Big 3 & Friends Plot "Regional" Empire

by Maureen McDonald and Derek VanPelt

The major commercial, industrial, and financial interests in southeastern Michigan, led by the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), have come forward in recent weeks with a sophisticated scheme to legally take over political control of the Detroit metropolitan area and its five million residents.

The scheme is called "regional government," and the latest version comes in a Bicentennial red-white-and-blue package, couched in the facile language of "progressive liberalism" and served up by a white knight named Kent Mathewson, president of a corporate-backed Troy think-tank called the Metropolitan Fund.

Even as the dailies gave generously of their space to help Mathewson launch the campaign to sell the new regionalism to the public, Michigan House Speaker William D. Ryan, the dean of the state legislature, was proffering the required legal support in H.B. 5527.

Regional government is the perfect "non-partisan" issue. To question it is to appear to oppose progress, cooperation, efficiency, and economy. And with half a million suburbanites, commuting daily to the city to work, shop, and eat, plus 170,000 Motor City residents commuting in the other direction, planning of many essential services can obviously benefit by regional coordination. The question is who would control the massive new apparatus, in whose interests it would be used, and what impact it would have on Detroit and the 249 other communities that would be compelled by law to participate.

If approved, the plan would return Detroit's black majority, only now beginning to take control of the city, to their former minority status, and could ride roughshod over independent-minded suburban governments as well. It would create a vast new bureaucracy more elitist and inaccessible-and probably more cumbersome and inefficient-than anything Michigan has seen before. Power to determine the destinies of the region, and its various communities and populations, would be vested in a 41-member regional council, twenty of whom would be appointed by the governor. Elected members' constituencies could be as large as half a million people, compared to 200,000 for a state senator.

The new economic and political base of the region would be the so-called "Midtown Ring," the big white donut of suburban commercial, industrial, and residential development encircling the city-leaving the hole for blacks, deprived of their political power and their tax base.

The regional agency would have zoning powers over the corporate-owned land in the suburbs and would control federal funds flowing into the city. The Big Three and their colleagues-among them other huge corporate concerns, the banks, and the utilities-would in fact gain through the regional council a virtual monopoly on services in the region. The council's chairperson, hardly an independent figure at $10,000 a year, would have final say on regional police and fire protection, parks and recreation funding, road maintenance, waste elimination systems, and the water supply. As a federally-designated regional planning agency, the new authority would control where new residential and commercial projects were built and how federal funds were doled out to its communities.

With the advent of the present plan, the interests behind the Metro Fund would have the simplified task of having to influence only 41 people (half of them appointments), rather than the often balky network of 250 governments they must deal with now. The trouble with locally elected officials, from the Big Three's point of view, is that they may see their first responsibility as being to their constituencies, with giant financial interests coming second. Ford

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"Regional" Empire Scheme

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and GM can choose and finance candidates, but they can't vote them in. The Metro plan would reverse the priorities, putting "the interests of the entire region," as determined by its most powerful institutions, first. City and suburbs alike could be easily steamrollered on any given issue.

The Metropolitan Fund, which brought Mathewson here from Salem, Oregon twelve years ago, has also spawned New Detroit, Inc. (through its former chairman, Joseph L. Hudson of department store fame); the present regional structure, the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG); and the Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority (SEMTA). Just as many of the same interests organized New Detroit after the 1967 rebellion to ameliorate racial tensions in the city, the new regional government proposal offers a more sophisticated and comprehensive response to an even more serious "crisis" - the taking of political power in Detroit by its majority black population.

Despite massive postwar flight from the city, first by white residents, then by their businesses and industries, the corporate powers managed to retain political control of Detroit until the election of Coleman Young in 1973. Meanwhile, they had built a new power base in the so-called "Midtown Ring," circling the city from the downriver area to the Grosse Pointes.

Included in the ring are the gargantuan Fairlane Town Center, the Ford-owned city within the city of Dearborn; the Chrysler-owned Northfield development; Prudential Insurance's Southfield mega-structure, Town Center; and the GM Technical Center in Warren. Other "midtown" institutions include the super shopping centers of Southland, Livonia Mall, Universal Mall, Northland, Tel-Twelve, Somerset, Lakeside, Macomb Mall, and Eastland.

