Episode 4: Dayne Walling

Flint native Dayne Walling describes his journey as Flint mayor while the city was under emergency management and began contending with problems caused by the water source switch from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. During our discussion, Dayne touched on how Michigan's decision to stop sharing sales tax revenues with its cities and towns despite their public obligations impacted the essential services available to residents in Flint and elsewhere throughout the state. Dayne addresses our need to demand more transparency and accountability in government affairs. He also calls for greater collective responsibility in efforts to ensure an equitable and sustainable delivery of essential services.

Transcript

Tainted Tap Podcast

Host by Dr. Katrinell M. Davis

Interview with Dayne Walling

Episode 4

Air Date: May 6, 2021

 “When we think we're getting good information, we may not be getting the full picture. So, we just have to continue to push and pull and, and really ask and demand that we get that level of accountability and transparency, and that's very different than the kind of things we've been seeing in government lately. This might sound like a far-off future, but I think that's what we need to be demanding, and when we think about infrastructure and drinking water, that that could be a place to start.”

Former City of Flint Mayor Dayne Walling

What led to your decision to govern over a city?

Dayne Walling:  It's a winding road. Growing up in Flint like you did, I did just have this love for the community and having gone to public schools, my parents being public school teachers, I had that positive association with the community. There are just so many good friends from different parts of the city and very different backgrounds, incomes, and sometimes religions. We had that in our public schools in Flint when I was growing up. I now, of course, know more of the political and legal history that came before that, but I had that experience as a student being in diverse, integrated classrooms and playgrounds. And at the same time, when I'm coming of age- I was born in 1974- all the headlines about factories closing and family members being laid off, or friends, families relocating or having people laid off and wondering what's next. It was on such a scale, and I know people are familiar with that story of what a community goes through when factories close and jobs go away, but I just felt like we should be able to do better than this. Not as a community so much, but just as a country; it shouldn't have to be like this. That sentiment was motivation for me to do a lot of community service and be involved in different student organizations at Michigan State. It led me to join the AmeriCorps program in its early months and to join a group of MSU students and Lansing residents that were doing neighborhood organizing and environmental work in the city of Lansing and got to work with a great team and North Town, Lansing. It was a diverse, bustling, busy neighborhood, but not without a lot of problems. And I saw in that how people could work together at the neighborhood, at the community level, but also the things that were outside of the local community's control, like the abandoned factory building at one end of the neighborhood, or what's happening with the economy, or with policing at the city or state or national levels. So, that just shaped me intellectually as well as professionally. And I knew I wanted to do this work in local government and community development. I got to work for the mayor in Washington, DC, for the Urban Coalition in Minneapolis and the twin cities, and throughout that time, I still had this connection to Flint had started this nonprofit network called Flight Club. I was drawn back to service at home; I was thinking I'm doing this work in other places. I think I need to do it in my hometown. And I knew I wanted to be involved politically by that point, but I didn't see it happening quite as fast as it did. We sometimes have a plan for ourselves, and then we have what happens. And I ended up feeling called to run for mayor in 2007. We moved back to the community in 2006- my wife and two kids- and that was the start of bringing me into this conversation about city leadership and city government. I ran in 2007; we had a big, diverse group of candidates who were all challenging the incumbent. I think we all felt like the city needed new ideas and fresh energy for this new 21st-century world where so many things were changing again. I worked really hard, knocked on thousands of doors, and talked with residents about my vision of a sustainable 21st-century city with new jobs, safe neighborhoods, and good schools and opportunities for all.  I've said that many, many, many times now I still believe it. I came up short, though, in that 2007 election by 581 votes, I knew I was going to run again, but things didn't work out kind of right from the beginning, the way I thought they would.

Well, I started my own community development consulting company that I'm actually back to working on now, a 21-policy management consulting, 21 PMC. But we as a country and as a community went into what we now look back on as the great recession, and the foreclosure crisis was hitting our community, and people were losing their houses to bank foreclosure and tax foreclosure. That means city revenues were dropping and the incumbent mayor resigned, he left office midterm, and we had a special election in 2009. I was blessed to receive the community's support. I was elected on a Tuesday because it was a special election. I was sworn in Wednesday night and publicly took the oath of office that Thursday. Unemployment in the community was 29%; it was the Great Depression level economic challenges, which led to a spike in violent crime and all kinds of other complications. So, it was again on a different level than what I envisioned, even knowing Flint's historical challenges with a shrinking tax base and population changing across the county. Right from the beginning, it was a very difficult environment to try to get things done at city hall. 

