As Detroit, a major American city in financial disarray, braces for what oversight by an emergency manager appointed by the State of Michigan may soon mean, one need look no further than Pontiac, a place that has been guided by emergency managers for the past four years. Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration is expected on Thursday to announce an emergency manager for Detroit.
A variety of oversight boards and receivers have stepped in — with mixed results — when the nation’s cities have teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. In Michigan alone, 21 emergency managers have been assigned to save cities and other government entities in the last quarter century, but few places have seen change as sweeping as that in Pontiac.
Unfettered by normal checks, balances and the pressures of getting re-elected, emergency managers here have overhauled labor contracts, sold off city assets and privatized nearly every service Pontiac once provided to citizens. Its police force has been outsourced to the county. Its Fire Department belongs to a nearby township. The city’s payroll, once numbering more than 600 workers, now amounts to about 50 public employees. Even parking meters have been sold. All this, and more cuts may be coming, all on the way to balancing the books.
“It’s not really a city anymore,” said Steve Swift, a Pontiac resident. “There’s nothing left now.”
Some say Pontiac’s sprint toward solvency is attracting new businesses, improving services, saving the city. But while supporters believe emergency managers, unencumbered by political infighting, are freed to make the tough decisions that local governments cannot make on their own, critics consider the entire notion of an outside manager anti-democratic, handing all-encompassing authority over the fate of a place to someone whose sole goal is to cut costs.
If anything, Pontiac’s path — a long, swerving course, of which the final results are not yet fully known — has shown that the effectiveness of an emergency manager may hinge most of all on the individual appointed.
“An emergency manager is like a man coming into your house,” said Donald Watkins, a city councilman. “He takes your checkbook, he takes your credit cards, he lives in your house and he sleeps in your bed with your wife.” Mr. Watkins added, “He tells you it’s still your house, but he doesn’t clean up, sells off everything and then he packs his bag and leaves.”
Pontiac, just 30 minutes north of Detroit, was once a healthy blue-collar city, thriving in the glory days of the American automotive industry as home to manufacturing plants of General Motors and the name of one of its brands. People used to wait to get a seat at restaurants downtown and, for nearly three decades, football fans came from miles around to watch the Lions play in the Silverdome until the team moved into Detroit in 2002.
By then, Pontiac’s slide toward insolvency was under way, plagued by a struggling automotive industry, years of financial mismanagement and a population that has been steadily declining since it peaked at more than 85,000 in 1970. Today, fewer than 60,000 people live here.
“When you wake up in the morning, you can feel the struggle,” said Shelton Martin, a resident, noting boarded-up elementary schools and abandoned homes scattered throughout the city, where a third of residents live in poverty.
In 2009, the same year Pontiac’s jobless rate reached 30 percent, the city’s projected deficit hit $12 million and state officials stepped in, just as they have now in Detroit, and appointed the first of three emergency managers who have run this city ever since.
Instantly, there was resistance. An early deal that sold the Silverdome, once valued at $22 million, for only $583,000 helped forge a deep distrust of the outside managers. The city’s first two emergency managers each resigned after little more than a year.
Monica Davey contributed reporting from Chicago.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/us/lessons-for-detroit-in-pontiacs-years-of-emergency-oversight.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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