Eric Mays, a dedicated city council member renowned for his activism during the infamous Flint, Michigan, water crisis and a history of disruptive behavior at public meetings, died on Saturday, Feb. 24, at 65. City officials made the announcement, but they did not disclose the cause of the death.
DETROIT (AP) — Michigan’s attorney general in 2016 promised to investigate “without fear or favor” the scandal over Flint’s lead-tainted drinking water and pledged that state regulators would be locked up for fudging data and misleading the public. Yet three years later, no one is behind bars. Instead, seven of 15 defendants have pleaded no contest to misdemeanors, some as minor as disrupting a public meeting. Their records eventually will be scrubbed clean. That has angered some people in Flint who believe key players who could have prevented the lead disaster are getting off easy. Four of five people at
If convicted, Lyon and the others charged with involuntary manslaughter could each face up to 15 years in prison.
Three years since discovery of tainted water, little has changed
More than 1,700 Flint-area residents and property owners are seeking more than $700 million in damages from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its handling of the city’s crisis with lead-tainted water.
On May 4, President Barack Obama spent the whole day in Flint, Michigan. He also drank a glass of filtered water. In April 2014, the drinking water in the city of Flint was contaminated after the brilliant decision was made to change the source of Flint’s water from Detroit Water and Sewage Department water to the Flint River. General Motors stopped using water from the Flint River, after new auto parts exposed to the river water showed signs of rust. The result was that over 10,000 children were exposed to unacceptable high levels of lead in their water. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease was
Rick Snyder, Michigan Republicans and the governor’s supporters do not care about the lives of the residents of the mostly black city.
Life over the past months has changed dramatically for Alaya Smith and her family, which includes her two-year-old son, Amarus Jones, and her fiancé.
They live in fear of the water.
Bill Fletcher says that time and again throughout the history of the United States if the ruling elite wants to push through a nefarious measure, they first implement it in communities of color. There are many peculiar things about the 2016 election cycle, but one of them is what is not being discussed. There are two items that immediately jump to mind and, believe it or not they both have to do with elections. The first is, that in the state of Michigan, there have been a series of silent coups taking place in which Black-majority cities are losing control
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is refuting claims that the water crisis in Flint, where residents have been exposed to toxic levels of lead and ten have died due to a contaminated water supply, is a case of environmental racism. But civil rights activists, politicians and residents of the city have summed up the events leading up to the crisis as well as the state government’s slow response to just that. More than half of Flint’s residents are black and the most recent statistics show that the average per capita income there is little more than $23,000.