How did that environment shape your capacity to get things done as 

mayor?

Dayne Walling:  Well, there was a lot that I felt like I could do as far as engaging with the community. I mean, I had my office open every Wednesday morning for two hours- I did that throughout my entire time in the office. I wouldn't miss it unless President Barack Obama was asking me to come to the White House, and I think that happened on one occasion that I missed a Wednesday morning for that purpose. I had a series of neighborhood action meetings in all nine city wards, and then subsequent to that, we went back and did three more in different parts of each ward. So, we did a lot to engage the community and bring people's ideas in. I had committed to working on this new comprehensive, or master plan, as our charter called for. But financially, I mean, it just was so difficult when property values go down; it means city property tax collections go down, and we're heavily dependent on those in Michigan. When people don't have a chance to go to work, then it means you're going to receive less income taxes, and then you had the state government there as its budget was getting hit. Part of what it did was keep more of the sales tax revenues that it collected and stopped sharing it with local governments like Flint. We were trying to figure out how to provide better services often with a lot of volunteer and resident engagement, helping to maintain parks, be at the desk at police mini stations, and be engaged with community policing. All this extra work at a time when economically and socially it's been as difficult as it had been for decades. 

Around this time, right, there were complaints about the cost of

water creeping up and becoming unreasonable. 

Dayne Walling:  Yeah, and this is important to mention because I mentioned public safety and parks, and the city's infrastructure is right there in terms of roads and water. One of the things- in terms of the cost- that's important to understand is that it often gets said that Flint has a system that was built for, let's say 200,000 people, and a dozen big automotive factories, and now we have a hundred thousand people and a handful of those factories, but it's not just the physical pipes that affect the cost. It's also the fact that the employees who work for the city's water department or who worked for the water department in the 1970s and 1980s, today's taxpayers actually our ratepayers in the case of the waterfront, are paying for the healthcare benefits of those retirees. This isn't the fault of the hardworking municipal employees who came to work every day, but it's a problem, especially how the state has allowed these individual municipal costs to be borne by the resonance of today, even though the services were provided in the past. One of the things I pushed as mayor and mentioned when I could, so indulge me here for a minute, the state could say, “Instead of only Flint having to cover those costs, it could also be covered by residents in Genesee county, in Grand Blanc, or even in adjacent counties,” because those services were actually not provided to today's residents. They were provided to the residents of yesteryear, so it's one of those ways that our central cities and our cities that really let the economic prosperity of decades ago are being forced to pay a disproportionately high cost. In the moment, as mayor, I couldn't change any of that. We had to bring in the revenue to pay those costs so that the system could continue to operate. I authorized an increase to the cost of water while I was also a candidate for reelection in the fall of 2011, which is not something you want to be doing as an elected official in the first place, certainly not being the first candidate to raise water rates between the primary and the general election. 

 Why don't we see those policy adjustments happen at the state 

level that can encourage the development and the progress that we 

need to see?

Dayne Walling:  I think that's a good question. I think this speaks to the deeper problems that we face as a democracy, and it's not just Flint or even the state of Michigan. Now, a lot of how our local government systems have operated is they've allowed, especially people with more wealth or more privilege, to move to places and not just leave their old house behind, but also leave these costs behind. We need to take some collective responsibility for that. I think there needs to be more transparency about those costs because I can tell you most people in Flint, Genesee County, would not know the details of what we're talking about here. Now, as far as how these employment costs from years ago are actually being paid for by those who turn on the tap and Flint today. There needs to be more transparency, there needs to be centering on equity and fairness, and not so much of just “How do I get myself in a position where I pay less taxes?” I think we need to be honest that we all depend on a lot of these essential public services. They need to be provided to people in our country, in our state, as a human right. That means we're all going to have to pay in. 

