Reinventing Detroit by Michael Peter Smith & L. Owen Kirkpatrick

Author:Michael Peter Smith & L. Owen Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Justifying Quasi-Democracy

One justification for the usurpation of democratic control is that the new decision-makers were in fact themselves either elected by the people on a statewide basis—the governor who appointed Orr and the state legislators who created the emergency manager law—or directly appointed by elected leaders. The Cobo regional authority, for example, had its five members appointed one each by the governor, the mayor of Detroit, and the three regional county executives. The City Council and the mayor can similarly exercise some measure of control over, say, Eastern Market or the RiverWalk through a variety of means, including zoning and planning decisions that impact those operations. Then, too, when Orr proposed that the State of Michigan take over and manage Detroit’s famed Belle Isle Park as a state park on a long-term lease (citing the city’s inability to even keep restrooms on the island open for lack of funds), storms of protest were followed eventually by a reluctant approval from City Council.

So democracy, while diminished, could be said to not exactly disappear. Rather, it receded somewhat into the background while duly elected leaders and their appointees made tough decisions on behalf of the city.

An intriguing incident in September 2014 illustrates the complexity of this question. Decades earlier, the city had created a set of entities called Citizens District Councils. These were neighborhood boards set up to advise city leaders on any project backed by the city taking place in a given neighborhood. The CDCs (not to be confused with community development corporations, also known as CDCs) added a layer of bureaucracy to the already cumbersome development process, but it also injected more voices into the system, and these were voices at the local level that often went ignored. Over time, the citizens district councils tended to operate well or poorly, depending on the membership, and few thought they added much essential to the redevelopment efforts. Yet a measure of outrage flared in early autumn 2014 when Orr, as one of his final acts as the city’s emergency manager, abolished the citizens district councils in the name of smoothing out the redevelopment bureaucracy. Orr spokesman Bill Nowling told the media that the CDCs hampered growth. “It was felt that the CDCs created an unnecessary level of bureaucracy that was hindering future development and revitalization efforts,” he said.10 Critics lamented yet another loss of democracy in the name of efficiency; yet the more informed questioned whether Orr, at the end of his statutory tenure and within days of turning control of the city back over to the mayor and City Council, would have abolished the CDCs without at least the tacit consent of Mayor Duggan. Unlike the strained relationship between Orr and former Mayor Dave Bing, Duggan and Orr had met daily for months; they had already arranged a power-sharing arrangement, with Orr giving some of the powers of control back to the mayor; and Duggan, a corporate turnaround expert, had long since shown that he expected to rule as an activist mayor with control over all aspects of his administration.

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