"In this particular case, you have to in some degree look at it as a hostile takeover," David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Studies, said earlier this year. A veteran scholar of urban affairs who has tracked the rise of African-American elected officials in America, Bositis argues that "Detroit is a very Democratic city and it's being taken over by a very Republican and conservative state government."
Snyder says his takeover is necessary because -- like many great industrial cities that have lost the factories that provided employment and tax revenues -- Detroit's finances are in rough shape. Everyone understands that. Everyone understands that, as in other municipalities across the country, it is possible to point to some of Detroit's past leaders and say that they made ill-thought and self-serving choices that undermined the city and its finances. And everyone knows that current officials have had a very hard time grappling with the issues that arise when a debt-burdened city's tax base is disappearing.
But what Snyder does not mention is that the state he runs has played a role in Detroit's decline by withholding financial assistance that is due to the city. While the federal government has neglected the challenges faced by cities that are drowning in debt, Michigan government has refused to toss available lifelines. The Detroit News has noted the anger of the city's elected representatives over the failure to provide more than $220 million in revenue-sharing payments.
The money was supposed to be paid to the city after it capped income tax rates. Yet, even as Detroit's economic circumstance worsened, Snyder refused to provide the needed assistance.
"Why not give the city its revenue sharing?" asked State Representative Brian Banks, a Democrat whose district takes in a portion of Detroit's northeast side. "Why not start giving a portion of it?"
"The governor won't admit that the state is culpable in why and how Detroit has got here," State Senator Bert Johnson , a Detroit-area Democrat, told the News . "If you cut revenue sharing, you cut money for the Police Department that has to manage the 139 square miles that is Detroit."
Disputes between Michigan and Detroit over state aid are nothing new. But the state's hard line has left the city vulnerable. And there's plenty of grumbling in Detroit about the prospect that, as is so often the case in austerity moments, valuable public assets will be sold off at bargain-basement prices to private interests.
For all the hits it takes in the media, Detroit is a city with significant properties, including Belle Isle, a 982-acre island park in the Detroit River, which is managed by the Detroit Recreation Department. It's got public utilities, such as the Detroit Department of Water and Sewerage. As the Metropolitan AFL-CIO has noted, the governor has created a circumstance that could lead to a rapid selling-off of assets that benefits buyers living outside Detroit while making the community "less livable."
All of this, from the appointment of the emergency manager to the bankruptcy filing to the austerity agency that is now all but certain to be implemented, will happen without the approval of the voters or their elected representatives.
This is a fundamental issue.
In tough times, under pressure from lenders and taxpayers, cities often make cuts. They even privatize services and sell off public facilities.
But under Snyder's emergency manager law, Detroit's voters and their elected leaders aren't making the choices that will determine Detroit's direction.
A Republican governor, and his appointed manager, are calling the shots.
This is not what the voters of Detroit asked for. Last fall, they had an opportunity to vote on whether the state should maintain the emergency manager law, and 82 percent of Detroit residents voted "no."
"When times are tough," local union officials said in a statement released after the governor announced in March that he was appointing his emergency manager, "it is especially important that decisions are made democratically and locally."
That's a basic American principle that Governor Snyder has abandoned with a power grab that should unsettle Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. What's happening in Detroit is not what democracy looks like.
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