Gretchen Whitmer’s big fat Greek water scandal
Zachary Faria
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What happens when you try to keep a crisis out of the public after running a campaign where you promised transparency? You end up like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and her team, trying to come up with creative ways to keep residents in the dark about your failures.
Benton Harbor in Michigan has been dealing with a water crisis, with the city’s water system exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s lead contamination standards going back to 2018. That was the last year in office for Gov. Rick Snyder, the Republican who Whitmer replaced thanks, in part, to a nationally famous water crisis in the city of Flint.
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But Benton Harbor (population: 9,103) continued to struggle with lead-contaminated water throughout Whitmer’s tenure. In 2021, three years into the crisis, the president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council said, “You still have to pay for water you can’t drink, you can’t brush your teeth with, you can’t cook with, or bathe with it” as residents continued to rely on bottled water. Only in 2022 did the city’s lead levels begin to drop, with leaders beginning to push residents to use tap water (with filters) earlier this year.
But a lawsuit has unveiled an equally interesting and disturbing issue from this crisis. In September 2021, just one month before the state encouraged residents to use bottled water and began sending shipments, Michigan Energy Department consultant Andy Leavitt sent an email to a top Whitmer adviser. The email read: “Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint.”
At least, the email roughly translated to that, because it was not written in English. In order to keep the email from the public record, Leavitt wrote those sentences by replacing the English letters with Greek letters that resembled them. Michigan’s public records department cannot electronically search for Greek letters, meaning that the email would have remained concealed if not for the lawsuit that followed the lead contamination.
It seems like it should be a big deal that Whitmer and her team did not learn from the Flint water crisis, as Leavitt said. It should be an even bigger deal that her team tried to keep that correspondence secret in spite of her grand promises of transparency. Then again, being a Democrat often means not having to answer seriously for scandals like this that would be blown up into massive stories were they perpetrated by a Republican. Some scandals are just (D)ifferent than others.