DA

Lead regulations crash state budgets, federal aid can’t solve. The overwhelming costs
of the flint water crisis prove
Adrienne L. Katner et. al 18, (“America’s Path to Drinking Water Infrastructure Inequality and
Environmental Injustice: The Case of Flint, Michigan ,” in “THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF
SUSTAINABILITY,” Palgrave MacMillan, pg. 85, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-
71389-2)
The financial costs of addressing the Flint debacle currently seem insurmountable . It is widely
acknowledged that the only sustainable long-term solution is full replacement of all corroding and
leaded plumbing. But the cost for replacing Flint’s entire water distribution system is estimated at $100–
120 million (Wells 2016). To address this financial crisis, s tate and federal investment is needed
(Livengood 2015). While Flint received more funding than other cities that have faced similar
infrastructure disrepair, there has been no sustained federal investment or initiative to fully replace or
repair water infrastructure on a national level to the extent needed. While the US EPA, Department of
Agriculture, and Department of Housing and Urban Development does provide some funding, over 95
percent of spending in water infrastructure projects is from state and local governments (Walton 2016).
Funds provided by the US EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) program are finite and
are generally allocated in the form of loans which many small communities cannot afford to pay back.
Since 1997, approximately $20 billion has been appropriated, but it could cost up to $30 billion for the
United States to replace the remaining LSLs and $384 billion to ensure that all Americans are provided
with safe drinking water (Tiemann 2016). If system expansion and population growth is considered, the
costs could be as high as $1 trillion through 2035 to restore and expand systems (AWWA 2013). It is also
important to remember that Flint’s financial burdens are not limited to infrastructure replacement.
There are also high costs associated with providing bottled water and care to affected residents,
maintaining long-term health surveillance, and defending the government’s actions in court (400
lawsuits to date) (Carmody 2016). Costs to address all of Flint’s needs alone may amount to as much as
$1.5 billion (Livengood 2016; Muennig 2016).

Attempts at federal aid failed flint, they’ll fail other cities too AND even with federal
aid, states still lose millions.
Claretta Bellamy 12/09/2021, (“Why the $626.25M settlement may not be enough for survivors of the
Flint water crisis,” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/62625m-settlement-may-not-
enough-survivors-flint-water-crisis-rcna7942)
Dionna Brown was a freshman in high school when the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, put her community in disarray. Now 23, she vividly
remembers the physical and mental ailments suffered by those exposed to hazardous lead. “My friends that lived on the east side and south
side, they had rashes on their skin,” Brown said. “Their hair was falling out.”

Last month a federal judge approved a partial settlement of $626.25 million to compensate as many as
85,000 residents for the problems caused by the water crisis. But even with the money headed toward
Flint residents, the health and safety issues related to the water crisis persist in the majority-Black
community. Many residents exposed to lead in their tap water developed illnesses like Legionnaires’
disease, miscarriages, behavioral problems in children and male infertility.
According to the preliminary terms of the settlement, 80 percent of the funds will be distributed to those who were 6 or younger at the time of
initial exposure to Flint River water. Two percent of the funds will be distributed to special education services in Genesee County, 18 percent
will fund property damage and roughly 1 percent will go toward businesses who suffered financial deprivation. The amount each person
receives will not be determined until all claims are submitted and found eligible.

While organizations like Black Millenials 4 Flint, which helped the city endure the crisis, are launching a
number of initiatives in 2022 to help vulnerable residents, the group’s founder, LaTricea Adams, said
that the government settlement is insufficient to support long-term care for those who continue to
struggle with health problems.

“This is a slap in the face,” Adams said. “With the settlement, it didn’t take into consideration public
health or the social determinants of health. There should have been Medicaid access, Medicare access,
for the remainder of people’s lives in Flint. There are irreversible damages done to people in Flint.”
Lynsey Mukomel, press secretary for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, said that lawsuits involving nonsettling defendants may lead to
additional funds being distributed. “We recognize no amount of money will undo the harm created by the crisis, nor the hardship that
continues for the city,” Mukomel said. “That said, we were encouraged to see that more than half of Flint’s population registered for the
settlement, which was negotiated tenaciously over 18 months to reach a historic outcome. We are proud of this settlement and the positive
step it adds to Flint’s healing process.” Since the water crisis began in 2014, Black Millenials 4 Flint has assisted communities exposed to lead in
Flint and other cities across the country, including Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Memphis. At the peak of the disaster in Flint, members
delivered water to homes and advocated against residents having to pay their water bills. While the organization is based in Washington,
Adams said it uses Flint in its name to pay homage to the mostly Black individuals who brought the environmental and social injustices to the
nation’s attention.

The crisis in Flint stemmed from a drive by the state’s governor at the time, Rick Snyder, to reduce
spending in the cash-strapped city by switching its main water source from Detroit Water and Sewage
to the Flint River via a pipeline from the Karegnondi Water Authority. Despite reports proving the water
to be unsafe, the switch was performed in 2014, exposing residents to water filled with high-risk
contaminants. The result was years of health issues for Black residents paired with the failed promise of
a boosted economy.
Once a strong industrial city in the early 20th century, Flint began to experience fiscal decline during the 1960s, as manufacturers — and once-
reliable factory jobs — left the U.S. and cities like Flint. Flint is 54 percent Black, and nearly 39 percent of all residents live in poverty, according
to the U.S. Census Bureau. The water crisis only exacerbated the city’s economic decline, said Henry Taylor, director of the Center for Urban
Studies at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. Decades of neglect and underdevelopment in Flint is a “challenge that
we face with African American communities across the country,” Taylor said. For example, the median household income in Flint was only
$28,834 in 2019, compared to the national median of $69,560.

