The Solvency Board Cometh

Mayor Dave Bing and the Detroit City Council are appalled at the plan Governor Rick Snyder has for their town: a nine member panel which would control Detroit's finances. It would allow the Mayor and the Council to keep their job jobs as chief executive and chief legislature, and that's about it.

To those who claim that it strips Detroit of its political representation, well, it hardly does that. Detroit elected officials stay in place, and they have a say in who gets appointed to the board. Mayor Bing and the Council in various combinations will select 6 of the 9 who will serve on the Board. Further, as cities are the subsets of the state and not independent entities of their own volition, then seeing as Detroiters still vote for their State Reps and the Governor they are most certainly not losing their right to select their elected officials.

Detroit has messed around for far too long and gets far too much from the State as it is for the city to have any real moral ground to cry foul. When even the Detroit Free Press editorializes that the Mayor and all should accept the plan, it speaks volumes about how bad off the City has become. It may be, as Stephen Henderson states in the Freep, an emergency manager under another name. But it has become necessary as Detroit leadership simply has not stepped up and done something about the crisis.

This situation cannot reasonably be painted as us against them, Detroit against the rest of Michigan. Detroit already gets more money per capita from Lansing than any other municipality in the State. The City has simply refused to make the tough calls necessary for solvency, and now it will pay the price. That's not tyranny. It's governing those who have displayed they can't govern themselves.

And it probably should have been done a long time ago.