 I think there is a collective responsibility that's required here. At the 

same time, states have to be transparent with the citizens, especially 

when you force citizens to prove that a pollution problem actually 

exists…

Dayne Walling:  You've been analyzing these issues, and we are talking about city finances and infrastructure costs, and then you lay around public health data. I believe all of that can be made available in a transparent way. It doesn't compromise anyone's individual privacy, and we need to be demanding that from our state governments. I would like to see the federal government, President Biden, make a commitment to requiring under the Safe Drinking Water Act: Lead and Copper Rule, that municipalities release the maximum contaminant level data at the census tract level, not just at the city-wide level because that mixes like you said, a lot of different neighborhoods with very different conditions, right? People want to know about their own neighborhood, not necessarily, well, they want to know both, right, because they also want to know what's happening on the other side of town and be able to compare those two things. We should be demanding that transparency; it's going to take more than information to do the kind of work that we're talking about, but information and knowledge are the basis for it. The state is in a position where it could be honest and transparent about the costs, the health risks, the age of infrastructure, and then make sure that investments and funding are flowing in an equitable kind of way. That's very different than each community just trying to kind of fight for their piece of the pie. 

 You talk about that moment in Flint when emergency managers are 

there, people are beginning to complain about brown, stinky water. 

Despite the fact that you're sort of sideline, you're present, and you're

there listening, can you talk about how you felt at that moment and 

what was going on?

Dayne Walling:  I appreciate you noticing something. If you were watching those videos, you probably saw me sitting to one side or the other of the podium and at the council meetings, which couldn't occur unless the emergency managers actually approved. Under state law, they were acting as the mayor and the city council. I certainly continued to show up. I didn't want people to know that I was feeling sick or had a hard time being there, but sometimes I did. Our council meetings and Flint are in the evening, so when you're on staff, police chief, or the mayor, you work 12 hours before the city council meeting. And then if it's, one of those long city council meetings where people have a lot of good things to say, like you say, but by midnight it can be a little hard. Personally, it just gets a little hard. It’s not that what’s being discussed isn’t important because there's so much that is important. I took a lot of notes, I paid attention to what people were concerned about, I would take those back, I would ask questions in the meetings that I was in; do my own research on emergency manager purchase orders or purchase resolutions that would then show up on the city clerk's website. There was a time I had these different job descriptions from the emergency managers where I was actually taking the weekly report from the director of public works. I still learned in that process that there were decisions that were being made- I wasn't involved in legal or personnel or any of the financial matters- that there were issues that I was getting certain information. It was getting filtered before it was getting to me. I just felt like I was in between all these different pressures: trying to reach out and get guidance from the EPA, seeing what the department of environmental quality from the state was saying, the director of public works. We had the emergency manager, had council members, and seeing what can we do. If we're being told the problem is outdated infrastructure, then how do we apply for grants to get some of the infrastructure improved? It's just that the community, city council, myself, we didn't have the full picture of what was actually happening. I look back on that, and I'm ashamed that I didn't know some of that. I know if I knew different things, I would have done different things, but I just tried at each step to make the best decisions and to answer questions honestly.  I now know so much of that was done with incomplete information. 

…it's always tough enough in Flint, and then when you add these outside influences and then we find that they weren't acting in good faith. In so many ways, we got put in a difficult, impossible, tragic position. Like you said, that was much of the time that I was in office. We have this outdated infrastructure, and we have households that have problems, but it wasn't until the independent research of Dr. Mark Edwards and then Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha that brought forward the evidence that this was a systemic problem. That's going now to late summer, early fall of 2015.  I was reelected in 2011, actually on the same day that the governor announced that Flint was going to be in a financial emergency and that he was going to appoint an emergency manager, so that election day was very different than what I had in mind. I was actually up for reelection in 2015, so myself and then Dr. Karen Weaver, who ended up winning that election, we're at candidate forums together, interacting, taking questions from the community, having these debates. I was calling at that time for this cooperative approach between the federal and state, the city and the county, and just didn't grasp the ways that what we were being told was being filtered and was still incomplete, even in that fall and to Dr. Weaver's credit, she started talking about calling for an emergency and really pushing that approach. I think that that became a game-changer once she was in office and able to do that in December 2015, and then going into 2016 and starting to get the recovery really going.

