Two state employees and the city employee have been charged with criminal conduct in the matter of the the contamination of Flint, Michigan water with lead reports CNN:
(CNN) — The man who supervised Flint’s water treatment plant has been charged, along with two state environmental officials, in connection with the Michigan city’s water crisis.
Mike Glasgow, a former supervisor at the Flint treatment plant who now serves as the city’s utilities administrator, is charged with tampering with evidence and willful neglect of duty as a public officer, according to court records.The other two are Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
Prysby, who still works with the department, stands charged with two counts of misconduct in office, tampering with evidence, conspiracy to tamper with evidence, and two violations of the Safe Water Drinking Act (one a monitoring violation, one a treatment violation). Busch, who is on unpaid administrative leave with the department, faces the same charges minus one of the misconduct in office counts.
The punishment really does not seem to fit the crime:
If convicted on all counts, Glasgow could face up to five years in prison and $6,000 in fines, Prysby could face up to 20 years in prison and more than $35,000 in fines and Busch could face a maximum of 15 years in prison and more than $25,000 in fines. The state code also says that Prysby and Busch could face additional fines up to $5,000 a day for each day they were in violation of the Safe Water Drinking Act.
Michigan’s Attorney General has provided a Clouseauan remark:
Criminal accusations announced Wednesday against two state workers and a Flint city employee “are only the beginning,” Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said, promising more charges will be filed.
Schuette declined to name possible additional targets of the ongoing criminal investigation. “There are no targets, and nobody’s ruled out,” he told reporters
I suspect everyone and I suspect no one.
I can only speculate on what the inevitable civil suits will look like.
The first one seems obvious: Glasgow was the certified plant operator, the person with the training and responsibility for environmental compliance. He also allegedly falsified data, which I think refers to falsely certifying that Flint had tested water in houses with lead in them. I haven’t seen the complaint, but it will be very interesting to see what is meant be false, did he know the houses didn’t have lead, or did he fail to take steps to find out?
The other two seem to be over-reaching, but I don’t quite understand the theories or the underlying facts. Regulatory liability for the Watchmen for bad advise seems unprecedented without some sort of quid-pro-quo.
The complaint isn’t that much more helpful. I think these are the operative complaints against the state officials:
1. Directly or indirectly participated in Glasgow reporting false or misleading lead data in the report.
2. More generally manipulating monitoring reports, by directing residents to “pre-flush” their taps for 5 minutes the night before, failing to collect enough samples and removing results sampled.
3. Failing to require corrosion control, either at the beginning or when the action level was exceeded.
The counts have a lot of duplication in them, so that some of these issues are raised as both misdemeanors and felonies. The big counts of official misconduct, probably depend entirely on the more specific issues of misreporting. Mandating corrosion control appears to be the weakest issue.