Schuette on Flint: More charges comingChad Livengood, Jim Lynch and Jacob Carah, The Detroit News 1:54 p.m. EDT April 20, 2016
Flint — Two state environmental officials and a Flint water administrator are accused of manipulating water testing results, tampering with evidence and misleading federal and county officials about the safety of Flint’s lead-tainted drinking water in criminal charges filed Wednesday.
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality District Engineer Michael Prysby faces six charges. Stephen Busch, DEQ’s Office of Drinking Water’s Lansing and Jackson district supervisor, faces a total of five charges. And Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, is facing two charges.
The charges, a mixture of felonies and misdemeanors, stem from an investigation led by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office into how Flint’s water system became tainted by toxic lead, setting a public health emergency that has roiled Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.
“I’ve stated this was the beginning of the road back — the road back to building and restoring trust and confidence of Flint families in their government...,” Schuette said during an afternoon press conference. “In Michigan, as I’ve made it abundantly clear that our system of justice applies to everybody. It’s not rigged. No one is above the law.”
On several occasions during a press conference Wednesday, Schuette sidestepped questions about potential charges against Snyder.
Investigator Andrew Arena echoed the idea that more charges against additional suspects are in the future.
“...This is the biggest case in the history of the State of Michigan — I think history will bear me out when we’re done...,” he said. “As an investigator, this is why you suit up.”
Busch and Prysby are linked to Flint’s failure to treat river water with corrosion controls — designed to prevent lead contamination — between April 2014 and October 2015.
Schuette’s charges filed Wednesday against Busch and Prysby accuse the career municipal water regulators of “willfully and knowingly misleading” federal regulators at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Genesee County Health Department about the treatment of Flint’s river water.
For Prysby, the charges against him include: two counts of misconduct in office; one count of conspiracy to tamper with evidence; tampering with evidence; and separate violations of water treatment and monitoring laws.
Busch faces one charge of misconduct in office, one charge of conspiracy to tamper with evidence, tampering with evidence and separate violations of water treatment and monitoring under the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act he was charged with enforcing.
Glasgow is charged with one count of tampering with evidence for changing lead water testing results and one count of willful neglect of duty as a public servant.
The evidence tampering charges against Prysby and Busch are related to unlawfully altering three lead water test reports between February and August 2015, according to a charging document obtained by The Detroit News.
Busch and Prysby also are accused of wrongly not requiring Flint to treat its corrosive river water with corrosion-controlling chemicals that could have prevented lead from leaching from pipes.
The misconduct in office charges are felonies punishable by up to five years in prison and or fines of $10,000. The evidence-tampering felonies are felonies punishable by up to four years in prison and or $10,000 fines.
The indictments are “the first of more to come,” according to one source familiar with the ongoing investigation.
Busch’s actions have been under state review for several months now. He spent five days on unpaid leave in late January, the maximum allowable under civil service rules. The DEQ supervisor earns $93,876 a year and has been on paid leave since Feb. 1, according to the State Budget Office.
Emails and internal communications released through public records requests paint Busch as a central figure in Flint’s water crisis. Snyder has said top managers in the Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance lacked “common sense” in failing to require corrosion controls when the city began using the Flint River as its source of drinking water.
A key juncture in the Flint crisis came early in 2015, when EPA officials attempted to discern if Flint was using corrosion controls to prevent lead from leaching into the river water. EPA officials have said they were misled by the DEQ about the situation, and both Busch and Prysby were at the heart of that exchange.
But state emails also show Busch recognized problems could arise from Flint using the river as its water source. On March 26, 2013, he wrote that regular use of the river could “pose an increased microbial risk to public health” and “pose an increased risk of disinfections by-product (carcinogen) exposure to public health.”
Last month, while appearing before state investigators, Glasgow laid the blame for Flint’s lack of corrosion controls at Prysby’s feet. The DEQ official, he said, had told him the city did not need to use corrosion controls when Flint’s treatment plant came on line.
Glasgow is accused of tampering with evidence related to Flint’s lead and copper testing reports. The willful neglect of duty charge against Glasgow is a one-year misdemeanor for failing to perform his duties as a licensed municipal water treatment operator.
