EXCLUSIVE: Flint Official Says Water Crisis Caused By ‘Ni**ers Not Paying Their Bills’ - Truth Against the Machine
EXCLUSIVE: Flint Official Says Water Crisis Caused By ‘Ni**ers Not Paying Their Bills’
Carly HammondJune 4, 2017
A local Flint official with the controversial Genesee County Land Bank suggested that the root causes of the Flint water crisis were that black people don’t pay their bills, audio recordings obtained by Truth Against The Machine reveal.
“Flint has the same problems as Detroit—fukking ni**ers don’t pay their bills, believe me, I deal with them,” Phil Stair, sales manager for the Genesee County Land Bank said on May 26th during a conversation with environmental activist and independent journalist Chelsea Lyons in Flint.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The full 20-minute audio of Stair’s is at the bottom of this story]
He was driving to a restaurant with Lyons and another individual, who he’d met that night, when he made the comments, which were recorded and later obtained by TATM.
Stair did go on to try and clarify: “I don’t want to call them ni**ers, shyt I just went to Myrtle Beach, 24 guys, and I was the only white guy; I got friends, I mean, there’s trash and there’s people that do this shyt. They just don’t pay their bills. Well, Detroit, didn’t collect on their bills, so they charged everybody else, but- Flint- Flint had to pay their bill to Detroit.”
Stair, a government employee through the Land Bank, which, according to its website, is a “non-profit government organization,” went on to explain to the activists his theory on the water crisis—one that’s been parroted by Governor Snyder and many other state and local officials.
“Detroit was charging all its customers for the cost—they weren’t collecting from their residents, they were shutting water off, they were letting bills go forever, they were charging everybody else; Flint has the same problems as Detroit—fukking ni**ers don’t pay their bills, believe me, I deal with them.”
Flint, which is 56 percent African American, was forced to switch to the toxic Flint River because of Detroit’s price hikes, according to Stair.
“Now, they need a 3-year extension on their contract to get on the new pipeline [Karegnondi Water Authority] they’re building to Flint. Detroit said no, we want a 20-year agreement. Flint said no we’re building the new system or whatever, and they jacked em, they jacked the price up and they [Flint] couldn’t afford to pay it, so they said, well, we gotta go back to what we did in 1978.”
He continued: “They [Flint] had a water plant, we’ll take the [water] out of the Flint River and the reservoirs—there’s two reservoirs upstream—and we’ll just treat the water, because they had to maintain that plant because Detroit was supposed to have a second source- unless you have a backup you gotta- they had to maintain their plants. So they used to maintain their water plant, they treated their water, tested it, said it was good, and they’d dump it back in the river, because they couldn’t mix it with the Detroit water.”
Stair’s version of events doesn’t match previous records and reporting, which show Flint’s decision to switch off of Detroit’s water system—made by the unelected Emergency Manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder—was not about saving money in the face of Detroit price-gouging.
Emails from before the 2014 water switch showed Detroit’s water and sewage department bending over backwards to retain Flint as a customer; after all, Flint was DWAS’s biggest customer other than the city of Detroit.
[BEAT THE PRESS: DONATE TO TATM SO WE CAN PAY OUR FEARLESS JOURNALISTS AND EDITORS TO CONTINUE THEIR PURSUIT OF EXPOSING THE OLIGARCHY.]
In an email dated April 15, 2013, Sue McCormick, DWAS’s Director, offers Flint a 48 percent rate cut immediately, which compared to the KWA over a 30-year- period, would be 20 percent cheaper for Flint.
Flint’s elected officials also own a large share of the blame for the water crisis. Beginning in 2007, the city habitually overspent and underestimated their budget deficits. In a 2011 audit of Flint by the state of Michigan, it was revealed that the city had pulled millions from the water and sewage funds, transferring the money from the at-that-time solvent water fund to make up for an insolvent general fund. More importantly, the city also had increased water and sewage rates 35 percent in 2011—to make up for their own spending shenanigans.
Four years later, Genesee county circuit court Judge Hayman found that the transferring of funds and subsequent price hikes was illegal; he also declared the tax foreclosures many residents experienced—because they couldn’t afford the price-gouged rates— to be illegal. The city was ordered to issue a refund for the 35 percent hike, but, in reality, the credits applied to water and sewer bills didn’t fully make up for the rate hike, and the overall water and sewer rates continued to increase. Detroit Free Press found that Flint residents paid the highest water rates in America in a 2015 study.
So, Stair’s version of events, which points to Detroit’s unyielding price hikes as the catalyst for Flint deciding to temporarily switch to the Flint River while KWA being built, doesn’t match reality.
He later doubles down on the type of people he feels have caused the blight in Flint.
As his conversation with the environmental activists continued, they asked him to elaborate: “Is the east side [of Flint] the bad side?”
“Yeah,” Stairs begins.
STAIR: “Well, I call the south side, where we were, that’s the new east side cause we [land bank] tore most of it down; all them derelict motherfukkers have moved down to the south side. They’re destroying that.”
