OCN 320 blog

David Eggert and Ed White at AP, via NewsNation Now:

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was charged Wednesday with two counts of willful neglect of duty stemming from an investigation of the Flint water crisis.

The charges, shown in an online court record, are misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The indictment filed by the attorney general’s office is groundbreaking: No governor or former governor in Michigan’s 184-year history had been charged with crimes related to their time in that office, according to the state archivist.

Besides Snyder, a Republican who served until 2019, charges are expected against other people, including former officials who served as state health director, Michigan’s chief medical executive, Snyder’s communications chief and a senior adviser.

Flint was in chronic financial trouble in 2014 when a Snyder-appointed manager who was running the majority Black city carried out a money-saving decision to use the Flint River for water while a regional pipeline from Lake Huron was under construction. The corrosive water, however, wasn’t treated properly and released lead from old plumbing into homes in one of the worst manmade environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide if contamination of groundwater that seeps into rivers, lakes and oceans violates the Clean Water Act.

Dumping pollutants directly into navigable bodies of water is prohibited by the 47-year-old law, but it is less clear about indirect sources.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Hawaii’s Maui County violated the law by injecting treated sewage from a wastewater treatment plant into the groundwater, some of which enters the Pacific Ocean. The high court will hear the county’s appeal next fall…

“It has been estimated that 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entered the ocean in 2010 from 192 coastal countries.”