Flint, Michigan is a "pretty poor" city in Michigan (personally, I don't know how poor it actually is, it might be a "normal" town). The city was trying to save on the cost of providing water. They decided to switch from (I think) buying water from Detroit to pumping from one of the Great Lakes. This decision is pretty benign. Except somewhere in there, the chemical are up of the water changed, so years of building up inside the pipes cleared up, exposing lead in the pipes, poisoning the residents... Except water treatment processes failed to detect amd clean the water, so it lasted for years. It made national headlines so much so that my church (in Texas) was raising money and sending it up there. Plenty of people got fired, people got sewed, politicians said grand things. Oh, right, and poor (black) people got screwed over.
TL;DR, "Flint, Michigan" is the short way of saying "the government could screw you over by poisoning your water"
