Do we really think the lawyers for the city of Detroit and creditors and the bankruptcy judge have no clue as to what dire straights some Detroit neighborhoods are in?
Did these folks really need a bus tour of the city?
Apparently so. On Friday, Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes and lawyers went on a tour of the city to see first hand what it's all about. You'd think for the big bucks these attorneys get paid, they might have spent a few hours -- without billing the city or their clients -- to see Detroit.
Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press voiced some skepticism of the whole ordeal.
He writes:
Absent any useful information about what the judge and creditors actually thought as they whisked through Brightmoor and Eastern Market, past the Heidelberg Project and up the M1-Rail route, here’s the phrase I can’t get out of my head:
“I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”
Readers of a certain age will recognize that as the title of a surrealistic 1971 comedy album by the Firesign Theatre.
Potheads of that era, so I’m told, would chuckle gleefully at the audio adventures of a character named Clem who boards a bus full of circus clowns on a ride to the Future Fair, where the riders are told they are “about to experience a period of simulated exhilaration.”
He writes that bankruptcy attorney Robert Hertzberg of the city’s law firm Pepper Hamilton briefed reporters on the tour and "the most detailed description he gave of any single spot was about the Detroit Institute of Arts."
Hertzberg talked about the Diego Rivera mural and court, and Van Gogh and the photo exhibition titled “Detroit — Bruce Weber” that featuring 80 large-scale photographs of everyday people and places in Detroit, Walsh writes.
Walsh writes that Greg Shumaker, a Jones Day attorney representing the city, said predictably “you do not get a sense of the scale of the problem unless you actually go and travel around like we did.”
But in the end, Walsh writes:
Still, one wonders whether Weber’s pictures were the closest thing to everyday Detroiters that the bus-capade participants actually saw.
-- Allan Lengel
Below is a video released by the city after the tour.
