Looking up and down the ranks of City Council, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing concluded Wednesday that lot contained no De Gaulle, and promptly decided to follow Marshal Petain’s course of action.
Unlike the Hero of Verdun, Bing’s collaboration is arguably justifiable. Any appeal of the emergency manager decision isn’t going to be successful since said appeal must be made to the person, Gov. Rick Snyder, who made the decision in the first place.
If Detroit’s mayor—be it Bing or whoever replaces him after the November election—is to have any significant voice in the inevitable EM process, the office can’t be dragged down the same rabbit hole that’s apparently swallowed City Council.
It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago this City Council looked like a vast improvement over the previous body personified by Monica Conyers’ grafty politics of resentment. More than once this Council was leading the charge for a more fiscally responsible Detroit. Somewhere along the way they mistakenly concluded the great lesson of history is that appealing to ideologically rigid mobs, from the Jacobins to the blackshirts to Jonestown, always ends well.
It’s also remarkable that Detroit’s Serious People had been convinced that businessman Dave Bing could use his business acumen to solve Detroit’s problems like a businessman because derp derp run Detroit like a business derp.
Bing’s tenure as mayor, it turns out, wasn’t foretold by his business career so much as by his basketball career. We like to think of Bing as a superstar stuck playing for an awful franchise, the kind that trades a Dave DeBusschere for a Walt Bellamy. In reality, maybe he was an early incarnation of Scottie Pippen sans Jordan or Charles Barkley—a great talent but lacking whatever is necessary to lead a team to a championship.
Wednesday’s decision against appealing the EM decision, as well as the sound and fury in response, perfectly sums up the dysfunction and ineffectualness that made an emergency manager a foregone conclusion.
The really terrifying thing to consider is that EM critics are basically right when they argue even the best emergency manager is unlikely to overcome the inherent barriers to a successful city.
Detroit isn’t a world-class city or the region’s driver or Michigan’s heart and soul or whatever catchy tagline the local ad wizards invent when billing their pro bono hours. Modern Detroit is a mostly dumping ground for the region’s poverty and abandonment.
Are we truly surprised a city of 700,000 mostly poor people went broke? Especially when the largest and wealthiest institutional residents negotiate generous tax break for themselves.
No. No one should be surprised. Nor should any reasonable person defend a status quo that borrows millions upon millions of dollars to pay for short-term expenses with long-term debt.
An EM may be able to cut costs and restructure debt, but the only way this city can be a functional place is through a more regional and collaborative approach to local government. Unfortunately, with Gil DiNello long dead and Brooks Patterson backing regional transit, Detroit has become the most steadfast opponent of greater regionalism.
Politicians framed their opposition to regionalizing Cobo Hall as a holy war. Transferring Belle Isle to the state DNR—effectively spreading the park’s costs across Michigan’s nine million residents instead of just Detroit’s 700,000—was scuttled by those who share Lester Maddox’s lust for local control above all else.
And if we can’t talk about the simplest and most obvious opportunities for regionalization, there’s no way we can tackle the trickier stuff.
Consider Detroit’s outsized legacy costs. This is also a regional issue. Many a suburbanite was educated at a DPS school and raised on a Detroit street paved, plowed, and patrolled by city workers and Detroit cops. So why has arbitrary political geography limited paying for retiree pensions and health care limited only to the few remaining Detroit residents?
Granted, no suburbanite is itching to pay into a system that funds stupid Alabama airline ventures or pays to send Pension Board members first-class to wholly useless conferences halfway around the world—no Detroiter should have to pay for that either—but if just considering reforming this broken city process in exchange for a regional or statewide system that pools pensions from multiple communities would likely end with the Detroit Student Followers of Councilwoman Watson's Line storming Cadillac Place and taking hostages.
So we’re left with a Detroit run by a state appointee with a mandate to cut, cut, and cut some more. That may be necessary to a point but the marginal utility of cutting diminishes the closer one gets to the bone. Fixing Detroit will ultimately require more than leaving it with only the government a city of poor people can afford.
Until we stop treating Detroit as a pariah or a special snowflake and recognize that it is a part of a larger metropolitan region and the state of Michigan, things will never get better.