All these malls and mini-cities are presently regulated by elected mayors and councilpeople in dozens of small cities. SEMCOG, too, is compromised of elected officials at least theoretically responsible to their electorate. So the "civic leaders" have designed a new layer of government with power vested in a few officials, half of them appointed.

The "Midtown Ring" also suffers from the consequences of having built up too fast and too thick in its haste to escape Detroit's blacks. Fleeing industries have helped provide the tax base to pay for epidemic residential construction in the suburbs. But when the new cities, closed to non-whites, found they were still having trouble paying for essential services, they decided black dollars would be just as good as white.

Instead of taking the bait, however, blacks began moving into stately old Detroit homes, developing loyalties to Detroit businesses, and running for important political offices. Their essential response to SEMCOG has been, "We'll sit down and discuss regional issues with you, but don't expect us to serve your meals." Now blacks run the city which includes the Art Centre, the Renaissance Center, the Fisher Building, the GM Building, and Wayne State University. They represent an increasingly powerful political and economic force, and proved it by electing Coleman Young.

The financial interests behind the Metropolitan Fund, currently pushing vigorously for a new regional government, would like to have all this back. Neither the city nor the suburban governments, however, are biting so far; the executive committee of SEMCOG has opposed the new plan. SEMCOG, which includes 104 voluntarily participating governments, fears such a "drastic move" and wants to hold on to the power it has now (primarily the power to study issues, make recommendations, and influence the flow of federal dollars to member communities). Urban specialists like John Musil, Director of Wayne State's Division of Urban Studies, aren't convinced the new structure would be either more efficient or more economical than the patchwork of local governments.

"Studies show," says Musil, "that the large the bureaucracy, the lower the quality of services-as rated by the citizens-and the higher the cost of those services."

"House Bill 5527 would create another layer of government bureaucracy with greater inefficiency than SEMCOG," says William Cilluffo, executive assistant to Mayor Young. Cilluffo also points out that running for regional board chairperson or representative would be a costly proposition, and wonders who would pay for it. "Furthermore," he says, "who would take responsibility for the way the agency shapes up?"

Right now, Metro Fund publicists are likely to be less concerned with winning over local officials than with lobbying the state legislature and selling the general public. These are the people who will decide at some point whether the Big Three, the banks, and their fellow financial interest will succeed in their scheme to gain political and economic hegemony over Detroit and all of southeastern Michigan.

Your Regional Planners:
Selections from the Metropolitan Fund Board of Trustees
Rodkey, Craighead, President, Detroit Bank & Trust Company
Robert E. Dewar, Chairman of the Board, S.S. Kresge Company
David K. Easlick, President, Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Max M. Fisher, Chairman of the Board, Detroit Renaissance
Richard C. Gerstenberg, Chairman, New Detroit, Inc.
W.A. Hedgecock, Vice President, Consumers Power Company
Joseph L. Hudson, Jr., Chairman, J.L. Hudson Company
Ray W. MacDonald, Chairman of the Board, Burroughs Corporation
Thomas A. Murphy, Chairman of the Board, General Motors Corporation
John J. Riccardo, Chairman of the Board, Chrysler Corporation
Dean E. Richardson, Chairman of the Board, Manufacturers National Bank of Detroit
Horace E. Sheldon, Director, Civic and Governmental Affairs, Ford Motor Company
Norman B. Weston, Vice Chairman of the Board, National Bank of Detroit
Stanley J. Winkelman, President, Winkelman Stores, Inc.

Illustration caption: "...for all of us, the problem of having to live in megalopolis will have to be solved in spiritual terms. The town planner cannot do our spiritual work for us..."
-Arnold Toynbee, Cities of Destiny, 1967.

Derek VanPelt is the Editor of this paper.

Maureen McDonald is a freelance writer who has previously worked for Detroit suburban newspapers.