Sunday, November 27, 2011

Jack Lessenberry: "An Emergency Manager could be what Detroit needs"

Whoa. Lessenberry is and has always been a pretty standard  progressive Democrat for as long as I have been reading him and so I never expected to hear this opinion from him. Ever. But now we have.

"Detroit government is terribly broken and dysfunctional", says Lessenberry, "in a way it has so far proven impossible for elected leaders to repair. The basic problem is this: What was once a prosperous city of nearly 2 million people is now a largely dilapidated and shrunken one of barely 700,000 mostly very poor people.

In addition to vast debts and a current budget deficit, the city has a social services and public employee sector built for a larger, richer city, and can no longer sustain it. Especially not in the face of massive revenue cuts from the state."

Sad but true.