Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Devastation - 3.23.11

Yesterday, official U.S. Census Bureau figures showed that Detroit’s population had fallen more than anyone had expected. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what the numbers mean.

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Detroit expected to get grim news from the U.S. Census bureau. But the results are, in fact, far worse than expected. They paint a picture of urban devastation unlike any in our nation’s history, a snapshot of the depopulation of a major American city.

Consider this: Since the Republican National Convention in 1980, Detroit has lost half a million people. In the thirty years before that, it lost even more -- another seven hundred thousand.

For years, the term “white flight” had been synonymous with what was happening. Today, it’s mostly about black flight. The black population of Detroit declined by more than one hundred and eighty-five thousand people during the last decade.

What that indicates is that the middle class of both races has given up on the city, in large part because the schools are perceived as being so bad. There have been a number of stories in recent months speculating that, for the first time, the census would find that the percentage of Detroiters who are white was increasing.

Optimists believed that the city was attracting a new generation of young urban pioneers, who were returning to Detroit from the suburbs, living in lofts and creating an artistic and urbane lifestyle.

The census shows that this was a complete fantasy. Sure, there may be a few kids doing those things. There are also a few people who vote for the Socialist Workers’ party. But both groups are statistically insignificant. Nearly half of what white population remained in Detroit in 2000 vanished over the next decade.

There are now only about fifty-five thousand people in Detroit who identify themselves as white. Sixty years ago, when the city celebrated its 250th anniversary, that figure was one point six million.

That means that more than ninety-five percent of the white population has disappeared. That’s not to say that Detroit’s troubles are solely due to the fact that the whites left. In fact, one-quarter of the black population left over the last decade as well.

But the disappearing Caucasians and the census returns from the suburbs tell another story that most of us don’t want to hear: Integration just doesn’t seem to work, at least when it comes to where we choose to live. My friend, the columnist Desiree Cooper, wryly defines integration as that period of time between when the first black family moves in and the last white one moves out.

The census seems to indicate that is sadly true. Southfield, nine percent black in 1980, is seventy percent black today. Highland Park, once a mostly white enclave, is now ninety-three percent black. Twenty minutes away are Oakland County communities like South Lyon, where blacks are still less than two percent of the population.

Michigan’s largest single city is now largely a ruin, with a population barely more than what it was a century ago. Economically, it is hard to see how Detroit can be viable on its own. Nor can I see how our state can prosper until we do something about this.

We need, plainly, some model for metropolitan government. Where we may choose to live doesn’t really matter. That we all have at least minimal functioning services does. That’s essential, if we are ever to be a prosperous state again.

Essay: Devastation - 3.23.11

Yesterday, official U.S. Census Bureau figures showed that Detroit’s population had fallen more than anyone had expected. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what the numbers mean.

Hear Audio Story

Detroit expected to get grim news from the U.S. Census bureau. But the results are, in fact, far worse than expected. They paint a picture of urban devastation unlike any in our nation’s history, a snapshot of the depopulation of a major American city.

Consider this: Since the Republican National Convention in 1980, Detroit has lost half a million people. In the thirty years before that, it lost even more -- another seven hundred thousand.

For years, the term “white flight” had been synonymous with what was happening. Today, it’s mostly about black flight. The black population of Detroit declined by more than one hundred and eighty-five thousand people during the last decade.

What that indicates is that the middle class of both races has given up on the city, in large part because the schools are perceived as being so bad. There have been a number of stories in recent months speculating that, for the first time, the census would find that the percentage of Detroiters who are white was increasing.

Optimists believed that the city was attracting a new generation of young urban pioneers, who were returning to Detroit from the suburbs, living in lofts and creating an artistic and urbane lifestyle.

The census shows that this was a complete fantasy. Sure, there may be a few kids doing those things. There are also a few people who vote for the Socialist Workers’ party. But both groups are statistically insignificant. Nearly half of what white population remained in Detroit in 2000 vanished over the next decade.

There are now only about fifty-five thousand people in Detroit who identify themselves as white. Sixty years ago, when the city celebrated its 250th anniversary, that figure was one point six million.

That means that more than ninety-five percent of the white population has disappeared. That’s not to say that Detroit’s troubles are solely due to the fact that the whites left. In fact, one-quarter of the black population left over the last decade as well.