ACTIVIST: “Who is?”
STAIR: “fukkin’ deadbeats who, when they tear the houses down, they gotta go somewhere, they go on the south side. It just shifts- it just shifts the shyt. The people are still the people, they fukked the houses up, then they leave and when we tear em down, they just go somewhere else and just fukk those houses up. I bought my house for $23,000 dollars in 1981, and they sold that house right there for $4,000 dollars about four years ago. So, 30 years it didn’t… but… it doesn’t owe me anything.”
ACTIVIST: “So, like, did this used to be, like, a white neighborhood?”
STAIR: “It’s still white. Well, this street isn’t so much, but overall, it’s still pretty white” (editor’s note—as stated earlier, Flint is 56 percent African American).
This kind of raw opinion on, as Stair puts it, the “derelicts and deadbeats” residing in Flint, is disturbing considering, as sales manager, he and his colleagues at the Land Bank are supposed to be guiding the residents of Flint to economic recovery in order to “restore value to the community,” as stated on the Land Bank’s website.
Stair didn’t hold back on elected officials, blaming Michigan Governor Snyder for not doing enough to prevent the crisis.
“It was really a failure on the part of the Governor to step in,” he said. “So when Detroit jacked em [Flint], the Governor should’ve stepped in and said ‘you bankrupt city,” cause they were under negotiations; Detroit filed bankruptcy, you’re not going to jack a city like Flint; and you’re gonna, we’ll give give you a little increase, but you’re going to extend their contract. He didn’t step in so, what they do? They [Flint] had to go with the other thing [KWA] and they fukked it up. It’s just a total fukk-up. The Governor should have said, no, you’re going to give an extension for 3 years, and you’ll get a little increase from what you’ve been getting, and nothing would’ve happened. Now they’re afraid to get on the new pipeline because they don’t want to mess with the water again.”
On this part, Stair is both correct and misinformed. Detroit was indeed raising its water prices to Flint. But one of the driving reasons has barely been reported.
As Jacobin Magazine reported, Detroit, like other cities, got burned by betting their taxpayers’ money as the subprime mortgage house of cards was about to fall.
The water crisis in Michigan is also intertwined with the subprime mortgage meltdown, which is closely related to financial deregulation. In 2005–7, Detroit had the highest rate of subprime mortgage foreclosures in the United States. While increasingly deregulated banks were aggressively marketing adjustable-rate subprime mortgages to working-class African Americans in Detroit, they were also selling risky financial instruments to the city government. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 allowed the swaps market to metastasize from $180 billion in 1998 to $6 trillion in 2004 to $57 trillion by the summer of 2008.
EXCLUSIVE: Flint Official Says Water Crisis Caused By ‘Ni**ers Not Paying Their Bills’
Carly HammondJune 4, 2017
A local Flint official with the controversial Genesee County Land Bank suggested that the root causes of the Flint water crisis were that black people don’t pay their bills, audio recordings obtained by Truth Against The Machine reveal.
“Flint has the same problems as Detroit—fukking ni**ers don’t pay their bills, believe me, I deal with them,” Phil Stair, sales manager for the Genesee County Land Bank said on May 26th during a conversation with environmental activist and independent journalist Chelsea Lyons in Flint.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The full 20-minute audio of Stair’s is at the bottom of this story]
He was driving to a restaurant with Lyons and another individual, who he’d met that night, when he made the comments, which were recorded and later obtained by TATM.
Stair did go on to try and clarify: “I don’t want to call them ni**ers, shyt I just went to Myrtle Beach, 24 guys, and I was the only white guy; I got friends, I mean, there’s trash and there’s people that do this shyt. They just don’t pay their bills. Well, Detroit, didn’t collect on their bills, so they charged everybody else, but- Flint- Flint had to pay their bill to Detroit.”
Stair, a government employee through the Land Bank, which, according to its website, is a “non-profit government organization,” went on to explain to the activists his theory on the water crisis—one that’s been parroted by Governor Snyder and many other state and local officials.
“Detroit was charging all its customers for the cost—they weren’t collecting from their residents, they were shutting water off, they were letting bills go forever, they were charging everybody else; Flint has the same problems as Detroit—fukking ni**ers don’t pay their bills, believe me, I deal with them.”
Flint, which is 56 percent African American, was forced to switch to the toxic Flint River because of Detroit’s price hikes, according to Stair.
“Now, they need a 3-year extension on their contract to get on the new pipeline [Karegnondi Water Authority] they’re building to Flint. Detroit said no, we want a 20-year agreement. Flint said no we’re building the new system or whatever, and they jacked em, they jacked the price up and they [Flint] couldn’t afford to pay it, so they said, well, we gotta go back to what we did in 1978.”
He continued: “They [Flint] had a water plant, we’ll take the [water] out of the Flint River and the reservoirs—there’s two reservoirs upstream—and we’ll just treat the water, because they had to maintain that plant because Detroit was supposed to have a second source- unless you have a backup you gotta- they had to maintain their plants. So they used to maintain their water plant, they treated their water, tested it, said it was good, and they’d dump it back in the river, because they couldn’t mix it with the Detroit water.”
