In Michigan Flint (my hometown), Detroit and Pontiac have been devastated by the downsizing of the Detroit automakers. In Flint we had at its peak 80,000 GM jobs. Now they are down to 10,000. You cannot replace that lost revenue. The cities themselves are physically too large. They cannot take care of its space. There isn't enough revenue any more. Rather than downsizing the cities attempt to beg and borrow to continue their ways. It's time we face the situation so the whole state doesn't collapse The suburbs are sound because they are newer, do not have all of the bad union contracts the cities can no longer afford (not the fault of the unions but they must deal with it now), and they are still growing.
This crisis of the cities is more from job loss and suburban growth then race.
State: Emergency managers were appointed due to financial crises, not race
View full sizeFormer bankruptcy lawyer, Kevyn Orr, was appointed as the City of Detroit's Emergency Financial Manager at a press conference Thursday, March 14, with Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing. DETROIT, MI -- In response to a federal lawsuit filed Monday by the NAACP, state officials said Michigan cities under state control were placed in emergency management because of their finances, not because of the racial makeup of their populations.
The Detroit branch of the NAACP announced Monday morning that it had filed a complaint in federal court claiming that the voting rights of more than half the state's African Americans are being violated by the state's emergency manager law.
(Read the full complaint here.)
The group plans to seek temporary, then permanent injunctions to remove emergency managers from office in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Allen Park, Benton Harbor, the Highland Park school district, the Muskegon Heights school district and the Detroit school district.
Each of Michigan's cities and school districts where emergency managers have been appointed, with the exception of Allen Park, have large black populations.
The lawsuit alleges that municipalities in financial distress without major African American communities have not been targeted for state takeover, pointing out a number of primarily white communities in financial distress, including the Walled Lake school district and its $10 million debt.
But Sara Wurfel, a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Snyder insists race has nothing to do with the decisions to appoint emergency managers in financially distressed cities.
"The communities or schools currently with an emergency manager or going through any part of state’s EM process are because of financial facts and crises, certainly not because the make-up of their populations," she said in a written statement.
Voters in November 2012 rejected the state's previous emergency manager law. Lawmakers then approved a new version of it in a lame-duck session at the end of last year.
"We are fully confident in both the spirit and Constitutionality of Public Act 436," Wurfel said. "This law recognized and respected the will of voters while ensuring local officials have a strong voice in how a financial crisis in their community or school is remedied."
The new law no longer allows the governor to unilaterally appoint an emergency manager and gives local elected governments facing financial emergency the choice between mediation, bankruptcy, a consent agreement setting a path for recovery or emergency management.
Detroit did not get that choice because Snyder appointed Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr in March, days before the new law went into effect.
The NAACP lawsuit was filed on the same day that Orr sent his first report on Detroit's finances to the state:
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