Homeless, Waterless and Childless in Michigan

While recently perusing daily online news sources, I happened across an article headlined ‘Detroit Water Infrastructure is Crumbling; many lack access to water’. “What,” I asked myself? “How can it be that people are going without water in 21st Century Motown?”

Eartha Jane Melzer, who wrote the article for Michigan Messenger on Nov. 15th, provided the shocking answer; shocking because not only are some Michigan people being denied access to water, they’re also being denied the right to raise their children because of it.

According to Ms. Melzer, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO) and the Sierra Club have teamed up to investigate Detroit’s deteriorating water infrastructure. The apparent fact of the matter is that last year Maureen Taylor, Chairperson of MWRO, reported that 45,000 Detroit households had their water shut off and although some of those houses had already been abandoned, a great many were occupied by families who couldn’t afford to pay their water bills.

As a result of this, Michigan’s ‘Protective Services’ agency, which can and does consider lack of water a form of child neglect, has removed children from homes with no water and placed them in foster care, perpetuating and adding to the volume of yet another government program financed on the taxpayers’ nickel. To compound the misery, Detroit, through Michigan’s Municipal Water Lien Act, adds the delinquent water/sewer bills to the homeowner’s property tax bill, further detracting from the financially challenged folk’s ability to keep a roof over their head and their children at home rather than at some stranger’s place.

Of course, as more and more people flee the considerably large area that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department serves, the onus of meeting its annual budget falls to those who remain beholden to the utility, and, as revenue falls, rates continue to increase.

According to recent poverty statistics, about 37 million Americans live in poverty, including 13 million children. In Michigan, 1 out of 5 people, including 500,000 children, live in or near poverty. As of last August, 1 out of 3 Detroiters lived in poverty, as did 47.8% of the city’s children. Further compounding poverty, which often goes hand in hand with a lack of education, nearly 44% of Michigan adults are said to read at the 4^th Grade level or below, hardly qualifying them for those good paying jobs Ms. Governor Blow You Away and our legislators keep promising.

In addition to the 45,000 Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s water shut-offs, Detroit based DTE Energy, which supplies electricity and natural gas to homes and businesses throughout southern Lower Michigan, reported a 56% increase in utility shut-offs for nonpayment of bills for the first 5 months of this year compared with the same period a year ago.

Though one would think it shouldn’t be necessary, due to the self-declared diligence of our over-paid and under-worked Michigan legislators who proclaim to be looking out for state citizens’ health, education, and welfare, it seems that Ms. Taylor and her group of do-gooders are taking the bull by the horns and trying to form a ballot initiative to remedy the situation.

What they propose to do is create a ‘water affordability’ plan that would protect senior citizens, disabled folks, and low-income people, which seem to be just about everyone lately. Credit for this plan should be shared with Marion Kramer, a Michigan activist and co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union who won a 2007 ‘Purpose Prize’ for organizing a grassroots, legal and legislative fight for the right to water in Detroit.

When Ms. Kramer stepped up to the water spigot several years ago, she “pressed the Highland Park City Council to address the exorbitant estimated water and sewage bills, and to stop the placing of delinquent water bills on property taxes. Town hall meetings called by the Union in the late 1990s at first attracted only a few dozen residents. Soon, a few hundred residents attended. Kramer said residents were initially hesitant to shout too much about their grievances, out of shame and fear that the court would remove their children from the home because of the health hazard caused by a lack of running water.”(See links for source)

Apparently and according to Ms. Melzer, Melissa Damaschke of the Sierra Club reports that the problem stems from Detroit’s inability to deal with up to a billion gallons of municipal and industrial waste-water daily that, when combined with heavy rainfall and melting snow, frequently overwhelms Detroit’s sewer system to the point that sewage overflows into the Great Lakes, causing ecological harm.

Ms. Damaschke further opined that the high cost of upgrading and expanding the city’s sewage system has forced the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to raise its water rates numerous times in recent years so that access to water, a basic human right, has become unaffordable to many residents.

It is, however, a vicious cycle that not only affects Detroiters, but also all state citizens who are being subjected to the demands of eco-environmentalists that clamor for more and more laws such as the federal Clean Water Act, which last year underwent a legislative rewrite so as to make it an even bigger thorn in the side of municipal water departments and their customers throughout Michigan and other states.

In 2000, it was estimated that Detroit’s water system would need an annual investment of $1 billion per year for 10 years to comply with federal mandates related to Act. However, Detroit was far from being the only city facing such outlandish expenses related to that particular environmental law, as it was also estimated by the EPA and other organizations that municipalities nationwide would have had to spend from $500 billion to $1 trillion in compliance costs by the year 2005. Needless to say, that hasn’t been done except for perhaps in more affluent locations, and certainly Detroit and other Michigan cities aren’t among them.

That the Sierra Club, which has championed the Clean Water Act and thrown fits over cow-pies in the pasture, would now be concerned about Detroit’s low-income families going without water seems ludicrous. Little good it does Detroit’s poor families to have squeaky-clean beaches when their children are living in foster homes because escalating utility bills have gone unpaid. In actuality, the Sierra Club is part of the problem, as are other green-weenie organizations that are trying to turn the US into their conceptualized version of pre-Christopher Columbus America, ala the UN-supported Wildlands Project.

Something else that certainly seems ludicrous is all the money the Granholm Administration and state legislature has poured and continues to pour into their half-baked schemes to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making Michigan economically solvent, and how little they’ve actually done to help the state’s poor sheeple during all these years of hard times.

Just recently, it was announced that $10 million of Granholm’s apparently bottomless 21st Century Jobs Fund, administered by her Michigan Economic Development Corporation appointees, was given, as a Centers of Excellence grant, to Massachusetts-based A123Systems, which, among other things, is attempting to produce a rechargeable lithium ion battery that may be potentially useful to the military and auto industry.

A123Systems is 9% owned by General Electric, which has already poured $55 million into it. The company, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years ago, has ties to Michigan through its A123Systems Advanced Research & Government Solutions Group situated in Ann Arbor. When it went public last August, it was looking to raise $175 million, and in it’s filing papers it was stated that the company planned to use the money to expand its manufacturing and research facilities, as well as pay back about $2.5 million in debt. Within the first three months of this year, the company had lost almost $14 million.

The state, which is said to have been in a recession since 2004, has partnered in many such public/private partnerships over recent years and Granholm has blown herself away on seven overseas ‘investment missions’ since taking office, yet Michigan still hemorrhages jobs and people.

Although it may be true that the emerging technology the state is investing in may be for the long term, the millions upon millions of government dollars that’s been spent on such technology, that may or may not make it off the pad, is of little value to the children who have been traumatized by being removed from their parents arms. It’s also of little value to the 44% of Michigan adults who can’t read above a 4th Grade level.

Over a decade has passed since Marion Kramer began to call attention to the plight of Michigan’s waterless Detroiters; the situation has become worse, and to date, little to nothing has been done about it. While Detroit could privatize it’s water/sewer utility and take a lesson from the successful private water enterprise being used at the other end of the state in the Keweenaw Peninsula community of Calumet, the municipality continues to balk. (See last Mackinac Org. link)

Whatever the outcome, it’s atrocious for poor Michigan folks to be going without water when the Governor and state legislators allow Nestle to withdraw 400 gallons of it a minute from a Mecosta County aquifer for an annual fee of about $100 per year and market it in Ice Mountain bottles all over the world.

Copyright by C.J. Williams