Stair’s version of events doesn’t match previous records and reporting, which show Flint’s decision to switch off of Detroit’s water system—made by the unelected Emergency Manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder—was not about saving money in the face of Detroit price-gouging.
Emails from before the 2014 water switch showed Detroit’s water and sewage department bending over backwards to retain Flint as a customer; after all, Flint was DWAS’s biggest customer other than the city of Detroit.
[BEAT THE PRESS: DONATE TO TATM SO WE CAN PAY OUR FEARLESS JOURNALISTS AND EDITORS TO CONTINUE THEIR PURSUIT OF EXPOSING THE OLIGARCHY.]
In an email dated April 15, 2013, Sue McCormick, DWAS’s Director, offers Flint a 48 percent rate cut immediately, which compared to the KWA over a 30-year- period, would be 20 percent cheaper for Flint.
Flint’s elected officials also own a large share of the blame for the water crisis. Beginning in 2007, the city habitually overspent and underestimated their budget deficits. In a 2011 audit of Flint by the state of Michigan, it was revealed that the city had pulled millions from the water and sewage funds, transferring the money from the at-that-time solvent water fund to make up for an insolvent general fund. More importantly, the city also had increased water and sewage rates 35 percent in 2011—to make up for their own spending shenanigans.
Four years later, Genesee county circuit court Judge Hayman found that the transferring of funds and subsequent price hikes was illegal; he also declared the tax foreclosures many residents experienced—because they couldn’t afford the price-gouged rates— to be illegal. The city was ordered to issue a refund for the 35 percent hike, but, in reality, the credits applied to water and sewer bills didn’t fully make up for the rate hike, and the overall water and sewer rates continued to increase. Detroit Free Press found that Flint residents paid the highest water rates in America in a 2015 study.
So, Stair’s version of events, which points to Detroit’s unyielding price hikes as the catalyst for Flint deciding to temporarily switch to the Flint River while KWA being built, doesn’t match reality.
He later doubles down on the type of people he feels have caused the blight in Flint.
As his conversation with the environmental activists continued, they asked him to elaborate: “Is the east side [of Flint] the bad side?”
“Yeah,” Stairs begins.
STAIR: “Well, I call the south side, where we were, that’s the new east side cause we [land bank] tore most of it down; all them derelict motherfukkers have moved down to the south side. They’re destroying that.”
ACTIVIST: “Who is?”
STAIR: “fukkin’ deadbeats who, when they tear the houses down, they gotta go somewhere, they go on the south side. It just shifts- it just shifts the shyt. The people are still the people, they fukked the houses up, then they leave and when we tear em down, they just go somewhere else and just fukk those houses up. I bought my house for $23,000 dollars in 1981, and they sold that house right there for $4,000 dollars about four years ago. So, 30 years it didn’t… but… it doesn’t owe me anything.”
ACTIVIST: “So, like, did this used to be, like, a white neighborhood?”
STAIR: “It’s still white. Well, this street isn’t so much, but overall, it’s still pretty white” (editor’s note—as stated earlier, Flint is 56 percent African American).
This kind of raw opinion on, as Stair puts it, the “derelicts and deadbeats” residing in Flint, is disturbing considering, as sales manager, he and his colleagues at the Land Bank are supposed to be guiding the residents of Flint to economic recovery in order to “restore value to the community,” as stated on the Land Bank’s website.
Stair didn’t hold back on elected officials, blaming Michigan Governor Snyder for not doing enough to prevent the crisis.
“It was really a failure on the part of the Governor to step in,” he said. “So when Detroit jacked em [Flint], the Governor should’ve stepped in and said ‘you bankrupt city,” cause they were under negotiations; Detroit filed bankruptcy, you’re not going to jack a city like Flint; and you’re gonna, we’ll give give you a little increase, but you’re going to extend their contract. He didn’t step in so, what they do? They [Flint] had to go with the other thing [KWA] and they fukked it up. It’s just a total fukk-up. The Governor should have said, no, you’re going to give an extension for 3 years, and you’ll get a little increase from what you’ve been getting, and nothing would’ve happened. Now they’re afraid to get on the new pipeline because they don’t want to mess with the water again.”
On this part, Stair is both correct and misinformed. Detroit was indeed raising its water prices to Flint. But one of the driving reasons has barely been reported.
As Jacobin Magazine reported, Detroit, like other cities, got burned by betting their taxpayers’ money as the subprime mortgage house of cards was about to fall.
The water crisis in Michigan is also intertwined with the subprime mortgage meltdown, which is closely related to financial deregulation. In 2005–7, Detroit had the highest rate of subprime mortgage foreclosures in the United States. While increasingly deregulated banks were aggressively marketing adjustable-rate subprime mortgages to working-class African Americans in Detroit, they were also selling risky financial instruments to the city government. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 allowed the swaps market to metastasize from $180 billion in 1998 to $6 trillion in 2004 to $57 trillion by the summer of 2008.
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