Michigan Emergency Manager Seizes Control of Flint, Stripping Democratic Governance

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appoints Michael Brown as emergency manager of Flint, effectively stripping all power from the city’s democratically elected mayor and city council under Public Act 4 of 2011. The law, signed by Snyder on March 16, 2011, granted appointed emergency managers near-total control over financially struggling municipalities, including the power to break collective bargaining agreements, fire elected officials, and privatize or sell public assets.

Flint becomes one of four Michigan cities under emergency manager control by the law’s first anniversary, joining Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and Ecorse. All were predominantly Black cities. The emergency manager law effectively disenfranchises local voters, removing meaningful democratic oversight at precisely the moment when cost-cutting decisions would have catastrophic public health consequences.

The anti-democratic nature of PA 4 was so extreme that Michigan voters rejected it by referendum in November 2012. However, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a nearly identical replacement, PA 436, just one month later, with provisions designed to prevent future citizen referendums. The emergency manager structure would directly enable the decision to switch Flint’s water source to the corrosive Flint River in 2014, prioritizing cost savings over public health in a city where 57% of residents are Black and over 40% live below the poverty line.

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission would later conclude that “historical, structural and systemic racism combined with implicit bias” played a central role in the crisis, with emergency manager laws invoked “frequently primarily in areas home to large numbers of Black voters, effectively stripping political power away from locally elected officials.”