From the Wall Street Journal:
A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.
Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district’s 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment…
…Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools…
Unions have utterly bankrupted the city of Detroit – as well as so many other cities (and some States) in the United States. And the corruption involved in the way unions gained control of elected politicians injected a terrible amount of irresponsibility and downright immorality in to our State and local politics. Something must be done to curb the unions – in Michigan, the decision has been to enact a law which empowers emergency financial managers to abrogate elected government and essentially re-do the entire system. I have to say, I don’t like this.
This is not an easy issue. What do you do when confronted with a political system which is so divorced from reality and so insensitive to the needs of the people that no improvement can be made? Do you allow it to continue – using an apathetic, bought or otherwise corrupted electorate to maintain itself in power and wealth while some of our greatest cities become sewers? Or do you just cut right across consent of the governed? Long time readers might recall a solution I had for Detroit – take the abandoned property out of city authority (and I mean really abandoned – property which, say, the city hadn’t been able to collect taxes on for 10 years), turn it in to, essentially, a Federal Territory and apply a revised “homestead act” to it; turning it over to any private citizen who would (a) stay on the property and (b) improve it for a period of at least five years. The idea was to turn wastelands in to productive property, thereby leading to a general revitalization of Detroit without the corrupt government being able to destroy things. Not the best solution, perhaps, but one which still allows for a maximum of local authority without that authority having the full ability to destroy.
This is a far cry from just announcing, one fine day, to the citizens of an area that their votes at the last election are null and void and a ruler has been appointed over them, no appeals allowed. It just rankles – and one imagines Barack Obama, armed with such power, abrogating the power of the government of the State of Nevada. While it is licit for a central government to intervene when a local government has proven incapable of ensuring justice, I worry greatly about the precedent and would prefer, if we are to do this sort of thing, at all, that any such laws have a sunset provision on them…and that any usurpation of local government be for, say, no more than two years (there is a precedent in republican and democratic governance for the appointment of a dictator in times of emergency…the Romans, especially, developed this power…and it did work for centuries; but not forever, as history shows…it is a dangerous thing to do).
In the end, the unions and the corrupt political establishment brought this upon themselves. One only has to note that the city of Detroit, with a population of 713,000, has an annual budget just about the same as the State of Nevada, population 2,600,000. It takes a gigantic amount of irresponsibility and corruption to get that much spending by that few people. And it further seems that the people of the city of Detroit either have no mind to change things, or don’t seem to mind societal disintegration. One way or another, change had to be made – it is highly regrettable that it was made this way, and we all need to think of a much better way to do it.
Blogs For Victory 