 What are some of the things you did before you got out of the office to 

get things going in a better direction?

 Dayne Walling:I mean, I did. It was a great deal of time and energy and the timing of it in terms of the election, which wasn't frankly what I was thinking about, but I wanted to get us reconnected to the Detroit system. I came, despite the concerns that the state was continuing to raise and even other city officials at the time, I became convinced finally- and I know for many people, I came too late to the party. I believe that we had to get reconnected to the Detroit water system. That was the way to get the best, safest water into our pipes as fast as possible. Detroit water and sewage district was not in a position to do all that for free. We had to have a contract. We had to have resources in place. I worked very diligently to get the state of Michigan, including the governor, the CS Mott Foundation, and support within the city to all put in the money we needed to make that reconnection. Now we can look back on that and say, “We shouldn't have had to do that. The state should have just paid for it." and I wholeheartedly agree with all that, but my job was to get it done, so I had to work with the situation that I found myself in.  I was able to lead that effort that many people behind the scenes got on board with. And before I subsequently lost that election, we did have Detroit water back in the city's pipes, and I look back and believe that that was a  necessary step. 

 Fast forward…We are in 2021. The vast majority of the lead 

service lines have been replaced, and yet there are still concerns. 

Dayne Walling:  There are, and you're right. After all these years of emergency managers in 2016, the state could not write the press release quickly enough to say that “Now, Dr. Karen Weaver, mayor of the city of Flint, is now in charge of everything,” that they committed dollars, and so did the state government.  The state government did also revise its own state standards around drinking water to bring the maximum contaminant level of lead to 10 parts per billion instead of 15; it needs to go lower than that. These systemic issues have really not been addressed. The funding is important. We want there to be equitable funding. We all need a few dollars to get through life, and the city's infrastructure certainly needed it. Their lead service lines needed to be replaced and other infrastructure modernized, so that did need to happen. But like you're saying, there were questions about, "Okay, well what about the rest?" What about really making our drinking water laws consistent with what pediatricians and the medical community is saying is safe, which would be five parts per billion or lower. What about this emergency manager law that removed democracy and is on the books, not just in 2016, but still today; it hasn't been removed. The state legislature and the governor are still protected by these secrecy laws where their communications aren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act the way every email I wrote at the city of Flint was, and those are all part of the causes of the Flint Water Crisis and the suffering that it entailed. I think it got a little- and this is just my own opinion- but it got a little too easy to just put taxpayer money because we're all paying what the state of Michigan pays outcomes from the rest of us. Anyway, it became a little too easy to put that funding in place but not actually deal with the deeper systems that had disadvantaged our community that is continuing to disproportionately affect our communities of color and low-income houses. 

 How are people managing this, and how does this impact-not just the 

mindset of the people on the ground or the residents- but how is this impacting the folks who are called to lead? 

Dayne Walling:  Yeah, you're asking some very good questions. I can see myself back in the mayor's office trying to come up with answers to these kinds of questions. How do you get a state government to genuinely take the interests of the people of Flint seriously? How do we get a country to take seriously the challenges that a lot of different communities have, but especially our communities that fueled this industrial prosperity and now are left trying to still put the pieces back together? And part of it for me is I do think we need our governments, and this can be the city, county, but especially the state, because the state is where so many of these different government agencies, public health, drinking, water infrastructure, they all go back to a state Capitol, a state government, maybe the federal government's providing some funding or writing some underlying regulations, but the real work is being done at the state level. There needs to be a commitment to sharing out this information. Being transparent, I think, is a paradigm-shifting kind of way. It's not just water quality data that we need at a neighborhood level or census track, but we need to look at environmental risk factors and educational funding and public safety; not just funding, but actually, the practices that are being employed in different neighborhoods, all of that could be brought together and shared. I think there's just a lot of interests that don't want it to be shared or be scrutinized, and we're going to have to demand it. I mean, this is just what I saw from my own experience; even when we think we're getting good information, we may not be getting the full picture. So we just have to continue to push and pull and really ask and demand that we get that level of accountability and transparency, and that's very different than the kind of things we've been seeing in government lately. This might sound low sound like a far-off future, but I think that's what we need to be demanding. When we about infrastructure and drinking water, that that could be a place to start. 

