Jack Lessenberry: Council won't sacrifice

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Jack Lessenberry

December 18, 2011

By JACK LESSENBERRY Syndicated Columnist The Record Eagle Wed Feb 08, 2012, 03:23 PM EST

So, your city is bleeding money and according to the accounting firm Ernst & Young, will totally run out of cash by April. That, however, is just the outskirts of the volcano.

Once-mighty Detroit has billions of dollars in unfunded pension and other liabilities. The city admits it isn't paying its bills on time.

The population is barely a third of what it once was. Throughout the last decade, it declined by an average of 24,000 a year, as those who wanted a better life headed for the exits.

Those who are left are largely poor and unskilled. Nearly half the adults are functionally illiterate. Mayor Dave Bing estimated last spring that the true unemployment rate is "40 to 45 percent." More and more experts think a state-appointed emergency manager is close to inevitable. City officials, however, swear that they can and will solve Detroit's problems on their own.

But does that mean that Motown's City Council members are willing to give up some of their cushy perks, including vast office expenses, city cars, cellphones and free parking?

Not on your life.

They think they've sacrificed enough. When one of their number proposed they set a good example, the suggestion was indignantly voted down. "Let us not engage in a race to the bottom," intoned Councilman Ken Cockrel, who served as acting mayor for eight months after Kwame Kilpatrick went to jail.

The proposed cuts were "excessive," snorted another council member, Charles Pugh, a former TV anchor who has a long history of personal financial problems.

Last week, council President Pro Tem Gary Brown thought the nine-member council should cut their expenses, since massive layoffs of city workers are inevitable.

Besides, Detroit's City Council is one of the most expensive in the nation. So he formally proposed council members voluntarily cut their own budgets by 30 percent.

Despite an earlier modest cut, Detroit's nine council members are still among the best paid in the nation. Each makes $73,181 except Pugh, the council president, who gets $76,911.

The real expense, however is in their large office budgets. Each council member gets more than $700,000 a year to hire employees and set up an office.

With the city facing financial catastrophe, Brown, a former policeman and the president pro tem, suggested his colleagues would do well to significantly cut their own budgets.

Unions that represent city workers are also being asked to take massive health care cuts, and there's a separate proposal to cut the mayor's budget by a third. So Councilman Brown reasoned that he and his colleagues should share in the sacrifice.

Longtime member JoAnn Watson supported him. But nobody else did. To an outsider, this might seem hard to believe.

City Council may be on the point of losing all their power and relevance. The governor has begun a preliminary financial review of the city's books, something that is seen as a likely first step toward an emergency manager. The cuts Brown suggested wouldn't save the city vast sums -- $4 million or so.

But they would be sending a signal that they were putting their money where their mouths are. Just days before, Pugh had defiantly posted, "WE DON'T NEED AN EMERGENCY MANAGER," in all capital letters, on his Facebook page.

"Detroit needs to be run by Detroiters," Mayor Bing said at a press conference earlier this month, with members of the city council and city union leaders huddled around him.

Well, in all probability, an emergency manager is going to come, and if council is unable or unwilling to understand shared sacrifice now, they almost certainly will then.

Odds are that any emergency manager will cut or eliminate their salaries, get rid of their cars and possibly their well-appointed staffs. Plus losing any ability to determine how money is spent.

This might have happened no matter what they did.

But it seems clear that by arrogantly refusing to share in the sacrifice they are asking others to make, the Detroit City Council threw away both the moral high ground and any chance the state would take them seriously as potential partners in solving the crisis.

You could even say that their actions amounted to a primal scream of irresponsibility. In effect, they seemed to be telling the governor, "save us from ourselves." And in all probability, he will.