Residents of the Michigan city are tired of politicians showing up for campaign stops and then disappearing. They want to be taken seriously going into 2020.

Sean Proctor for BuzzFeed News Dishes being washed in the back room of the Lunch Studio on May 2, 2017, in downtown Flint, Michigan.

FLINT, Michigan — Five years after Flint’s water turned brown and acrid, leaching lead out of old pipes and carrying other contaminants into people’s homes, Carma Lewis still can’t bring herself to drink from the tap. There’s a filter on her faucet, but her pipes have not been replaced, and she isn’t risking her health again after being lied to repeatedly by officials at all levels of government about the water’s safety. “There may be people who might not trust the water ever again. That’s just a part of reality,” she told BuzzFeed News. The people of Flint have, in every presidential cycle for the past two decades, seen their city used as a campaign stop for candidates looking to boost their credibility by showcasing the working-class grit of the Midwest. So far this year, though, the presidential candidates have been completely absent except for former housing secretary Julián Castro, who visited last weekend. Lewis — and several others in the city who spoke to BuzzFeed News this past weekend — say they’re tired, and they’re skeptical of both politicians and the media as they continue to contend with the water crisis that’s deeply altered their lives. But they want candidates to come to Flint if they come with concrete plans and commitments, something beyond the photo ops and listening tours they’ve been through many times before. “Don’t come here if you just want a soundbite. Because I will call you to the carpet. If you come here talking BS and you don’t mean it, you will be called to task,” said Marseille Allen, a local activist who also works as a probations agent, adding that candidates need to talk to residents and activists who have experienced the crisis firsthand, not just politicians, when they visit.



Residents are wary of their city, first seen as the hardworking birthplace of General Motors and then as emblematic of postindustrial decline and rising violent crime, being used as a symbol yet again in yet another political cycle. “People here are tired of talking about water to people who really don’t care,” Allen said.

People in the city, where 54% of residents are black, are still dealing with the crisis’s fallout: children whose neurological development may have been irreversibly damaged; pregnant women who had miscarriages after drinking the contaminated water — the number of miscarriages spiked by 58% after the water was switched; people whose trust in their elected officials and reliance on the infrastructure that runs through their city has been turned upside down; and corroded lead pipes on the main water lines and in people’s homes that have yet to be replaced. On Thursday the state threw out criminal charges against eight people involved in the water scandal, including the former head of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services. State officials said there would be a renewed investigation into what happened to the city’s water supply.

“We are experiencing what I call water fatigue,” said Kent Key, a public health expert at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. “They’re emotionally and psychologically tired. They’re tired physiologically with their health because of the effects of it. People are fatigued, and the last thing we need to do is waste any of our energy on something that’s not going to be productive.” During Castro’s one-day visit to the city last weekend, he heard repeatedly from locals who said that they’re glad he’s paying attention, but he needs to remember that passing through is not enough. “Will you just make us a promise that, win, lose, or draw in 2020, that we won’t just be a campaign stop? Because we saw a lot of that in 2016, and we have not seen a lot of those people,” Chia Morgan, a local activist and social worker, told Castro.

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images Donald Trump touring the Flint water plant on Sept. 14, 2016.

National politicians only really started paying attention to Flint’s crisis in 2016, two years after the crisis began. Then-president Barack Obama visited the city and declared a federal emergency, which provided some emergency resources to the city but fell short of what would have been available under a disaster declaration. A federal law currently prevents man-made disasters like the water crisis from qualifying as national disasters. Presidential candidates then began coming through town. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held a debate in Flint in April 2016. Donald Trump visited, and got a frosty reception, in September. Sanders went back to Flint in February 2018 and met with local leaders working on the recovery. He often brings up his time in Flint on the campaign trail this year. "One of the most emotional meetings I ever had in my life was in Flint, Michigan, talking to the parents whose kids were poisoned by the lead in the water there," he said at a May stop in South Carolina. "Very hard meeting to deal with." Marseille Allen remembered the Clinton-Sanders debate in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and said she’s disappointed she hasn’t seen Clinton return to Flint since. “To my sister Hillary, come back. Because you said you were coming, I need you to come back,” she said. “Come and talk to the people who did the work.” “Even those who didn’t win the election have resources; they could have come back and helped,” Key said. Representatives for Clinton and Sanders did not respond to requests for comment.



The progress on replacing water infrastructure damaged by the corrosive water has been slow. The city needs to examine for damage some 28,000 pipes leading from the streets into people’s homes and to check if they are made of lead or galvanized steel, which would mean they need replacing. Of those, 21,617 have been checked so far, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told BuzzFeed News, and 8,496 of those needed replacing and were replaced. The city still has around 7,000 pipes to examine. But even when that process is done, there is no organized process for replacing the pipes actually inside people’s homes. “In-home, I can’t tell you because I don’t have a count of how many actually need to be replaced,” Weaver, who was elected in 2015, said. “That’s one of the things we’ve been fighting with the state and federal government about. We know that some people’s in-home plumbing was damaged.” “Until we address these physical issues and psychological issues, the trauma that this crisis has caused, we’re going to be in it for the long haul,” Key said. “Each candidate that comes here, they need to be exposed to this.”

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Demonstrators outside the Fox Theater before a Republican presidential debate March 3, 2016, in Detroit.