Council members’ oversight is not thorough

    The council members are well paid for their services, earning $81,000 annually plus they each have office budgets of $569,101 annually (except President Gil Hill who gets $85,456 and an office budget of $756,850). They also get two month-long breaks annually. The council meets five days a week on the 13th floor of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center.

    A close look at the two-hour, 19-minute meeting on Sept. 5 illustrates how the council members talk about things that impact precious few Detroiters.

    At least two of the city’s most glaring and intractable problems got short shrift: overgrown lots and abandoned buildings.

    One minute and 25 seconds into the meeting, line item 12 — two contracts on cutting weeds on vacant lots — was dealt with in three seconds by the four members in attendance. Five others hadn’t shown up yet.

    “We’ll approve line item 12,” said Councilman Nicholas Hood III, then heading the meeting.

    None of the other three members in attendance spoke.

    Line item 12 was a Finance Department report on the contracts — one for $110,426 and the other for $86,736. The city contracts out most of the weed and grass cutting work for its more than 40,000 vacant lots.

    The contracts already had been submitted and approved. But bureaucrats later discovered that the contract math was incorrect. No one, including the council members, had read the original carefully. No one questioned whether the contract had been fulfilled properly: were the contractors cutting the grass as required? The council spent three seconds on the issue. It spent three minutes on ladybugs.

    Later the council approved line items 20, 21, and 22, requests by the Buildings and Safety Engineering Department to remove 29 buildings from its demolition list because the buildings had been securely sealed. The department also asked the council to allow 19 previously condemned buildings to stay on the demolition list. The council approved the requests without discussion. No council member asked about any of the specific properties: What kind of buildings were they? How long had they been vacant? Who owned them? How much would it cost to board them up or demolish them? What were the chances of selling the properties?

    Mahaffey was confused in reading the housing list. She wondered why the buildings did not have licenses to allow them to be rented. Sheila Cockrel explained they were buildings to be demolished. No one was living in them.

    The council spent one minute and 25 seconds on the matter. It spent three minutes on ladybugs.

    Similar buildings are brought to the council every day because Buildings and Safety Engineering must get the council’s approval to put any building on its demolition list or take it off. This laborious approval process — dealing with every property handled by the city — has caused months-long delays in the demolition of buildings, because the council would approve only a certain number of demolitions each week.

    The Archer administration had tried to get the council to agree to hold demolition hearings only on properties where someone was challenging the demolition. The move would reduce drastically the number of hearings required. The council refused.

    After a Detroit News investigation in 2000 found 1,181 vacant buildings within one block of city schools, the council heeded a longstanding Archer administration request to hold more condemnation hearings each week. Prior to the change, 96 demolition cases were brought forth weekly. Now Monday sessions average about 150 cases. The council has been known on Mondays to review 250 cases.

    But with the overwhelming majority of these buildings, these reviews are simply a government formality: the council members usually have no idea about the status of the buildings. They almost never ask questions. Many council members have not been showing up to the added session on Monday afternoons. Five of the nine members were absent for each of the afternoon sessions on Sept. 10 and Sept. 17. Four were absent on Sept. 24.

    As with much of their daily agenda Sept. 5 — whether it was reports on tax breaks for local companies or authorizing parade permits — the council members simply shrugged and moved on.

    Councilwoman Mahaffey at this meeting submitted a resolution calling for the city to set up new rules for accelerated forfeiture of abandoned property — an important issue because Detroit has the largest abandoned building problem of any city in the nation. The abandoned buildings — from multi-story factories contaminated with chemicals to burnt-out bungalows used by drug dealers — pock the city’s landscape and limit moves for economic rebirth.

    Mahaffey remarked that no action had been taken on this proposal, which she has been advocating for four years. She said she was awaiting reports from several city departments on the proposal. The council deferred the idea to a later date — again.