The state said it has already spent $423 million to help Flint recover from the crisis, including a $97
million settlement passed in March to replace all of the city’s lead service lines contaminating its water
system. However, for cities like Flint to prosper, Taylor said money needs to be invested and recirculated
more consciously into the community.
“There’s never been a moment in American history when Black people have not lived in underdeveloped neighborhoods like Flint,” Taylor said.
“You got to change the neighborhoods in order to change the other outcomes.” Meanwhile, local organizations continue to fill the gaps. In
Black Millenials 4 Flint’s case, next year the group will launch Lead Free Mamas, a program that will work in conjunction with Revive Community
Health Center in Flint to help educate midwives, doulas and social birth workers on how to incorporate environmentalism into their practices.
Brown, whose adolescence is filled with memories of friends and family getting sick from contaminated water, is now actively fighting against
such injustices. Inspired by a class she took at Howard University on environmental inequalities, she began working toward solving the water
crisis in Flint and other cities and joined Black Millenials 4 Flint after moving back to the city after graduation. Brown is now the national
director of the organization’s Youth EJ Griots Program, which engages young Black and Latino leaders to organize against environmental and
civil injustices. The death of Brown’s grandmother from chronic kidney disease provided her with a stark reminder of how the water crisis is
still taking a toll on the community, despite the settlement. “A price tag does not take the place for losing a family member,” Brown said. She
said her grandmother was never tested for lead, but Brown remains suspicious. “Even though it happened last year, I can probably see her
disease happened from the lead.” Youth leadership and engagement is a key factor in Black Millenials 4 Flint’s initiatives. Due to the limited job
availability and economic decline in the city, many young people are leaving to pursue a college education or for better jobs, Adams said. But
the need for continued organizing and activism remains in Flint, even after the final settlement payment is disbursed. “Lead in drinking water in
everyday life is still a problem,” Brown said. “We’re living like a third-world country in a lot of cities because we don’t have any water, the most
basic right, and like, access to clean water — and that happens all over the country in Black and brown communities. Nobody says anything.
Nobody does anything. So our mission will not change.”

A state budget crisis locks in recession

Jeanna Smialek et. al 20, (“State and Local Budget Pain Looms Over Economy’s Future,” NY Times,
August 14th, 2020, accessed 7/17/21, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/business/economy/state-
local-budget-pain.html)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy struggled to shake off the last recession, with historically slow
growth and a labor market that took more than six years to recover its earlier employment levels. A big
part of the reason: state and local governments, which cut spending and fired workers amid
widespread budget shortfalls. The same dynamic poses one of the biggest threats to America’s recovery
from the pandemic downturn. State governments are again experiencing extreme budget problems as
they pay out increasing sums to cover unemployment and health costs caused by the coronavirus crisis
while revenues from sales taxes and corporate and personal income tax payments plummet. States
could face a gap of at least $555 billion through the 2022 fiscal year, according to one estimate.
Economists warn that the long-term risk coming from struggling states could prove even more
damaging this time than the last recession, which spanned 2007 to 2009, unless Washington steps in.
Yet providing more aid to state and local governments has become one of the biggest political battles in
the fight over another pandemic rescue package. The Senate formally adjourned on Thursday until early
September, all but ending any chance that an agreement could be reached soon. House members had
already left Washington. President Trump and top Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the majority leader, say that providing more money to states could simply bail out fiscally
irresponsible governments that did not manage their budgets and their public pension plans prudently
in good times. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday in a television interview that most
states had not exhausted the $150 billion that was allocated in the relief bill passed in March, though
analysts say much of that has already been earmarked for certain projects. Democrats insist that states
need more money and have proposed as much as $1 trillion, saying it would support needed services
and help the economy recover more quickly. While many governments entered the downturn with solid
tax revenues and billions of dollars in their emergency reserve funds, those coffers are quickly
dwindling. State revenues “could fall as much as or more than they did in the worst year of the Great
Recession and remain depressed in following years,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, a progressive think tank. Nearly all states are required to balance their budgets, meaning
officials will need to plug shortfalls by tapping emergency funds, raising taxes or cutting costs, including
jobs. That worries economists and Federal Reserve officials. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, regularly
warns that state job cuts could weigh on the economy’s ability to recover, and his colleagues warn of
public-sector budget pain as one of the primary vulnerabilities ahead. “It will hold back the economic
recovery if they continue to lay people off and if they continue to cut essential services,” Mr. Powell said
during congressional testimony in June. “In fact, that’s kind of what happened post the global financial
crisis.”

Another economic crisis risks global conflict.

Qian Liu 11/13/2018 (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/the-next-economic-crisis-could-
cause-a-global-conflict-heres-why)
The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes
after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis,
combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict . The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost

bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies. Policymakers have
utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was
not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Clutch Plague in 1929. As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-
price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy. If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been
characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Clutch Plague, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to

with wealth and income

believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict. According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially

inequality at historically high levels. This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors
stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking
migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are
symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis . Voters have good
reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving
their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite
the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as
countries – most notably, Donald Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile, proxy
wars are raging in Syria and Yemen. Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that
the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political
scientist Samuel Huntington , considering such a scenario could help us avoid it, because it would force
us to take action. In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they
have long promised, while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful
global dialogue. The alternative may well be global conflagration.