Holding up a large amount of aid to a very large predominantly black and Latino city because of $55 million not given to a small predominantly black city. Holding up aid to a majority (D) city because of what a (R) senator does.
There are more blacks affected in the part of unincorporated Harris county that I live in than in all of Flint. And not all of Flint's black population is affected--about a third have Pb levels in their water well below the EPA minimum.More than another third have Pb levels below the minimum, but not far below it.
Then there's the whole "act of God" and "natural disaster" versus "consequence of bad decision making" and all the cover-up nonsense that delayed a solution and made the solution harder to achieve.
Here are some solutions to the budget impasse:
(1) Find an alternate funding source for Flint's $55 million, since Michigan is in a nasty deficit situation. I assume.
(2) Fund Flint and not all askers. The other $195 million ($165 million according to some new stories) is for non-Flint. For Flint there's some sort of plan, budget estimate, time-table. For the others, it's, "Gee, there's $. Ooh, ooh, me, too."
Unfortunately, a lot of people would reject either scenario because it would mean "they've won." Yeah, Flint gets the money, but it meant letting some Tea Partier get his way. Honor must be satisfied, even if in the duel the wife and kids become widow and orphans. Must avoid compromise, no matter what the consequences. How quaintly Southern.
A lot of this is reminiscent of a news story I heard last week. Somebody was on the radio, screeching about some delaying tactic that was being used to delay proper school funding. "We know what we have to do, let's get that money released." It was outrageous, and I could feel his outrage and his desire to make me outraged.
After the screed the announcer calmly pointed out that the money would need to be released by the Texas State Legislature, which won't convene again until spring 2017. If the guy had his way and all the stalling tactics ended and a decision was made tomorrow, nothing would happen until more than a year from now. All the stalling tactics will have run their course by January 2017. Small points left out by the rhetorician, playing off preconceived biases and I-wanna-believe-the-worst listeners, which made his screed simply irritating. He was impatient to be able to declare victory, because he's running for office. He may be (D), but he's a dork. A manipulative dork.
For most of the money held up by Lee, there's no action plan or even budget because it's not directed to Flint and the other places with lead problems are still working out the extent of the problem, no where near having an plan of action, much less running numbers for implementation. The $ would be assigned based on some politician's guess as to what would be needed, and being important enough to get his state's needs addressed instead of some other state's. None of the money would, of course, be returned. Some might never be spent for the purpose stated. As for Flint, there's enough already in the bank to continue working at full-speed until May--my reading is "late May," but that might be a mistake and they mean "early May."
In other words, the hold holding up everything actually holds up nothing at the present.
The same lab at VTech that had the first samples released new data today. Over 1/3 of the water samples are under the minimum needed; in other words, they'd be considered safe to drink in any other town. One sample was outrageously high, more than 10x higher than the highest during the first round of sampling. The news report gave no explanation for this, which makes little sense. Perhaps the person simply hadn't run the water for a long time and lead continued to leach. Or perhaps the sampling was flawed. This was a clear outlier in the sample. In other words, one problem that creates urgency is that the problem is less acute. We have to hurry before the acute crisis becomes a becomes a long-term manageable problem, because crisis can be used but long-term problems aren't political fodder.
It was also reported that water usage is down, with the likely implication that this is hindering chemical pipe repair. That is, of course, the ultimate non-political solution--problem goes away and nobody can profit from it. They need more flow-through to get phosphate where it needs to go quickly. Would greater flow solve the problem or or not? The predictions are "yes," it would help considerably and maybe make the problem go away, but they found somebody willing to go on record that it's unproven so we can't really know. But I can't help but wonder if the anomalous sample is related to water sitting in the pipes, and possibly even dating back to the pre-crisis days when no action was being taken to mitigate the Pb problem.
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