In a 2015 email to another city officials, Glasgow wrote: “We originally had this chemical in the design, but the DEQ did not mandate it from the start,” Glasgow wrote in the email. “(They) informed us to wait and see the results of our lead and copper sampling to determine if it was necessary.”
Glasgow was involved with overseeing the city’s water sampling program under the guidelines of the federal Lead and Copper Rule. At a time when the city was drawing its water from the Flint River and failing to treat it to prevent corrosion, sampling was being conducted at homes that did not have lead service lines — part of the testing criteria.
Instead, samples were taken from few homes with lead lines — artificially lowering the overall lead detected around the city. It allowed Flint to report compliance with the Lead and Copper Rule when it did not federal standards.
Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech researcher whose sampling helped identify the presence of high lead levels in Flint’s water, laid out his concerns about the homes the city was choosing to sample in an Oct. 15 email to top Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials.
In it, he challenged not only the lack of homes tested with lead service lines, but the decision to throw out one sampling result, from the home of resident Lee-Anne Walters with extraordinarily high lead results.
“For your information, on the basis of records from the city, Lee-Anne’s home is the only home in the 2015 sampling pool that is proven to have a lead pipe,” Edwards wrote. “I have compared the sample sites that the city used to the database that Flint has put together, and of 11 samples in the database that the city claims had a lead pipe, zero actually had a lead pipe…
“Your employees…threw out the only Flint (Lead and Copper Rule) samples know to be legitimate in the 2015 sampling round.”
In 2015, Glasgow seemingly admitted to shortcomings in the way samples were collected when confronted by an interviewer with ACLU-Michigan. When asked how testers could be sure they were getting samples from homes with lead lines, he essentially said there was no way to be sure.
“We throw bottles out everywhere just to collect as many as we can to try to hit our numbers… We just turn in every result that we get in,” he said.
Schuette’s probe has been looking into state and local government officials to determine whether state laws were violated. In launching the investigation in January, Schuette said the crisis in Flint was “a human tragedy in which families are struggling with even the most basic parts of daily life.” He vowed to “help restore some of the trust in our government while helping families move forward.”
Schuette assembled what he called a “top-shelf” team earlier this year for the probe, led by Todd Flood, a former Wayne County assistant prosecutor, and Arena, who ran several major investigations as head of the Detroit FBI Office until his retirement in 2012. Arena came out of retirement, he said, because the Flint water investigation is “the biggest case in the history of the state.”
In late March, Flood began deposing several unnamed city employees who were subpoenaed to appear at an office in Detroit, Flint City Attorney Stacy Erwin Oakes previously said.
Oakes did not return a message Tuesday night seeking comment.
Flood said in February the inquiry could lead to a variety of criminal charges or civil actions.
The team includes more than 20 attorneys and investigators, including former state and Detroit police officers.
Flood has said he also could pursue restitution for Flint residents affected by the water contamination crisis, suggesting he could target private companies or governments involved in the man-made disaster.
Critics have questioned the objectivity of the investigation, noting that Flood has made political contributions to both Schuette and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, a fact he has said will not affect his judgment in the case. Flood also donated to former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Because he is involved in the probe, Schuette is not part of the team defending Snyder in a federal class-action lawsuit.
The contamination crisis has led to the resignation of the state Department of Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant and department spokesman Brad Wurfel. Gov. Rick Snyder dismissed Liane Shekter Smith, former head of the DEQ’s Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance. In response to a spike in Legionnaires’ cases that coincided with the water crisis — 91 cases in 17 months beginning in June 2014, including 12 deaths — Snyder called for an investigation into the health department.
Flint switched off Detroit’s Lake Huron water supply in April 2014 and began using the Flint River as an interim source while a new regional pipeline was built. Residents quickly began complaining about the water’s color and odor, and independent experts eventually discovered elevated lead levels in the water and blood of children.
The state, which initially downplayed concerns, confirmed the lead findings in October and began taking steps to address the crisis. Wyant resigned in late December amid criticism over his agency’s failure to ensure proper corrosion controls were added to Flint River water, which had leached lead from aging underground pipes.
In January, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit open its own investigation into the Flint water crisis along with the EPA. Federal officials declined to say whether the case is a civil or criminal investigation.
Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, said Wednesday after state charges were announced: “Federal law enforcement agencies have been working on a parallel investigation cooperatively with the state but independently. We will continue to explore any violations of federal law.”