’t realize its next period of ascendency and we will, like we are in Flint right now, pay an enormous price for that failure.”
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: At the federal level, is there more that we can be doing to help assist in that? Certainly, local leadership, state leadership is the first step. But what can we do, what’s our role in assisting to make sure that that is not the overwhelming driver?
REP. DAN KILDEE: “There are a whole lot of pieces of this at the federal level. One is what [U.S. Representative] Paul Tonko was working on. We need to get real serious about investing in infrastructure, in seen and unseen infrastructure. That’s a pretty big step. But I think there are clearly other pieces of it.
“Housing policy for example, even the way our own federal departments have dealt with housing, whether it is finance policy or the way we invest. We think of housing units and the development of housing units as the way we measure the quality of a community, and we’ve got to look at other indicators. We’ve got to really start looking at how public policy affects the quality of life for people who live in these places. The other piece of it is if we’re serious about sustainability, we have to be serious about cities. Because growth and the need for growth, pressure to grow, is going to be released somewhere, and if we don’t cultivate ways through, and of course this is somewhat self-serving, direct support of these new really innovative urban land banks that can acquire property, manage property, and then much more intelligently present those properties to the real investor market when demand for development does occur – if we don’t do that, the federal government could surely help with that, then development pressure is going to go where? It’s going to go to the most efficient place it can land. Where will that be? It will be green fields, and what will that do? It’ll expand the cost and size of our infrastructure. We will actually increase the physical footprint and the cost of government without increasing people to pay for that, and left behind our older places, older cities that we can’t forget.
“The very notion that we can forget these places and move on to the next shiny place misses the real lesson of what is happening in my hometown right now. Because that’s what happened. They were ready, and this is primarily an indictment of state government, they were basically ready to move on from Flint, and let’s build somewhere else. Let’s put our stake in the ground in terms of the next economy somewhere else.
“The bill to do that is a lot of money; I mean it’s a lot of money, its $1.5 billion that I put in the Families of Flint Act which is a 10 year recovery plan for Flint. And it could’ve been bigger than that. We just had to stop and get something in the hopper. There is a huge cost to all of this, the only question is, and this is the moral argument that is often used when talking about the economics of the federal budget itself, but the real question is are we going to pass these costs to someone else? Costs that are realized by government, but in this case, costs that are realized by families, by some kid in Flint. This is the most painful part of this whole story. How do you put this in a ledger, how do you put this on a balance sheet?
“Mitch Albom, who is a great writer from Detroit, did a series of interviews with children in Flint. The hardest answer to hear was an interview he did with a young kid. I think the kid was nine. And he just said, ‘I’m afraid I am not going to be smart now.’ This is a nine-year-old kid, who for a year-and-a-half drank water laced with this neurotoxin because of a bunch of decisions made by people who believe in austerity and believe that environmental protections are uncompetitive. Talk to that nine year-old kid. That’s my answer to the people who make these choices. Now I’m not saying they do it intentionally, but it is an uninformed approach to government, to think that the protections that we have built into our system are simply uncompetitive annoyances and the governmental systems that support communities are too much of a cost for us to bear. Not on any scale, not on the scale that measures the cost of fixing Flint, and certainly not on the scale that questions what happens to the life of a nine-year-old kid who wonders whether or not his future won’t be what he thought it would be, or what his parents thought it would be. That’s the moral dimension of this crisis that we can’t forget.”
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: It’s a story that any mother, any parent, I have a five-year-old, who just can’t imagine that question, or that concern at that age. That’s really difficult to hear. One more question, big picture, there is so much discussion about the cost of water. When it comes to drought we hear a lot of folks that feel it is appropriate, that if you live in a community or drought stricken region, it is appropriate to pay more to have a luscious green lawn, because that is not a necessity in life. But clean drinking water, safe drinking water, paying more for it to be clean, seems morally audacious, I would say to most folks. You should have an assumption that you are drinking clean water. How do we get price into that to cover costs in a community like Flint that would have to carry a bigger cost burden, but clearly that is not the answer. Have you thought about what is the role to correct for really a national problem in overall pricing of water?
REP. DAN KILDEE “That’s a great question, and I think I gets to partly what Paul [Tonko] is working on and others, is that we have to have a much stronger federal role.
“We ought to at least be able to start with the premise that as a nation, clean drinking water is a basic and fundamental right. And it not be subject to the sort of variances or variables in particular communities. Just to tell you how outrageous it is, the Flint water that poisoned all these kids – that still cannot be consumed – is the most expensive water in the United States. One of the reasons is that we localize, we completely localize, at the most local level, those costs.
“Because of that, whether it’s California experiencing drought, or our older industrial cities that have infrastructure that is so inefficient that it is extraordinarily expensive to provide water, we have to homogenize the economics of water, and some other basic infrastructure needs in this country. So that it does not become a question of a community’s competitiveness as to whether it can provide clean drinking water. There are certain things that ought to be subject to the competition of the market place, one of the them is not how clean or how drinkable is your water. Or whether you can in poverty actually afford to drink it. Having a much stronger I think, of course there are folks who disagree with this, having a much more significant federal role in financing water infrastructure would go a long way in homogenizing the cost so that it is not such a variation from community to community based on age of the community, age of the infrastructure, or immediate access to water.
“Having said that, come to the Great Lakes state. We’re losing population; Michigan is the only state in the last census that had a net population loss. The long term trend will be, ‘come where the water is, it’s great.’” (laughter)
CHRISTY GOLDFUSS: Congressman, I just want to say, thank you for the leadership on this issue. Thank you for sharing your experiences, really leading your colleagues in the Congress to answer these questions and to address these questions. We really appreciate your partnership.
REP. DAN KILDEE: “Thank you I appreciate all the concern for my hometown. Thank you all.”
Source: Congressman Dan Kildee
