Ten people there have now died from Legionnaire’s disease, a form of pneumonia likely linked to bacteria in the city’s water. Lead levels perilously above federal limits have put 9,000 young children at risk of blood poisoning. Countless residents have complained of rashes, hair loss, and headaches caused by their taps. The city’s pipes have suffered hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.

And yet, after nearly two years of living with poisonous water and astonishing government negligence, Flint residents still pay between $100 and $200 a month for their water bills. For a predominantly low-income community, those bills add insult to injury. “We’ve been paying for it for so long,” resident Tyrone Wooten told Mic. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Don’t flush the toilets sometimes; we don’t know how much that costs.’ “

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Because what happens when those services are slashed, oversight fails, government doesn’t intervene, and the state and city do not properly share revenue? In Flint, “human tragedy is resulting,” says Michelle Wilde Anderson, a scholar of public law at Stanford University. “There are things that are too important to bargain away in the conversation about debt repayment.