Trouble is, it doesn’t look like there’s any way that’s going to happen, anytime soon.
And that’s a tragedy for a city that has been in agony for years, and which finally has a leadership team trying hard to put Detroit on a rational path to getting itself together.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is probably as good a leader as the city could have right now. He was an inspiration to earlier generations as a charismatic basketball star.
He then went on to build a successful business in the city. He resisted pleas to enter politics for years, and finally ran for mayor only when he was convinced that was Detroit’s only hope.
Once in office, he refused a salary, donating it to the police department instead.
Ever since, he’s been trying to get a handle on the city’s battered finances, trying to figure out what the real deficit is in order to balance the budget. The task is enormous. For nearly seven years, the chronically poor city was in the hands of what seems to have been a criminal and fiscally irresponsible regime.
Last fall Mayor Bing told me that he can’t even start to think about building a better future till he knew what his true costs were. Add to that the problem that the city has a work force assembled to run a city of two million people.
Now, the census estimates there are fewer than eight hundred thousand left. The mayor thinks the true jobless rate is more than 40 percent, when you count those who have given up looking for work.
Not only does he have to try to stop the hemorrhaging, he has to try to change the city’s image. And every time Kwame Kilpatrick is back in town and back in court, he gets a setback.
Actually, we all get a setback. Detroit-bashing has been a popular sport for years. But the fact is that everyone in Michigan suffers, as long as our major city is perceived by the world as a crime-ridden, corrupt slum.
There’s far more to it than that, and Detroit still has a lot going for it and some breathtaking cultural attractions. There’s a team now in place struggling to try to do the right thing.
There is a business community, too, who may not live in Detroit but who care about it. Peter Karamanos, the founder of Compuware, deserves credit. He gave Kwame Kilpatrick a good-paying job in Dallas to try and help both him and Detroit, which needed him gone.
But the former mayor blew his chance for a new start, living the high life and not making his restitution payments. So, he is continually being hauled back into court. He will be back again next month, when, it now seems likely, he will be sent back to jail.
That will, once more, ramp up the media circus. Well, here’s a probably fruitless plea to the media to start downplaying the Kwame show. Yes, Detroit elected a bad one. But so have a lot of places.
Detroit is now trying desperately to help itself, and to a large extent, we’re all in this together.
We’d all do well to remember that.
Comments