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President Obama vowed federal support for the beleaguered residents of this city on Wednesday and said government officials at all levels should have prevented Flint’s water supply from being contaminated with lead. In his first visit to the city since the water crisis began, Mr. Obama received updates from local officials and residents, made a show of drinking filtered tap water, and told a crowd of about 1,000 people at a high school that they deserved more from their leaders. (Shear and Bosman, 5/4)

President Obama arrived here Wednesday to check in on a disadvantaged city that has been denied a most elemental government service — safe drinking water — but his visit turned into an outpouring of emotion from a community aggrieved by years of neglect from its elected officials. The president’s day in a city that has become a national symbol of disenfranchisement was intended to bolster confidence over a public health crisis related to toxic levels of lead contamination in Flint’s tap water. Obama drank from a glass filled with filtered Flint water to drive home his message that recovery efforts, slow off the mark, were finally making gains. (Nakamura, 5/4)

A Flint municipal official struck a deal with prosecutors Wednesday, pledging cooperation in exchange for reduced charges as authorities continue investigating lead contamination of the impoverished Michigan city's drinking water supply. Utilities administrator Mike Glasgow entered a plea to one count of willful neglect of duty, a misdemeanor, in exchange for dismissal of a felony charge of tampering with evidence. The state attorney general's office said the deal will take effect in one year. (5/4)

A year ago, Gov. Rick Snyder was stoking rumors of a presidential bid as a metrics-driven Republican whose ability to run government like a business transformed a troubled state. But the leadership style so lauded a year ago — the emphasis on problem-solving over politics, the laser-like focus on the bottom line, the reliance on emergency financial managers to whip troubled cities into shape — has proven to be his undoing. Now, he is viewed as the person ultimately responsible for one of the nation's biggest public-health disasters in memory — the lead contamination of a water system serving 100,000 people, and a possible link between the water system and an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease that killed 12 people. (Mack, Fonger and Counts, 5/3)