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Mayor Duggan on "Flashpoint"
Amid speculation what he might do next, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says he'll decide later this year whether to run in 2025 for a fourth term as mayor.
"It's still two years away," Duggan said on WDIV's "Flashpoint" Sunday morning in an interview with host Devin Scillian. "But apparenlty I made the job look easy because everybody wants it. Back when I first ran there weren't a whole lot of people that thoguht running for a... backrupt city that was under control of an emergency mangeer was the best job as a write-in candidate."
"But it's excirting how many people want to do it," said the 65-year-old mayor. "And I'll make a decision later this year, and either I'll have a lot of opponents or voters will have a lot of choices."
There has been speculation that if Duggan doesn't run, he might have interest in the governor's job in 2026.
Meanwhile, political observers have mentioned a number of people who might run for mayor in 2025 including City Council President Mary Sheffield, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, Detroit Deputy Mayor Todd Bettison and former Detroit Police Chief James Craig.
During his Sunday appearance, Duggan applauded the police chief for a decline in violent crime numbers.
"Chief (James) White has done a remarkable job."
"As Chief White has said repeatedly, a non-fatal shooting is a homicide that missed. And so they are ramping up the detectives in the detective bureaus in all 12 precincts to go hard after these non-fatal shootings. Prosecutor Worthy is committing community prosecutors to follow up. Dawn Ison and (the U.S. Attoney's Office) are committing federal investigators. And what I want to see is a much higher clearance rate on the non-fatal shootings."
He told Scillian he's excited about development in the city, including Corktown and the construction of the University of Michigan Center for Innovation, which will offer masters degrees and workforce development programs that focus on technology and innovation. The building broke ground last month at 2121 Cass Ave.
"The University of Michigan graduate school is going to change the future of this city," he said.
"This is the vision, the jobs of the future. We have to have the training here in Detroit. And so mobility jobs, software tech jobs, climate change jobs, those curriculums are now going to be offered at a graudate school in the city of Detroit.
"So that the top undergraduates from schools all across America will come here. You can get an internship over at the train station with Ford, you can get an internship with Amazon, you can get an internship with Google and Microsoft that are downtown. And now you start to see those national companies saying, 'I want to locate where that talent is being trained.'"
And I go back to when I first pitched Bill Ford on coming down to Detroit with the center where he's going to design the electric and autonomous vehicles of the future.
He said 'I'm looking at Silicon Valley, I'm looking at Ann Arbor cause that's where they're being trained.'"
"I said, 'Bill they may go to school there, but they want to live in Detroit.' He came up with the idea of the train station. But if I had been able to say to him, 'the University of Michigan grad school is right next door,' it would have been an easy decision."
The train station is set to come online later this year.
