I haven't talked to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing this week, but I felt like calling him to say, "I feel your pain." For ten months, he's been scrambling to try and get a handle on his city's fractured finances and repair its shattered public image.
In the long run, of course, these are two related problems. For years now, Detroit has been the city people were proud of not being from. First, it was "Murder City" in the 1970s, then a poster child for racial, unemployment and poverty problems.
Detroit recovered a little respect in the 1990s. But then followed the Kwame Kilpatrick years. Detroit's swaggering, flamboyant "hip-hop" mayor gave the city a new black eye. Nearly two years ago he finally resigned, did a few months time, and was banished to a job in Texas. But now it seems as if he is back in some Detroit courtroom every other day, behaving outrageously.
Last year around Thanksgiving, Mayor Bing told me he winces every time Kilpatrick was in the news. If so, last week must have been the equivalent of several pulled hamstrings.
The disgraced mayor was in court not once but twice, this time with a high-priced, loud-mouthed PR man. Worse, he'll be back week after next, to find out if he's going back to jail.
Monica Conyers, the former city council member, was in court too. When a federal judge finally sentenced her for her part in a bribery scheme, she unleashed a temper tantrum and said she would refuse to go to jail. Good luck with that.
And if that wasn't enough, at week's end the mayor's mother, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, was summoned before a grand jury for unspecified reasons.
None of this is likely to make people want to move to Detroit. Except that, guess what. I think the media is missing the real story here, which is that Detroiters, by and large, finally get it. Their city has horrible economic problems that are a legacy and function of the post-industrial past.
Many of its remaining citizens are poor, poorly educated and are desperate for jobs and better lives. But they seem to be rejecting the irrationality of the past. Last fall they elected a mayor who is a man of integrity.
Having made money in business, Dave Bing is refusing to take a salary as he struggles to help out his city.
Voters also elected a city council which seems to consist largely of grown-ups, and picked a commission to rewrite the city's badly flawed charter.
Currently, city elections are held in a bizarre manner that encourages the election of people with famous names.
The system is working. There are those who think Detroit's problems have to do with race, though they know they can't say so. But black prosecutors and juries went after and convicted the corrupt mayor, and I couldn't find a single person in town yesterday who had anything good to say about Monica Conyers.
Detroit has an official city motto that most of its residents don't even know. It's in Latin, but the English translation is this: We hope for better things. It will arise from the ashes.
Believe it or not, Detroit is trying to do just that. And we in the rest of the state have a whole lot to gain if our biggest city manages to succeed.
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