But the disappearing Caucasians and the census returns from the suburbs tell another story that most of us don’t want to hear: Integration just doesn’t seem to work, at least when it comes to where we choose to live. My friend, the columnist Desiree Cooper, wryly defines integration as that period of time between when the first black family moves in and the last white one moves out.

The census seems to indicate that is sadly true. Southfield, nine percent black in 1980, is seventy percent black today. Highland Park, once a mostly white enclave, is now ninety-three percent black. Twenty minutes away are Oakland County communities like South Lyon, where blacks are still less than two percent of the population.

Michigan’s largest single city is now largely a ruin, with a population barely more than what it was a century ago. Economically, it is hard to see how Detroit can be viable on its own. Nor can I see how our state can prosper until we do something about this.

We need, plainly, some model for metropolitan government. Where we may choose to live doesn’t really matter. That we all have at least minimal functioning services does. That’s essential, if we are ever to be a prosperous state again.

Essay: Mergers and Acquisitions - 3.22.11

In Grand Rapids yesterday, Governor Snyder proposed a controversial set of new local government reforms. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the ones that got less attention could end up being more significant.

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There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth statewide over the new proposals the governor outlined in Grand Rapids yesterday, the ones especially that will affect local governments.

He proposes to hold back one-third of the revenue sharing money communities get from the state, and release it only if cities, villages and townships adopt certain reforms. Those would include putting all new hires on a pension plan based on what they and their employer put in, a so-called “defined contribution plan.”

Experts feel that too many places now offer what are known as defined benefits plans, which are costlier, and which governments are obligated to honor regardless of their ability to pay.

Under the Snyder plan, new local government hires would also have to pay at least twenty percent of the cost of their health care. There would be certain other rules governing things how much money governments contribute and how fast pensions could rise.

These reforms are, in short, all things public employee unions have strenuously opposed. Predictably, Democrats mostly denounced these proposals yesterday. Republicans and business groups praised them .. but so did alliances of local governments.

As the head of the Michigan Municipal League said yesterday, local governments are desperate today for any tools that will help them get a handle on their spiraling costs.

My guess is that these reforms are likely to become law, given the large Republican majorities in the legislature. However, I am not sure the carrot the governor is offering is going to be large enough to give local governments the incentives to get this done.

Consider this: To start with, the governor is already slashing the total amount spent on revenue sharing by a third. That will cut what Detroit is getting, for example, from a maximum of $178 million dollars to $119 million. They can get two thirds of the new amount basically by just promising to try and do better at consolidating services.

Will the city then find it worthwhile to adopt some terribly controversial measures to get another less than $40 million dollars? Well, maybe. But the Macomb County city of Utica might not. Their revenue sharing incentive will be something like twenty thousand dollars, not enough, perhaps to take on the unions.

But the governor proposed some other reforms in Grand Rapids yesterday which got less attention -- but which, in the long run, could be much more significant. For example, he wants to make it much more easy for governments to merge.

Governor Snyder also wants to clear the way for combined city and county governments, as they’ve done in Indianapolis, Miami and Louisville. In the long run, this may be the only solution for Detroit.

He also wants to streamline the process for consolidating services, as when a city and a township decide to share a fire department. We’re bound to see a lot of this happening soon.

Many of the governor’s reforms are controversial, and probably no one is on board with all of them. But nobody can deny that he is proposing a comprehensive set of solutions to our state’s economic problems, something we haven’t seen in a long time. And if anyone is offering any serious alternatives, I haven’t seen them yet.

Essay: Shortchanging the Future - 3.21.11

A Macomb County Commissioner is leading a petition drive against the governor’s proposal to tax pensions. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says there is a little more to the story.

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Macomb County Commissioner Phil DiMaria is angry about Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposal to tax pension income, and he’s doing something about it. He’s launched a statewide petition drive to oppose the tax, which is key to the governor’s proposed budget.

DiMaria, who has been on the county commission for twenty years, thinks the governor is badly out of touch. “He’s rich. He’s never going to be an old person who has to pinch pennies to try and get by, try and buy milk and bread,” he told me yesterday.

“This isn’t any shared sacrifice. This is one more assault on the middle class so he can give business a big tax break.”

The response so far has been overwhelming, DiMaria said. He’s gotten requests for petitions from as far away as Petoskey and Chelsea. His goal is not to put anything on the ballot. He just wants to collect as many signatures as possible and then use them to try and sway the governor and the legislators.

