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“All hands on deck!”
“This is about people.”
“Jobs are the key to the future.”
“Let’s grow Detroit.”
Those are outtakes from Gov. Rick Snyder’s carefully orchestrated town forum Friday at which he announced his decision that Detroit will soon get an emergency financial manager.
They are corporate-speak slogans that soon will qualify as clichés if Snyder keeps repeating them. They do little to explain what it will mean for Detroit to be under an emergency financial manager. But that might be the point.
Snyder doesn’t like to indulge in the blame game, and I certainly don’t want to go there, either. But I think it’s fair to point out that the governor is remarkably vague when he discusses the future of Detroit.
Take the most important issue, public safety. What are the governor’s plans for the continually shrinking police department? One of the Detroit residents at the forum Friday asked him that. “We can’t do anything unless we have a safe city,” the resident told Snyder.
Here is Snyder’s response:
“We need to work on that. One of the things, we’re trying to work in partnership – we’ve been already trying to do that in terms of different state agencies trying to partner with the Detroit Police Department.
“I think there’s some good relationships there. To give you a real-life illustration, at the start of the last school year, the Michigan State Police worked with the Detroit Police Department, Wayne State, all those on safe routes to school.”
That did not answer the man’s question.
Nolan Finley of the Detroit News tried again. He reminded Snyder that public safety is the No. 1 concern in Detroit, and asked “if we can expect a surge in state resources to make people feel safer quickly after an emergency manager is appointed?”
Here is Snyder’s response:
“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘surge’ because I don’t want it to be viewed as a bunch of Michigan State Police coming into the city.
“It’s really about ‘how do we partner with the Detroit Police Department?’ Because again, this is about the city running the city but having more resources, more focused resources, more things to balance that. And that’s something we tried to demonstrate with our proposal on Belle Isle, for example. In this last year’s budget message I talked about a number of state troopers being able to come police Belle Isle, which would free up Detroit police to go in the neighborhoods.”
In that answer, Snyder at least addressed Finley’s question about a “surge.” But the rest of the reply is murky. How is the city going to have “more focused resources?” What does that mean?
Snyder’s opacity does not help calm the anxiety of residents and business people, even those who support the idea of an emergency manager.
Embedding an emergency manager in Detroit is an intricate proposition. It appears that no city of Detroit’s size and complexity in the nation has been placed under state control to the extent Detroit will be under state control. The obvious racial and political implications of a white, Republican governor asserting control over a mostly black, Democratic city only adds to the intricacy of what Snyder is attempting.
It might have been helpful if Snyder had spelled out, in a little more detail, what will happen when the EM comes to town. State Treasurer Andy Dillon mentioned the effort to begin restoring Detroit’s damaged street lights this summer, which, of course, is about public safety, too. The creation of a lighting authority has already begun, in fact.
What are Snyder’s plan for public safety? More EMS rigs? Privatization? Will he allow the police department to continue to wither? Can the EM fix the fire department’s hook and ladders?
What role does he envision for the mayor and city council beyond the “all hands on deck” response?
Snyder is a smart guy. It’s inconceivable he and his lieutenants haven’t discussed at length the details and ramifications of imposing an emergency manager on Detroit. Sharing some of his thoughts might help defuse the growing opposition to his history-making plan.
Then again, sharing information might also stoke the resentment.
