Burdett Loomis: Could a Flint-like crisis happen here in Kansas?

Ordinarily, Kansans would not look to a medium-size Michigan city with a large minority population for lessons in politics and policymaking.

But Flint’s continuing water-quality disaster offers clear lessons for any state whose leaders have cut back services and placed greater tax burdens on localities.

As one Michigan conservative activist explained: “Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to address Flint’s longtime fiscal problems. The manager, looking to reduce costs, opted to start obtaining water from the nearby Flint River instead of paying Detroit for the supply. The river had contaminants from years of auto manufacturing, and acted corrosively on the pipes to leach out the lead.”

As the overseer of water quality for Michigan municipalities, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality failed in early 2014 to require the city to add inexpensive corrosion-control chemicals to this new – and clearly more polluted – water source. Over the next 18 months, Flint’s children experienced huge spikes in lead levels in their blood.

The DEQ acknowledged its mistake and switched the city back to lake water this past October, but the long-term effects of the lead poisoning will not be known for years.

Meanwhile, Snyder, who has shrunk government aggressively in Michigan, did not declare a state of emergency until early January 2016, and has deflected blame from his administration. Snyder eventually requested – and President Obama granted – emergency aid to help address the evolving disaster.

Why is Flint’s public health crisis relevant to Kansas? First, we need to question whether such a situation could happen here.

Although an exact repeat is unlikely, the anti-government attitude of Gov. Sam Brownback and the Legislature suggests similar problems already exist, especially for the state’s most vulnerable citizens.

For example, under the Brownback administration, welfare funds – which provide no more than $400 per month for truly poor families – are cut off after 36 months, or 24 months sooner than the federal law requires. Thus, in January 2016, 200 families lost their meager assistance, even as the Kansas poverty rate was climbing and the sales tax on food remained among the highest in the nation.

The state cannot fill its ranks of prison guards or state troopers, as budget shortfalls continue to bedevil policymakers. And for some of the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens, those housed at the Osawatomie State Hospital, cutbacks have meant that the facility no longer qualifies for Medicare funding.

Conditions at prisons or mental hospitals, along with public safety on the roads, have not yet produced a story as dramatic as that of Flint’s lead poisoning. What has become clear, however, is that Kansas’ continuing budgetary squeeze and the anti-government, anti-federal assistance stances of state officials have created a series of personal crises for those individuals – the needy, prisoners and the mentally ill – who have the least power to affect policies that directly affect them.

And that’s just plain wrong.

This story was originally published January 22, 2016 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Burdett Loomis: Could a Flint-like crisis happen here in Kansas?."