DiMaria, who is a sixty-year-old Democrat, knows the odds are against his being able to change the governor’s mind, but he may have an easier time with some of the freshmen Republicans in the legislature who would have to face angry voters next year.

I asked DiMaria if he realized that the governor’s proposal would exempt the first $41,000 from taxes. He did, but he doesn’t think any pension income should be taxed.

But what DiMaria doesn’t usually tell people is that he is not exactly a disinterested party. He already collects one pension from the Oakland County city of Troy, where he was a police officer for thirty years. When he leaves the county commission, he will be eligible for a second government pension, on top of the first.

In other words, whatever other motives he may have, he doesn’t want to pay taxes on his income. I asked DiMaria how he felt about the governor’s proposal to drastically cut education funding, and he said he was against that too. “How’s he going to get new business without people properly educated to run these jobs?“ he said. But you don’t see DiMaria, or anyone else I know about, trying to get people to sign petitions to save education.

And that disturbs me. DiMaria and I grew up in a Michigan where our parents had survived the Great Depression and World War II, and in many cases were struggling to get by. Yet they voted to tax themselves to build new schools so their kids could get a proper education. They wanted us to have more chances than they had. Today, adults seem more selfish. It’s as if our slogan was, “we’ve got ours, and we’re hanging on to it. If you are trying to get through school today, that’s tough, kid.”

I suppose I should be on Phil DiMaria’s team, since I am getting steadily closer to pension age myself. But I don’t understand why pension income should be treated differently from any other income. And I am pretty sure that if we think our comfort more important than the next generation’s future, Michigan isn’t going to have much of a future, no matter what sacrifices any governor’s budget should happen to bring.

Essay: Unpopular Votes - 3.18.11

A group called National Popular Vote is lobbying the legislature to change the way we elect presidents. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been considering this.

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For the last two months, Michigan has been consumed with debate over Governor Snyder’s proposed new budget -- and with a number of his other deal-changing priorities as well, such as the just passed tough new Emergency Financial Manager law.

But there are other issues, and a lobbyist for one showed up in Lansing yesterday to urge the legislature to vote to change the way we elect presidents. Tom Golisano, a millionaire businessman and philanthropist, is the spokesperson for a group called National Popular Vote, which is beginning to have some success.

They want to change the laws to make sure that the candidate who gets the most popular votes for president nationwide gets elected, and they think they’ve found a way to do this without amending the constitution.

Here’s how that would work. First of all, chances are that you at least vaguely remember that while we act as if presidents are elected by a nationwide vote of the people, this only happens indirectly. That’s because of something called the electoral college. If you remember your twelfth grade civics class -- or the two thousand election between George Bush and Al Gore -- you know that presidential elections are really like a giant board game.

States have a certain number of electoral votes based roughly on their population. Most states have a winner-take-all rule by which whoever wins that state gets all its electoral votes. The name of the game is to win enough states to add up to two hundred and seventy.

Most of the time, whomever gets more popular votes wins the electoral votes. But that wasn’t the case eleven years ago. Half a million more people nationwide voted for Gore, but Bush won the electoral vote. Four years later, Bush won the popular vote easily, but would have lost the election if John Kerry had won Ohio.

The group called National Popular Vote wants to change that by getting states to pass laws that would require their electors to vote for whomever wins the national popular vote. This change would only take effect when National Popular Vote is adopted by states with enough electoral votes to elect a winner.

The group says that polls show that most people think this would be a good idea, and I don’t doubt those polls are right.

However, I don’t think it is necessarily a good idea, for a number of reasons. The winner of the popular vote does win the electoral vote almost all the time. Some, in fact, think that Al Gore should have won the electoral vote, if Florida had counted its votes properly. In most cases, the electoral vote magnifies the popular result. And if we changed the system to mean only popular votes counted, campaigning would change.

Sparsely populated states like Nevada would never see a presidential nominee in the flesh. Actually, I doubt we’d see much of them in Michigan, either. The candidates would probably just spend all their time on TV, or in heavily populated areas.

The United States is supposed to be a federal system, where the individual states have a distinct role to play. The current system isn’t really broken. We might want to be careful before trying to radically fix it.

Essay: Carping Criticism - 3.17.11

Remember the concern everyone had last year over the possibility that Asian carp might get into the Great Lakes? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been wondering what the government has been doing about that.

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Remember the Asian carp, which migrated up the Mississippi, into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and which experts feared were about to get into Lake Michigan?

