The City In Financial Crisis

    It's truly humiliating for Detroiters to watch their city's department heads having to line up outside the Deputy Mayor's office to plead against the mandated 30 per cent cuts in their budgets for the coming fiscal year. But unless Lansing and Washington wake up to the enormity of their negligence soon, the real pain will have only just begun.

   The City's financial position, which has deteriorated to the danger point, is the result of forces beyond the control of the black administration which must, in the absence of human compassion from those who hold the purse strings, make the hard decisions-cutbacks and layoffs, or inevitable insolvency.

    We must again point out that the powerful suburban legislators who wail over Joyce Garrett 's salary would never ask the same austerities of their own communities which Detroit has had to enforce- and apparently will have to enforce even harder, in order to "prove" the City deserving of help.

   These lawmakers and their own constituencies have taken many a free ride on Detroit's generosity over the years, whether it be in the form of a trip to Belle Isle or the Art Institute or the water they drink, which the city provides and is forbidden by state law to make a penny on. The prosperity of their suburban empire has come at the expense of black Detroiters in particular, who have to live and work (if they can find work) in neighborhoods left to rot by whites.

   Now these ingrates have the gall to suggest that Detroit should cut its losses by selling them its bus system so they can consolidate "regional" control of another key aspect of the economy in southeastern Michigan. Meanwhile, they continue to squirm at the merest suggestion that they should pay a fair share of their incomes earned in Detroit-or even an extra nickel on a pack of cigarettes-so the Motor City doesn't go down the tube.

    On top of it all, with the City making every effort to find a way out of the mess, out of nowhere comes a State outfit called the Municipal Finance Commission to limit the City's borrowing and assume "veto power" over the City's budget.

    Although Detroit 's problems are not yet of the magnitude of New York 's, the scenario looks more and more like the banking-corporate-statehouse takeover of New York City that transpired last year, leaving the Big Apple's elected government with little more than a procedural and administrative function to perform-and with the banks getting the first shot at the City's revenue, before even the City payroll and its welfare clients.

    If the Republicans in Washington and Lansing are trying to drive Detroiters to the point of open rebellion again, they're doing the right things. City layoffs will worsen unemployment here, already higher than anywhere else (33 per cent, according to the recent Michigan State study). Deep cuts in the Fire Department would lengthen response time to an intolerable degree, and this is the worst possible time to have to lay off more police.

    Police and fire representatives should be ashamed of themselves for even suggesting that the City drop its residency requirement in return for their forgoing pay raises this year.

   Detroit's long-range fiscal crisis can only be met by a full-scale national commitment to rebuild our floundering cities and offer their inhabitants a share of the ever-increasing wealth of suburbia. Otherwise, the problems of the cities will become everybody's problems before long. Sooner or later, this commitment will have to be made. The question now is how much worse things have to get, and how many more changes we will have to go through, before this becomes obvious to those who decide how to spend our tax money.