Four more officials charged in Flint water crisis

by David Gutierrez, Natural News:

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed criminal charges against four more people in connection with the Flint water crisis, bringing the total number of people charged to 13. The office is also suing two engineering companies.

Those charged placed concern for finances over the health of Flint residents, Schuette said.

“All too prevalent and very evident during the course of this investigation has been a fixation on finances and balance sheets. This fixation has cost lives. This fixation came with the expense of protecting the health and safety of Flint. It’s all about numbers over people, money over health.”

Stolen money used to poison children

The new charges center around a conspiracy to get the city to stop purchasing water from the city of Detroit in order to save money. This led Flint to draw water from the heavily contaminated Flint River, poisoning hundreds of children with lead and other heavy metals.

Two former emergency managers of Flint, Jerry Ambrose and Darnell Earley, were charged with felonies for conspiracy and false pretenses, and misdemeanors for misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty.

Due to its years-long financial crisis, Flint had its finances placed under the control of emergency managers. Schuette said that Ambrose and Earley supported the construction of the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) pipeline – which has yet to be completed – but knew the it could not be built without financial contributions from Flint. Because the city was millions of dollars in debt, they could not issue new bonds to pay for the pipeline. So, the men misused an emergency clause intended to deal with “fire, flood, or other calamity” to illicitly borrow tens of millions of dollars. Allegedly, the money was meant to clean up a contaminated lagoon; instead it was all diverted to the KWA.

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