That’s where things stood when I first talked about this issue here more than fifteen months ago. Since then, traces of carp DNA has been found in Lake Michigan, though there is no evidence that a permanent breeding population has been established there.

But if that ever happens, it will be an environmental disaster of unimaginable proportions. The carp are huge awful ugly fish. One variety tends to jump and have broken water skiers’ jaws.

Worse, they suck up virtually all the available food supply, which means they starve out other more desirable fish. Once they get firmly established, they are virtually impossible to eradicate, which would mean farewell to the sport and commercial fishing industries.

Plus, that would play havoc with the ecology of the lakes and could cost the economy, depending on whose estimates you believe, between one and seven billion dollars a year.

I wondered what the government has been doing about this, and last week talked to a highly respected environmental journalist about this. The Toledo Blade’s Tom Henry has been following the carp story for years. He has won numerous awards for his reporting, and is on the Society of Environmental Journalists board.

When I asked him what our government was doing to try to protect our lakes, his answer was “dithering.” Canada, he told me, was at least trying. This month alone, their government has levied two huge fines against two firms caught trying to smuggle live Asian carp into Canada, in one case, apparently to raise and breed.

That’s how all the trouble is thought to have started in the first place, when a flood in Arkansas washed some carp from a fish farm into the Mississippi River almost twenty years ago. Since then, they’ve been migrating north, and the federal response, Tom Henry said, has been seventeen years of indefensible inaction. Last year, the governors of most of the Great Lakes states attempted to get Illinois to close the canal.

But Illinois refused, saying it would be too devastating to Chicago’s economy, and the President and the Supreme Court refused to overturn that decision.

What’s happening now? Well, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has given itself another four years to do an “interbasin study,” of the problem and come up with a plan.

By then, the carp may be all the way to Vermont. The key danger zone, Henry tells me, is Western Lake Erie, the area from Toledo stretching on out past Port Clinton and Sandusky.

That is the anchor spot of the fishing industry and, sadly, also the area in which the carp might find it easiest to establish themselves. But when the Corps came to take public comment recently, where did they go? Ann Arbor.

Which, if they didn’t notice, isn’t on the lakes at all. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced a bill to get thing moving faster. “We’re anxious to light a fire under the Army Corps of Engineers,” she said. It would be nice if that happened before muddy-tasting Asian carp are the only things we have left to cook.

Essay: You Never Can Tell - 3.16.11

Some Michigan Democrats are hoping Governor Snyder’s controversial budget means he will be a one-term leader. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says history suggests something different.

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The governor’s made some decisions that are wildly unpopular. Unions are upset. Taxpayers are upset. His own party isn’t too sure he is right.

Behind closed doors, leaders of the opposition party are rubbing their hands in glee. They think they know a one-term governor when they see one.

That’s what’s going on right now in Wisconsin, to be sure, and also, to a lesser extent, in Lansing. Democrats are convinced that if Governor Snyder indeed manages to tax pensions, cut education, and end the Earned Income Tax Credit, he’ll be toast.

Well, maybe. But also, maybe not. One of my more sensitive students asked me this touching question recently: “Isn’t it a drag being old?” To which I said, “no, not really.”

To which he said, “why?”

What I wanted to say was something like, “because we Baby Boomer and Generation Xers have sucked up all the the available jobs, that’s why, and most of us aren’t leaving anytime soon.

“Which means you can look forward after graduation to fifteen years as a Wal-Mart associate.” I didn’t say that, because I am a mature adult. So I said I didn’t mind being old, because ... being old means you know stuff. And one thing I know is that politics is sort of like the weather. If you don’t like the way things are going now, wait ten minutes, or maybe ten months.

Twenty-eight years ago, we had another economic crisis and a new governor named James Blanchard temporarily raised taxes through the roof. Well, he was widely regarded as politically dead, especially after voters recalled two state senators.

But guess what. The tax hike worked; the budget got balanced; the economy picked up, and Blanchard was re-elected by an astonishing margin of more than two to one. That wasn’t all that surprising. Two years before Blanchard’s tax hike, we had a president who angered organized labor big-time by firing every striking member of the Air Traffic Controllers union in the country. If you thought the unions are mad at the governor now, you weren’t alive back then. But three years later, many union members voted to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

Eight years later, we had a new Republican governor who began doing controversial and unpopular things. He closed clinics and mental health facilities and chopped benefits. There was an uproar almost like the one now.

