Nancy Kaffer

Detroit Free Press Columnist

Watching your governor squirm in his seat is a singular experience.

Wednesday night, Gov. Rick Snyder appeared on CBS's nightly newscast opposite anchor Scott Pelley to discuss the water crisis in Flint, where thousands of residents were exposed to lead-contaminated water. The city switched its drinking supply, with state approval, in 2014. Snyder's administration was slow to react to the crisis, even as evidence mounted that the situation in Flint had become dire -- in some ZIP codes, the percentage of children with elevated blood-lead levels doubled after the switch.

What, Pelley asked Snyder, did the latest Flint water tests show? The governor froze; he didn't know. Pelley was incredulous.

This, apparently, is life in Snyder's Lansing, where vital information doesn't seem to land on the desks of the decision-makers at the top until it is far too late.

On Wednesday, Snyder made good on his promise to release his e-mails related to the Flint water crisis (sort of, more on that later) -- his office holds itself exempt from the state's open records act, which mandates that documents created using public dollars, in the course of the public's business, are obtainable by the public.

Those e-mails paint a disturbing picture of an organization with structural and cultural flaws, a sprawling bureaucracy with little flow among the low- and mid-level employees in possession of data and information, and the leaders charged with making and enacting plans. And for a governor whose stump speech hinged on his competence as a business manager, it is -- by his own measure -- an administrative failure.

As a total record of the decision-making leading to both the switch and the preceding decision to join a new regional water authority, the e-mails are lacking. The file of Snyder's e-mails contains missives written to or by the governor, but doesn't include important e-mails from prominent administration figures.

There's more to learn, here, and if Snyder is sincere in his stated desire to rebuild public trust in his administration, he should release all executive-branch e-mails relative to the Flint water crisis.

But consider these e-mails alongside communications from other departments (already obtained via that open records law).

Among low- and mid-level employees at the state Department of Environmental Quality, the question of lead in Flint's water was fiercely debated as far back as February, when a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employee's memo warned that distressingly high levels of lead present at one Flint home could indicate system-wide problems, according to e-mails obtained by Virginia Tech University researcher Marc Edwards.

By July, the validity of lead sampling performed by Edwards was a bone of contention among MDEQ employees, with the department's former spokesperson working diligently to downplay the ever-alarming results returned by Edwards' testing. Snyder's former chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, e-mailed the health department in July asking for a closer look at Flint lead data -- but if he passed the health department's e-mailed response along to Snyder, that e-mail isn't present in the records released this week.

When did the first e-mail referencing lead, per the files released this week, reach Snyder?

September.

Considering the furor over lead in other state departments, and the amount of media attention paid to the question of Flint's water safety, it's nearly impossible to understand how lead stayed out of the governor's written communications for so long. Even an earlier water-filter distribution that summer in Flint seemed geared toward another problem, the presence of coliform bacteria, a disinfectant and a resulting odor, taste and color of the water that followed.

This isn't how a healthy organization works. MDEQ seemed to assume that test results showing a large amount of lead were anomalous. The health department, when confronted with an analysis performed by one of its own epidemiologists showing an unusual increase in blood-lead level among children, declared that analysis had insufficient data points.

And that's what these e-mails show: All this time, the state had the information it needed to make wise decisions in Flint.