WASHINGTON — The crisis in Flint, Michigan, a poor, mostly black city where lead has contaminated the drinking water, would not have been allowed to happen in a rich suburb, the city's mayor said Wednesday.
"It's a minority community, it's a poor community, and voices were not being heard," Mayor Karen Weaver said. "And that's a part of this problem."
Weaver added her voice to a growing chorus arguing that officials found it too easy to disregard the concerns of an already disenfranchised community after the city started drawing its drinking water from the Flint River.
Hillary Clinton made a similar argument during the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, saying that "there would have been action" had children in a wealthy Detroit suburb faced similar conditions.
Speaking with reporters at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, Weaver said that she was grateful for the attention her city was receiving from the national news media and political leaders but that it had taken much too long for aid to arrive. And she noted that no one was sure how long it would take for her city's water supply to be safe.
"We have been crying about this for almost two years — it will be two years in April — and that's what we want to know: What took so long?" she said, surrounded by other mayors from around the country. "Because it doesn't take a scientist to tell us brown water is not good."
Weaver spoke just blocks from the White House, where on Tuesday she met with President Barack Obama and members of his administration to discuss the continuing crisis. The mayor, who took office in November, said she had also met on Wednesday with members of Michigan's congressional delegation.
Obama declared a state of emergency in the city and surrounding county on Saturday in response to the crisis, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide up to $5 million in aid. He also sent Nicole Lurie, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response for the Health and Human Services Department, to lead the federal response in Flint.
Obama was scheduled to be in Detroit, an hour's drive south of Flint, on Wednesday to meet with representatives of the auto industry and that city's mayor. The president was not scheduled to travel to Flint.
Weaver declined to comment on calls for the state's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, to resign over his administration's response to the crisis, saying that she would wait for an investigation into the response.
She said all levels of government deserved criticism.
"People will ask, 'Who do you blame?'" she said. "Well, we know the buck stops with the governor. We know that, but if we want to start pointing fingers, there's enough blame to go all the way around."
Snyder used nearly his entire State of the State address on Tuesday to address the issue, offering a direct apology to Flint residents, acknowledging missteps by his administration in recognizing and addressing what has become a crisis, and pledging to push for millions of dollars in additional state funding to help support residents and updates to the city's damaged and aging infrastructure.
Weaver called Snyder's apology a "good start," but said it was the state's responsibility to replace Flint's infrastructure.
"We know that the state has a rainy-day fund," she said. "This is a rainy day in the city of Flint. Actually, it's raining cats and dogs, and we need that money to be directed to the city of Flint. We have an infrastructure crisis and a public health crisis going on at the same time."
Snyder has come under fire from Democrats and local officials for his administration's handling of the crisis. State officials have acknowledged being much too slow to take complaints about Flint's water seriously, but critics say that even since the lead problem became public knowledge last September, the governor has been slow to act.
It was not until this month that Snyder declared a state of emergency; sent a small contingent of National Guard troops to help with distributing bottled water, water filters and lead testing kits; and requested a federal state of emergency.
For almost five decades, Flint drew its water from the city of Detroit's water system, but concerns about high prices from Detroit helped lead to a switch. So in April 2014, Flint stopped taking Detroit water and started drawing water from the Flint River.
Flint had serious fiscal problems of its own, and from 2011 to 2015, its finances were under the control of a series of emergency managers appointed by Snyder's administration. The decision to try to save money by switching water supplies was approved by one of the emergency managers.
From the outset, people complained. The water was found to have bacterial contamination, and then disinfectant used to kill the bacteria caused a kind of chemical contamination. But even after those problems were resolved, many residents said the color, smell and taste of the water were bad.
Within months of the switch, a General Motors engine plant in Flint found that the city's water had corroded parts, and stopped using it. A hospital saw that the water was damaging its instruments, and stepped up its own filtering and use of bottled water, as did a local university. But residents and most businesses remained tied to the Flint River, and the state insisted that the water was safe.
But it turned out that the water was so corrosive that it leached lead out of old pipes. The state Department of Environmental Quality later conceded that it should have required the city to add anti-corrosion chemicals to the water, but did not. There have also been allegations that the city failed in its own lead-testing duties.
It was not until September 2015 that evidence of lead poisoning became public, and officials began to acknowledge it.
Researchers at Virginia Tech who have looked into the lead poisoning contend that state health officials knew of the lead problem months earlier but that the Department of Environmental Quality suppressed the information and misled the public.
The recent report from a task force appointed by the governor said the environmental agency had taken a lax approach to enforcement, and responded to people's concerns with "aggressive dismissal, belittlement and attempts to discredit these efforts and the individuals involved."
The episode is under investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department at the federal level, and by the state's attorney general, Bill Schuette, who is widely expected to run for governor in 2018.
The state says it has identified 43 people with elevated levels of lead, which poisons the nervous system and can stunt brain development in children. In addition, state officials disclosed this week that in 2014 and 2015 there was an increase in Legionnaires' disease cases in Genesee County, which includes Flint, including 10 fatalities, coinciding with the contamination of the water supply. The officials said they were investigating whether there might be a connection.
The city switched back to using Detroit water in October, but it is unclear how long the leaching will continue, and residents are still being advised not to use unfiltered tap water for drinking, cooking or bathing. Flint is expected to gain a new, safe water source later this year, when a pipeline from Lake Huron is completed after years of work.