An Emergency Manager could be what Detroit needs

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don't want an emergency manager making decisions for my city."

—Detroit Mayor Dave Bing

"The city of Detroit DOES NOT need an Emergency Manager!!! BING JUST NEEDS TO SHOW SOME DAMN LEADERSHIP..." —City Council President Charles Pugh, via Facebook.

What I am about to say may get me a lot of hate mail but, sorry, I disagree. I think having the right emergency manager for a time might turn out to be a good thing for Detroit.

That's not a popular opinion among the people I naturally respect, hang with and gravitate toward. Ron Williams, the founder of this newspaper, and a man for whom I have infinite respect, sent me a plea recently to help fight this law.

He — like lots of other people — are outraged about the beefed-up emergency manager law passed this year, which, in his words, "allows the governor to appoint an 'emergency manager' to take over any city, town or school district."

Williams, who these days is fighting to create sustainable communities (happyfrogdetroit.com), correctly points out that such a manager now has the "power to dismiss elected officials, shred union contracts, sell public property, and even dissolve local government entities."

That's all true. The proposition that appointing an emergency manager to run Detroit would be awful is pretty much an article of faith among those who call themselves progressives, liberals or identify with those communities dedicated to civil rights and civil liberties.

So why do I think this might be a good thing? For the following reasons:

Detroit government is terribly broken and dysfunctional in a way it has so far proven impossible for elected leaders to repair. The basic problem is this: What was once a prosperous city of nearly 2 million people is now a largely dilapidated and shrunken one of barely 700,000 mostly very poor people.

In addition to vast debts and a current budget deficit, the city has a social services and public employee sector built for a larger, richer city, and can no longer sustain it. Especially not in the face of massive revenue cuts from the state.

There have been layoffs and more salary cuts and layoffs and salary cuts, and as I write this, the mayor and the council are squabbling further about how many more workers to dump.

Alas, none of this will work, except to slightly postpone the inevitable. The city is trying to deal with its problems by using "salami tactics" — cut a little and then a little more — and is instead dying a death of a thousand cuts.

> Email Jack Lessenberry