A group of Michigan residents sued the state Wednesday to challenge a controversial new law that allows the governor of Michigan to appoint an unelected emergency manager or corporation to take over financially distressed towns and cities and effectively fire elected officials. The law empowers those unelected managers to sell off public property, shred union contacts, and privatize government services, without any input from local voters.
Some supporters have described the measure as a form of “financial martial law” needed to help restore financial stability to fiscally challenged cities and school districts. But the plaintiffs in the lawsuit question the constitutionality of a measure that gives the state the power to strip the right of residents to elect mayors, city councils and school boards.
Michigan now has an unelected emergency manager running the schools in Detroit, as well as the cities of Pontiac, Ecorse and Benton Harbor.
John Philo talking:
what the lawsuit’s about is we’re putting in front of the court to make the decision of whether or not local citizens have a right to a democratic form of local government, whether local citizens have a right to elect their local officials, because as it stands under this law, the governor and the state legislature is saying we do not. They’re saying that we can have a new form of government in which they appoint your local government, which is one person, and that that person is not accountable to local electors, to local citizens. There’s no right of petition. They have no voice. It takes away entirely their role in what we consider a democratic system. People assume they have a right to a democratic form of government in this country, at all levels—at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level. This is the first experiment that we know of where we’re bypassing that entirely.
there have been some occasions here on the East Coast where a particular school board was taken over by the state government.
we believe it’s intimately related to the law, in that this is—this is disenfranchising and saying that these folks just don’t have enough responsibility to run their own local affairs. It’s directed at the low-income communities and communities of color. Those are the ones that are going to be hardest hit. Those are the ones that are hardest hit. The presence of the law itself, too, is impacting the local governments in other communities, also, again, low-income communities of color. And it’s forcing them into considering whether they should enter into a consent agreement before they have an emergency manager appointed.
I did some rough numbers, and it came out to something like 66 percent of the state, of the communities that are predominately black or African American, are in severe financial distress. Sixty-six percent of our population in this state could lose their right to vote in local elections and to have local government.
I think it’s important to know that this law, it’s not about the finances that we’re contesting. We had an emergency financial manager law previously. What had changed is now it’s an emergency manager law, and it expands the scope of that emergency manager not only over financial matters—this isn’t about them balancing the bucks—but it allows them to appoint and replace, you know, building commissioner members, historical commission members, human rights commission members. These are matters of policy. Those are people that come from—that traditionally in our country, anyway, you know, are expressed through local elected officials and through the voters, who have a right to pass referendum, to recall an elected official, but also to put them into office to carry out those policies. It carries over into whether or not a strip club will be located in a community or how close it would be to a church. I can’t fathom how that relates to a financial issue in the local community.
Edith Lee-Payne talking:
I’d been, obviously, very concerned about this emergency manager or financial manager for some time. I’m active within my community in a number of ways. And one of our council members, JoAnn Watson, had put together some community events where these issues were raised, and I wanted to become a part of it.
in 1999, the state did a takeover of our schools months after we had had an election. The school board had little time to do anything before this takeover occurred. For six years, the state-appointed representative and an appointed reform board actually put our school system in a greater deficit and greater problems. After the residents did—voted for a referendum, we were able to get our voting rights back. And that occurred in 2005. We’ve been trying to improve the conditions that happened that the state caused. Now they want to come back and do it again. So that’s actually the comparison that I’m making, where I see that this emergency manager and financial manager, and the one that we had—the recent one, Robert Bobb—did the same thing. He just put our finances, our whole school structure, in complete chaos. And now he’s gone. And there’s no recourse in this legislation. We can’t go after him to do anything, and we didn’t ask for him in the first place.
the fact that—when I’ve spoken with community leaders, as well as our legislators from Detroit, they speak as—and say that they’re powerless because of the Republican-controlled House and Senate. There is very little left for us to do but to exercise our constitutional right to vote and/or recall. That’s the only redress we have. We’re angered by it. We’re frustrated by it. And when we know that there is already laws and legislation, that constitutions are in place for us, to protect us, that give us the rights to the legislative process, and the fact that we have the branches of government that are now—the separation of powers that are also being compromised, we have—and my personal position is, when we have these things that are there for us—these are the laws that were made for us by our Founding Fathers—why would they be challenged? Why would they be compromised, especially when these legislators and our governor took an oath, this year, to uphold the very thing that they’re violating? That’s disturbing.
Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over. privatize the whole town. this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.
Discussion with John Philo, Edith Lee-Payne.
John Philo, legal director of the Maurice & Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice.
Edith Lee-Payne, longtime Detroit resident who is suing the state of Michigan over its emergency manager law.
– from democracynow.org