Dan Calabrese

The difficult question when wrestling with Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager law is this: It is troubling that the decisions made by local citizens are essentially trumped by the governor, who sends someone in from the outside to overrule every decision local officials have made about how they will handle the city’s finances.

That bothers me. It bothers a lot of people.

But the governor was elected too, and it’s also his responsibility to look out for the taxpayers in every one of our state’s cities. So when local officials show themselves to be so irresponsible that there is simply no one else to represent the interests of the taxpayers, maybe they should be grateful the governor is willing to act on their behalf.

The Detroit City Council’s refusal to make a reasonable cut to its own budget, at a time when the city is just months away from complete fiscal oblivion, presents one such conundrum.

Granted, the budget of the City Council is nowhere near the biggest part of Detroit’s woes. You could cut the Council’s budget to zero and Detroit would still be on the brink of fiscal oblivion if it can’t shed legacy costs born of the contracts it negotiated with its 48 employee unions.

But when you find yourself in a fiscal crisis – a word that hardly seems to cut it here – you can only solve the problem by making adjustments anywhere and everywhere you can. You don’t make a choice between large cuts and smaller ones. You make them all. And that’s because your only way out of this mess is to change the way you think – and apply your newfound sanity across the board.

But the Detroit City Council will have none of that. It refused this week, in a 6-2 vote, to approve a 33 percent cut, totalling $4 million, to its annual budget. This is a Council whose nine members get $700,000 a year, each, to hire staff and furnish an office. Many major cities don’t even treat their councilmembers as full-time employees, let alone lavish them with that kind of staff.

Councilman Ken Cockrel Jr., explaining his opposition to the cut, noted that the Council has cut its budget 10 percent each of the past two years. And  . . .? Since the city is still facing an existential crisis, a clear-thinking person would have to conclude that the recent years’ cuts have been woefully inadequate. Other councilmembers worry that the power of the legislative branch will be eroded if they give up their annual cash haul.

Yeah. About that. It seems to me that, given the way the Council has used its power to put the city on the verge of the end game, we might all be better off if they had a little less power. And I do mean “we,” because even those of us who don’t live in Detroit are ultimately going to be affected by the ultimate outcome of this situation.

You know how you’re always being told that Michigan can’t make it without a viable Detroit? The people who say that are not wrong. But it works both ways. If we need a viable Detroit, then Detroit cannot be permitted to run itself into the ground while the rest of the state is forced to stand by helpless and do nothing about it. You could argue that the residents of Detroit made their choices, and that they’ve got the government they deserve, although one might counter that they were only able to choose from the choices that a pretty sorry local political process produced.

Regardless, the Detroit City Council has proven itself beyond any shadow of doubt to be a group of unserious people that refuses to deal with the city’s problems in a responsible way. There is no option of replacing them before April, when the city will run out of money, with a group of responsible citizens – even if you were to assume that the voters would do so given the chance.

And if Detroit collapses, yes, the entire state will bear the burden in one way or another.

That cannot be allowed to happen, and since Detroit’s own local leaders are apparently quite willing to allow it, Snyder is the only public official left who can put a stop to it.

Someone has to protect the interests of the taxpayers. And there is nothing more to see with respect to the notion that Detroit’s leaders can somehow fix the problem themselves. Send in the emergency manager today. It’s the only option left, and time is running out.

© 2011 North Star Writers Group

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