# Rick Snyder **Richard Dale "Rick" Snyder** is a venture capitalist and former Gateway Inc. executive who served as the Republican 48th Governor of Michigan from 2011 to 2019. He campaigned as "one tough nerd," a pro-business technocrat, and made aggressive use of Michigan's [[Emergency Manager]] law (Public Act 436 of 2012) to place financially distressed, majority-Black cities — including Flint and Detroit — under unelected state-appointed managers empowered to override local elected officials. It was under that emergency-management regime that the [[Flint Water Crisis]] unfolded. Snyder declared a state of emergency in January 2016 once the scale of the lead contamination became undeniable, and his administration became the central object of the resulting investigations. ## KB significance Snyder is the highest-profile illustration in this vault of how austerity governance and the suspension of local democracy can produce catastrophe. The emergency-manager model he championed — favored by the [[Mackinac Center for Public Policy]] and allied free-market institutions as a tool for imposing fiscal discipline on cities — removed the cost-cutting water decision from any accountable elected body. In January 2021 he was charged with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty. Those charges, and the broader prosecution, collapsed after the Michigan Supreme Court's 2022 ruling barring the one-judge grand jury mechanism the attorney general had used; by late 2023 all criminal cases were closed without convictions. ## After The prosecution ended without a verdict on the facts. After the Michigan Supreme Court's 2022 ruling that the one-judge grand jury had been improperly used, Judge William Crawford dismissed the misdemeanor charges on **December 12, 2023** and ordered Snyder's booking records destroyed; his lawyer promised a report of his own so that "the people of Flint can quickly decide for themselves who lied to them." Snyder had endorsed Joe Biden in 2020; Harvard's Kennedy School withdrew a fellowship offer in 2019 under protest. By spring 2026 the Detroit press was running his advice on how Michigan could "turn itself around" and a columnist was writing of his rehabilitation — the arc the vault records as the usual one: the accountability mechanism failed on procedure, and the policy that produced the catastrophe was never itself on trial. See [[Emergency Manager]] and the [[Flint Water Crisis]].