But the next election was a long time away. When it came, John Engler was reelected by a huge landslide, getting more than sixty percent of the vote against a respected former congressman.

Now it’s possible things will be different this time. If Snyder gets his budget passed, and the economy doesn’t turn around relatively soon, he and the Republicans could be in deep trouble. But his next election is more than three and half years away.

Michigan also seems to like divided government. We voted for Republican presidents and Democratic governors throughout the 1980s. We voted for Democratic presidents and Republican governors throughout the 1990s. In politics, it ain’t over till it’s over, and there really are no final victories. Those out of power should be a little cautious about measuring the drapes for their expected return.

Essay: Saving Newspapers - 3.14.11

Newspapers across the nation have been losing money and circulation, in Detroit more than in other place. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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It’s hardly a secret that newspapers aren’t doing very well these days. Over the decades, they’ve been gradually replaced as the nation’s universal mass medium by television.

Newspaper’s biggest economic blow came, however, with the flight of advertising revenue to the Internet. This, combined with an ever-more busy public bombarded by more and more media choices, has badly wounded what was once a thriving industry.

And left us in danger of being dangerously uninformed as well. Ann Arbor, for example, no longer has a daily newspaper at all.

The problem is perhaps most acute in Detroit, where, twenty-five years ago, the Detroit News and Free Press sold a combined total of one point three million newspapers every day.

That number has declined ever since. Audited figures show that as of last September, they were down to a combined circulation of less than four hundred thousand, a number that has dropped further since then.

To save money two years ago, Detroit’s newspapers embarked on an experiment in which they would deliver the papers only three days a week, and asked consumers to read it them on line or go to the store and buy it the rest if the week. This really hasn’t worked.

After first saying they would not allow independent contractors to deliver the papers to people‘s homes on the other days, the newspapers are now tolerating, if not actively encouraging this.

But the circulation is still falling, and recently, the Detroit Media Partnership, the agency which runs the papers, made an astonishing announcement. They will pay $5,000 each for the two best ideas readers offer to help serve the community and increase readership.

Well, I don’t intend to compete for the prize money, but I do have an idea which I am willing to offer them, free of charge.

I have been a newspaper reader all my life, a writer for newspapers for most of it. I have been a newspaper editor, helped run a newspaper company, and teach the history of journalism. So here’s what I recommend to not only the Detroit Media Partnership, but newspapers everywhere. Go back to producing newspapers for intelligent, informed consumers who like to read.

For the last twenty-five years, newspapers in general, and the Gannett company in particular, have produced newspapers seemingly designed for people who don’t like reading and who would prefer to watch TV instead. Well, the returns are in, and it is very clear that people who want to watch television don’t want a newspaper that imitates TV, with splashy pictures and articles about Miley Cyrus.

They don’t want a newspaper at all. Meanwhile, those of us who do like to read and want to know what’s going on in Michigan have been disenfranchised. The auto companies got in trouble partly because they strayed from their core business,

Newspapers should return to doing what they do best, and produce well-written, incisive coverage of things that matter.

If they do that, they just might find a winning formula with a smaller, though loyal and consistent base of subscribers. I know lots of people would tell me this couldn’t possibly work.

But even so, it might be worth a try. After all, it could hardly fail worse than what the newspapers are doing now.

Essay: Wacky Weather - 3.11.11

This winter has been one to remember, and it isn’t over yet. But what causes extreme weather, and does this winter call the whole question of climate change into some doubt? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been doing some reading.

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You don’t need me to tell you this, but we’ve had a rough winter. Not nearly as tough as they’ve had in New York, or almost anywhere on the eastern seaboard. But it’s been cold and snowy.

How snowy? Well, in Detroit, we are already in the top dozen winters of all time, with more than sixty inches. Last month was the third snowiest February in recorded history.

But it could always be worse. If you have any interest in the weather, by the way, there’s a fascinating little book that just came out last year: Extreme Michigan Weather: The Wild World of the Great Lakes State, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Author Paul Gross is a longtime meterologist who now works for WDIV-TV in Detroit. His book looks at the strange and constantly changing weather we have in this state, or, as he puts it, everything from heat waves to bitter snows, ice storms to tornadoes to floods.

We don’t, however, have hurricanes, and his book will tell you why. (Not having any tropical ocean waters around here is a big part of it.) Ice we do have -- in abundance.