Does the settlement [offer] get any of that?

Dayne Walling:  Well, it's primarily the financial compensation for victims, and this is important to their dollars there. They're not enough.  I think the focus on young children is important, and there may still be more to come. I know Mayor Neely said, “This should be the floor, not the ceiling in terms of the victim compensation.” I agree with that, but these other government responsibilities caused or contributed to the Flint Water Crisis. I would like to see the federal government coming forward and saying, “We will commit to neighborhood-level indicators with a Safe Drinking Water Act and the Lead and Copper Rule.” The state should say, "By July 1st, 2021, or by July 4th, 2021, there's no more emergency manager law in the state of Michigan that has to be buried and drive a stake through its heart.” We could look at these costs of our infrastructure across each county and see how that can be more equitably paid for by people who are past and future residents. I know some people will hear that, and they'll say, “No, that's government going too far,” but I think we need the government to be honest with what's happening in our communities and the federal and state. Even down to the city level, it's time for Flint to take a look again at the comprehensive plan that was passed, that I was a major part of in 2013. Well, now it's 2021. What's the vision for how Flint goes forward from here? Let's put that down on paper so people can see it and be held accountable for it. 

 What can people do with what they have to make things better and 

put the city back on track?

Dayne Walling:   I think restoring the trust is the core of what you're saying.  Being in office, being the mayor in 2015, and the fall where we all became just so shocked and appalled in finding out the systemic nature, those details becoming widely known publicly available, thank God. It is going to be a lot of work, and I think it does have to get beyond the funding. The funding is important. That's one step, but this increased level of transparency and providing that information in a way that a family can look at over the dinner table and understand as far as what's happening in their neighborhood, and then knowing how that's fairly equitable to what's happening in other places. People in Flint are very attentive, and they have been for a long time. Like I said about growing up in Flint, we know their communities where they don't have to worry about water being so expensive, where the grass gets cut in the parks every week, like it should in Michigan, not once a month because there's not enough money to cut it more often. And I have always believed that as a state, certainly as a country, but as a state of Michigan, that we have the ability to do that for all of our communities that every public park in the state of Michigan should have its grass cut once a week.  I don't think that's an unrealistic demand. I think there should be a well-qualified community police officer in neighborhoods. I think when someone does need to call 911, that someone shows up, and they can be respectful and enforce the law and really protect life. The data and maybe the last point, especially with what we've experienced with the pandemic and the digital divide, I don't think it's unreasonable for any parent in Michigan to think that their child has about as good a school to go to as any other parents do for their child. The data will show that that is very much not the case; we have created a system where individual communities and the people who have the money to live in those communities are able to avoid those historical costs of the infrastructure system that fueled our state's prosperity. We could have the same conversation about Detroit and who benefits and who pays. We have got to make that more equitable. People know it in their hearts. They know it in their gut. We just have to, as public and leaders, people who aspire to be leaders, who are candidates for city council or school board, can all be part of the solution in being honest about these challenges and describing the steps that can be taken to make the system more transparent, more equitable, truly more democratic with a small “D."

…We can have our differences and people can have different careers and some of the incomes that come with that, but these basic public services that we're talking about: the water being safe, the grasping cut being able to drive down a street with relatively few paths. We don't want any potholes. We know we can't quite be like Canada, but let's try a little bit. We could share in that trust, and I jumped to some of the work I'm doing now. I've been out of the office now for five years, and one of the things I've done is gone back to Purdue to pursue my own Ph.D.  I'm looking at communities across the country that have gone through that long-term economic change that Flint has and seeing that there are places where they have been more inclusive, less fragmented, and we know there still would be inequalities in each of these places, but as a whole, they're more prosperous. We can have a successful economy, and we can have regional fairness, and people can experience greater equity. That actually can benefit all of us, even though it seems like there's this temptation for people to just kind of advance their agenda or narrow self-interest. Let's think about the broader interest we have as a community. Look, I don't have the answers to those politics. I lost the two elections that I ran for because I also made a run at a state representative position and came in second in the primary. I don't have all the answers, but I have gone through this and learned even more about the right questions to ask.