As a snowbird from Flint, I would like to add my 2 cents to this discussion.
Flint's decline started when GM started to consolidate and reduce operations, and essentially pulled out of Flint. That left a lot of unemployed and that of course, led to a decline of revenues since the taxes generated were now reduced. But of course, no one wanted to do with less even though they could no longer afford it, so Flint kept spending and got further into the hole. The uneducated elected leaders were great at promising "free" things they couldn't deliver, so it was a downward spiral. And one of the recent mayors was a convicted felon, but that didn't stop him from running for mayor.
The state either had to step in with an emergency manager or let the city declare bankruptcy. They chose emergency managers who had to make really hard cutbacks in a lot of areas to keep the city solvent. One of those cutbacks was to no longer buy water from Detroit. Detroit was in the same financial mess (remember, they eventually declared bankrupcy) and were trying to generate more and more money by selling water to outside communities at a higher and higher rate. Detroit felt the outside communities had no other alternatives, so they kept raising the rates similar to a form of blackmail.
So the emergency manager had no choice but to discontinue buying Detroit water and Flint is actually building a new water pipe line all the way to Port Huron to get water from Lake Huron. But in the interim, until the new pipeline is completed this summer, Flint started to use their old water plant and get it from the Flint River. Actually, when I was a kid, that is where our water came from but I suspect the water plant hadn't been used for years and years, so I'm sure it was terribly outdated.
And the lead situation arose because the river water was corrosive, and that corrosive water actually started to eat into a lot of the REALLY OLD plumbing infrastructure, which consisted of lead pipes. That is where the lead is coming from.
But through some level of incompetence, no one thought about the infrastructure and what a change in water supply might do to the pipes. They had used Detroit water so long that it wasn't on anyones radar. So they didn't think to add chemicals which would have prevented the proplem and the water started to eat the old lead pipes which were installed in the older sections of the city. That has created the problem we are reading about now. It is important to know, however, that the lead problem is not impacting the whole of the city, but in the area where lead pipes and lead solder was used. And like most other cities, the older sections of Flint are also the poorer sections as well so the news media is using that as a major talking point.
So it is really the same old story we have all heard before. Much of the infrastructure of America was built before the mid 1950's and uneducated politicians keep spending money they don't have. But was there an intentional decission to target a specific group of Flint citizens - I say NO. It was more a series of decissions that were made by people who had good intentions but who were uninformed to the consequences. Could it happen here in TV, or any where else? I hate to say it, but probably.
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