Jackson Jambalaya

Clean up a city, balance the books, get a surplus.  All good things, right? Wrong.  Doing such merely gets you called a "plantation overseer".  Yup.  Pontiac, Michigan is making a comeback after the state revoked home rule for the city.  The Wall Street Journal reported today:


When Mayor Deirdre Waterman wanted to trumpet the economic recovery of this city of 60,000, she couldn’t turn to a municipal public relations worker or community development staffer.

Those positions were wiped out by state-appointed emergency managers several years ago, when the city’s staff of more than 500 was cut to 30. Today most employees administer contracts for essential services such as policing and street cleaning that have been transferred to other districts or privatized.

Instead, Ms. Waterman tapped three interns from Oakland University 6 miles away in Rochester, Mich. The students produced a newsletter that was mailed to Pontiac’s 25,000 homes.

“Those jobs would have been done by city employees—if I had city employees to do that,” said Ms. Waterman, who works out of a nearly vacant City Hall overlooking a resurgent downtown. (Seems like she found a way to get it done with little, if any, cost to the city. Yet she complains.)

The internship program with the university has given the mayor a de facto staff, and the students some real-world experience. But it also points to tensions among the mayor and city council, who have no party affiliations, and state-appointees in this recovering city where elected officials still have little control over daily functions.....

But Pontiac and five other Michigan municipalities, including Flint and Benton Harbor, still are overseen by transition advisory boards appointed by the governor. Pontiac’s board has four members who hold finance-related positions in local, county and state government.

Pontiac, which once had 85,000 residents and played host to the Detroit Lions in the soaring Silverdome, has endured trouble common across the Rust Belt. In addition to the Lions moving to Ford Field in Detroit, Pontiac also lost a total of nearly 3,000 jobs when General Motors shut a truck-assembly plant in 1994 and another in 2009. Today, many residents still work at other GM sites or for the county or a local hospital. Pontiac’s jobless rate was 10.7% in September.

Many residents moved away and property values declined, leaving abandoned houses, bloated expenses and sharply lower revenue. The city had three emergency managers between 2009 and 2013. The last one appointed Joseph Sobota as city administrator and he runs Pontiac on a daily basis.

State officials are now weighing whether to completely hand back power to the city—something Ms. Waterman is pressing. “I’m ready to go back to home rule,” she said.

Louis Schimmel, who served as emergency manager from 2011 to 2013, takes credit for the recovery and yet says it is still not time for business as usual in Pontiac.

Mr. Schimmel sold off the city’s sewage authority for $55 million and drastically cut city jobs. Moreover, he and a predecessor dissolved the police, firefighter and other unions using powers granted by the state’s emergency-manager law for financially stressed municipalities.

“I financially fixed the city big-time,” said Mr. Schimmel who still wields power as an advisory board member. “We don’t feel that we’re comfortable leaving right now, I can tell you that much.”

Today, Pontiac has a surplus of $10.8 million, or about 30% of its roughly $32 million budget, its third straight surplus. Revenues are rising as more residents are paying property taxes and the city has pushed to collect delinquent income taxes, officials said.

Entrepreneurs and developers are returning........

There are lingering tensions, however, at City Hall.

During a recent council meeting, members repeatedly sparred with Mr. Sobota, the city administrator. And several residents complained that Mr. Sobota and the previous emergency managers shortchanged the city. They said properties were sold off too cheaply and that the city doesn’t have enough firefighters under its contract with a nearby township.

One resident of Pontiac—which is 52% African-American, 27% white and 17% Hispanic—called Mr. Sobota, who is white, a “plantation overseer.” (Can we hire him down here?)

“Democracy has left the city of Pontiac,” said Walter Moore, who was mayor in the 1980s and 1990s and wants the state to return control to the city. (Ahhh.... one of the fools who screwed up things in the first place. Just like Louis XVII: Learned nothing and forgot everything) “Until that’s done, there will be no peace.” (Fine. Perhaps its time to start running fools such as this one out of town.)  The criticism doesn’t faze him, Mr. Sobota said.

Ms. Waterman, an ophthalmologist who earns $100,000 a year as mayor, said she is focused on attracting new businesses and cleaning up blight. There are up to 1,000 vacant lots within the 20-square-mile city.

But on Saginaw Street, Pontiac’s main drag, business is picking up. On one end, a barbecue restaurant is expected to open soon next to a 1920s-era performing arts theater that is being restored. On the other end, the Lafayette Market, a brightly lighted space with a wine store and cafe, does a brisk lunch and catering business. “It’s starting to make a comeback,” Cheri Westberg, operations manager at the market, said of Pontiac..... Rest of article.

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