When Men of Infamy to Grandeur Soar, They light a Torch to Show Their Shay the More.

[XLFD]

When you are in the government and dealing with something as important as the public health and safety, you should not be creating a false narrative to try and defray the problem.  This is a lesson that Flint's water crisis should have taught everyone.  But Ludington's prevaricator in chief, City Manager John Shay has did just that, by lying about the results of lead testing of Ludington's drinking water. 

Now Shay has been attempting to dismiss the high levels of lead in his city by saying that we have a lot of old buildings, which equates to a lot of old lead paint, but three of the five Michigan counties without any kids tested with elevated blood lead levels (0%) have older houses. 

His water plant supervisor made the following statement to the City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews):

It turns out he was wrong about that.  But our City Manager went even further than what Supervisor Malzahn did in an interview with Northern Michigan's News Leader, TV 9&10 News:

"We are required to test [drinking water] for a variety of different chemicals," says John Shay, Ludington City Manager. "Our last three rounds of testing show no lead in the water."

"We do 20 to 22 samples throughout the water system and we send those samples to a laboratory in the Grand Rapids area," Shay says. "They report the results back, which have been zero and we send that on to the DEQ."

No lead in the water.  The 20-22 samples show zero lead.  Impressive if true. 

But it isn't.  Results from these 20-22 homes in 2011 and 2014 were asked for in a FOIA request to verify these unambiguous claims of the city manager, who has committed perjury on a court document during a time when he knew his legal team had the son of the presiding judge on it. 

On page six of the Lead Copper Testing-2014.pdf we find a refutation of City Manager John Shay's two assertions made to the television medium:

For those who can't convert, .006 mg/L translates to 6 parts per billion, so Malzahn's assertion that nothing was above the action level was also incorrect. 

But the point here is that our city manager failed to tell us that one of our 21 homes was twice the minimum reportable limit, and even over the action level mentioned by Malzahn.  He not only failed to tell us, he calmly told us two lies, using the media further to obfuscate the elevated lead blood levels in our kids with homilies meant to deflect the focus away from city liability:

"Probably the two most likely causes are lead-based paint in older homes and there are a lot of older homes in this area, as well as possibly some lead residue in the soil," Shay says.

"Ludington is a very small part of that zip code," Shay says. "That zip encompasses a much larger area than simply the city of Ludington. Pere Marquette Township, Hamlin Township, portions of Victory Township, Summit Township, some of the rural townships are also within that zip code."

"We will not compromise safety," Shay says. "We will continue to provide safe water so people don't have to worry about the water they get from the city of Ludington."

[stump]

Have to comment on your spelling , the correct spelling is City of LEADINGTON

[Willy]

Good job X. Very interesting information which people would not know about if not for you.

[XLFD]

Thanks, Willy, all the other local media have decided to waive that responsibility. 

The WTP Supervisor Malzahn confirmed my allegation of the city manager's dishonest assessment in his comments to the council on Monday night, after I had brought it up in my comments.