Dan Kildee: “I thank my friend for offering this amendment and for yielding to me. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the…”

“I thank my friend for offering this amendment and for yielding to me. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question so we can immediately bring up H.R. 4479, which, as described, is the Families of Flint Act. We all know this story. Many Members have heard me talk about it here on the floor of the House before. But in short, the city of Flint had been a struggling community already because of the loss of jobs. {time} 1345 Then the State of Michigan just a few years ago cut one of the three essential elements to keep that city running--State revenue sharing-- which threw the city into a financial crisis. The State's response: appoint a financial manager, an emergency manager, to take over the city government, to suspend democracy, and, essentially, to act in dictatorial form. One of the decisions that that emergency manager made was to move the city from using Great Lakes water as its primary drinking water source to using the Flint River--a highly corrosive river--just to save money, and they did save money. The corrosion from that water, untreated, caused lead to leach into the pipes in Flint and into the homes of 100,000 people. There are consequences to that decision. The lives of children--the lives of people in Flint--are permanently affected by that. There are 9,000 children under the age of 6 who could potentially bear scars of this poisoning for the rest of their lives and have their development affected. Lead is a neurotoxin.…”