Bureaucracy chokes Detroit

Mismanaged departments thwart efficient services

David Coates / The Detroit News Thomas Blakney lives across the street from a city-owned lot filled with discarded tires and trash. Public Works officials won’t remove the tires because they don’t want to spend the money.

By Cameron McWhirter / The Detroit News

    DETROIT

etroit’s government hobbles the city’s efforts to revive.

    Systemic problems hamper the efficient delivery of city services: understaffing, underfunding, mismanagement, lack of coordination between departments, scant concern for serving residents, and failure by employees to deal creatively with challenges.

    These deficiencies combined with an ineffective City Council and bleak financial prospects create a picture of a government adrift, disconnected from its citizens and their most pressing issues, and often unable to meet residents’ most basic needs. This condition contributes to keeping Detroit a broken city.

    “The culture of city government is the barrier,” said Freman Hendrix, a businessman who was deputy to Mayor Dennis Archer. “The low expectations people bring to their jobs. We have political problems, cultural problems, and we have union problems.”

    Detroit’s City Hall fails residents in these ways:

* It hasn’t conquered blight. The Buildings and Safety Engineering and Public Works departments are slow to demolish abandoned buildings.

    The 2000 census shows Detroit has the highest rate of vacant buildings among the 15 largest U.S. cities. Vacant buildings attract criminals and squatters.

    In addition, the city still has the nation’s largest stockpile of municipally owned vacant lots, about 40,000. The city has no idea what it owns and no effective process for clearing up titles so the land can be sold. Consequently, Detroit must spend millions of dollars each year maintaining vacant lots while losing millions in property tax revenue.

    — It hasn’t maintained the city’s infrastructure, eroding the living experiences of residents. The Recreation Department fails to maintain parks. Even Belle Isle, the city’s jewel according to Archer, has vacant buildings and potholed roads. Detroit public libraries close two days a week and most nights. The Fire Department has chronic staffing and equipment problems. The Public Lighting Department fails to keep street lights on in neighborhoods across the city.

    These service breakdowns mean higher repair outlays once the problems become acute, causing inconvenience and, in some cases, threatening public safety.

    — It has contributed to flight. As the 2000 census showed, Detroit lost more than 76,000 people in the last decade. People looking for better city services, lower taxes and higher-quality public schools continue to leave. The combination of costly fees, red tape and taxes drives businesses from Detroit. Even during the 1993-97 boom, Detroit lost more than 4 percent of its businesses, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As businesses close or relocate, jobs and taxes are lost.

    City government’s problems are not only widespread, but they also are old. Since the city began to lose population in the late 1950s, a succession of mayors — Miriani, Cavanagh, Gribbs, Young and Archer — have had to face the hard-to-manage demands of declining revenues, rising needs for city services and a workforce that has been often overwhelmed or indifferent to the social problems attendant to a shrinking city.

    City Hall has risen to the occasion to meet certain challenges, but only after a crisis caused national humiliation and thunderous public outcry.

    Angels’ Night, an annual effort requiring the coordination of multiple departments and tens of thousands of volunteers, effectively killed the Devil’s Night arson plague — but only after nationally televised blazes scarred the city’s reputation.

    The city has a coordinated neighborhood snow removal plan, but it took the national embarrassment of the January 1999 blizzard — which left the city immobilized for days — to make clearing the streets a priority.

    The problems facing Detroit are similar to those of other big-city governments, but the barriers to solutions run deep. They include expensive or restrictive union contracts, tight city finances, the difficulty of shedding activities that could be better performed elsewhere and the lack of accountability among civil servants.

    For a mayor attempting to make changes, the challenge is to stay focused, Hendrix said. “You get scattered, and the push-pull that comes from the community and the council members with their own agendas can really get you off-track.”

    David Fasenfest, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies, compared the city’s prolonged problems to a toothache. What starts as a minor annoyance grows in intensity until it’s all a person can think about.

    “It undermines your willingness to tolerate minor inconveniences,” he said. “Your underlying ability to cope with other problems lessens. People move away. What you are left with is the people who cannot leave and services that cannot be repaired.”