Jake Blumgart, writing in Next City, steps back and takes a long view, for a national audience, of Emergency Manager Kevin Orr's reign over Detroit.
The negation of local democratic control in Detroit is stunning, Blumgart writes, but he notes Michigan is home to four other cities and three school districts under full emergency managerial control. Other states are closely watching Michigan’s experiment, he notes. In March 2012 Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a similar law into effect with little fanfare.
“The fundamental fact is that cities are creatures of state governments, so they have very limited rights on their own behalf,” says Michael Katz, a professor of urban history at the University of Pennsylvania. “Legally state governments can do this. I don’t think there is any question about that. The question is about the advisability of the consequences. Was this the only way to handle it?”
University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel Bagenstos, until 2011 the second-highest ranking official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, says: “Can this style of response to city financial crises create a sustainable model for cities to flourish in future? It’s hard to see how that can happen. There is a need sometimes to have short-term technocratic control in places that are having difficulty paying their bills. But solving the managerial problems doesn’t solve the underlying trend of deindustrialization.”
Blumgart says Orr has 18 months to get Detroit’s finances in order, a short time to undo generations of population decline, capital flight and discriminatory public policy. Great swaths of Detroit are plagued by dysfunctional or dead streetlights, and in the last four years the city was hit with 70,000 foreclosures on top of the tens of thousands of already vacant homes.
“In 2012 alone, Detroit lost $1.347 billion in wealth because of the foreclosure crisis,” writes Dianna Feeley, a retired autoworker and a member of Detroit Eviction Defense. Meanwhile, the city is struggling under $3.8 billion in interest rate swap deal obligations, which were set under fishy circumstances best explained in this by MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff, and have been challenged in court by other municipalities. The operating deficit for the budget that began on July 1 is $387 million, according to Orr’s office, and the city’s long-term debt is more than $18 billion.