Ice and snow. But if you are feeling so tired of snow you can’t stand it, consider this. We lucked out today. Grand Rapids once got almost seven inches of snow on March 11. In Flint, it’s been as cold as seven below zero this day, which I found in Paul Gross’s book.

He includes all these tables for fun in Extreme Michigan Weather. So, just in case you were burning to know, it was once twenty below zero on this date in Ironwood.

I’m glad I wasn’t there -- though I wish today was going to match the seventy-two degrees we once hit on this date in Motown.

What has been happening is snowier winters. Five of the last nine winters have had at least sixty inches of snow. Prior to that, we had only ten such winters in more than a century. So the logical question is: Does that mean global warming is a bunch of hooey?

Not at all. I talked a few weeks ago to Professor Andrew Jorgensen at the University of Toledo. He is a chemist who has been studying climate change. He told me that one effect was hotter summers and colder winters. But with fifty years, if present trends continue, he expects our climate here to be somewhere between that of Kentucky’s and that of Arkansas.

We may feel nostalgic for winters like this if and when that happens, though this year I’ve had enough of walking a rambunctious puppy on icy sidewalks to last me a lifetime. Paul Gross’s book didn’t answer every question I’ve ever had about the weather, but he did clear up one mystery for me: What makes weather happen?

“There’s one main concept to remember,” he says. “Weather results from change and from rising air.” Works for me.

By the way, I read that sentence the other day while waiting for a meeting in Lansing, and I realized that if you substitute the word “politics” for “weather,” and make it “rising hot air”…. you’ve got a second handy definition that’s just as true as the first one.

Essay: Emergency Financial Managers - 3.10.11

A bitterly divided Michigan House and Senate have passed new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation. Michigan Radio‘s Jack Lessenberry has some non-partisan thoughts.

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Nobody in Lansing was neutral yesterday when the Michigan senate completed passage of new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation on a straight, party line vote.

State Senator Phil Pavlov said this is needed to maintain “vital services, such as public safety and education,” when a city or a school district is in desperate financial straits.

This reform, he said, is necessary to allow steps to be taken “to protect public interests and the public’s money and strengthen local control and accountability.” His fellow Republicans all agreed.

But if you talked to any of the Democrats, they sounded like this was the equivalent of Mussolini seizing power. “An unfair and unjustified power grab,“ Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer called it. One of her colleagues said it went way too far, “and was going to damage our communities and our schools.”

Well, you could say that it is nice to see that our time-honored tradition of bitter partisan divisions is alive and well, but I think the opposite. We’ve had four sterile years of that in Lansing. I think we’d all be better off if this could have been a bipartisan bill.

It’s also frustratingly clear that in the past, some emergency managers in places like Pontiac and Hamtramck could have used more authority. Robert Bobb needed to be able to tackle academic reform in the Detroit district; the courts said he couldn’t.

Now, his successor will have that power. Democrats are mainly afraid of provisions in the bill that would allow emergency managers to void contracts and ignore collective bargaining agreements if necessary. EFMs can even dissolve a municipal government.

Democrats rightly fear this could be the death knell for public employee unions in such cases. To be sure, the majority Republicans seemed uninterested in even attempting to compromise or win over Democrats. However, here’s something we might ask the indignant minority party: Where have you been for the last several years?

What’s clear is that a lot more school districts and municipalities are likely to have to endure emergency financial managers, or EFMs for short.

This has been clear to everyone for some time, and it has also been clear that the old law was inadequate. Did the Democrats propose changes last year, when they controlled the governorship and the state house? Did they suggest conducting a review of Detroit’s troubled finances?

They did not, clearly for political reasons. They did nothing, any more than they attempted to address the state’s deep-seated financial problems. Now, the balance of power has shifted.

What’s needed now is a little more common sense and a little less hysteria. As I read this law, EFMs will now be appointed by the state treasurer, not the governor. And the man now in that job, Andy Dillon, happens to be a Democrat. He also has the ability to grant local officials most of the powers emergency managers have.

If emergency managers are appointed who gleefully begin dissolving contracts for sheer ideological reasons, there’s bound to be plenty of public criticism, and a backlash, as witness Wisconsin.

What’s needed now is the means and goodwill to keep financially strapped governments functioning, and, especially, to educate kids, no matter what.

If everyone keeps that in mind, we’ll all be better off.