Over the past few years, the Motor City has been a national laughingstock. Not for the crime rate, racial problems, the bad schools or the terrible poverty that afflicts so many of its residents.
Instead, Detroit has been the shame of the nation in recent years thanks mainly to its elected leaders. First, there was Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a huge and hugely talented man. He talked a good game, but threw it all away to live the life of a flamboyant thug.
Kilpatrick is out of prison now and thankfully out of state, hopefully forever. But he did plenty of damage to a city that already had all the trouble it could handle.
Unfortunately, once he was gone, City Council stepped up to embarrass us further.
We had months of Monica Conyers, the wife of the House Judiciary Chairman, acting very much as you might expect a foul-mouthed teenager to act.
Unfortunately, she was then acting council president. She called her fellow council members names, indulged in openly racist behavior and name-calling, and generally acted like a clown.
Five months or so ago she resigned, when it turned out she was also taking bribes in parking lots. She is expected to be sentenced to prison on December 1st.
Unfortunately, Conyers has had plenty of company in discrediting the council in recent years. There was the councilman who got in trouble for putting his girl friend’s daughter on the city payroll, even though she never lived in Detroit.
He went to jail too. Another council member, known mostly for funny hats and incoherent nastiness, died just before she was to be served with a federal indictment which charged her, among other things, of trading a vote for 17 pounds of sausage.
So why have Detroiters kept electing people like this? Mostly because of the system. Motown is the only large city in the nation to elect all of its council members at large. Voters have to pick from a roster of more than 100 names, and naturally, they tend to go with names they know. Under those rules, Kate Gosselin would likely win a seat if she chose to run.
This summer, a band of mostly young people set out to change that. They pounded the pavement, collected signatures and got a proposal on next week’s ballot to switch to a system where most of council is elected by individual districts.
That would mean for the first time people in the neighborhoods could elect someone they know to fight for their own interests.
To be sure, arguments can be made against a district system. Yet the bottom line is that Detroiters are trying to fix their mess. As further proof, this spring they decided to elect a commission to rewrite their badly flawed city charter.
But meanwhile in Lansing, nothing has changed. Day after day, we’ve seen the appalling spectacle of inflexible and incompetent lawmakers who cannot even balance their budget.
Detroiters are trying to do something about their leadership failure. It might be time to ask what’s taking the rest of us so long.
The leadership failure in the city has nothing to do with the type of governance format. The core issue is the quality and caliber of the candidates...
Detroit of course is not the only region which suffers from this lethal flaw but this reality is also an aspect of the private/public business/ religious/media sectors of our state..
We have simply hit the bottom. Our state is of aourse a reflection of its electorate..So like Mike sings..'Change the man/woman in the mirror" that is when we can begin our return to greatness in our state...
Posted by: Thrasher | October 29, 2009 at 12:50 PM