Detroit Free Press, by Stephen Henderson

By Stephen Henderson

So there weren't a lot of new numbers in the Detroit financial review team report.

The city's broke, spends more than it takes in, and its efforts to cut spending have not made a significant structural difference.

Those truths are so tired that we ought to consider translating them into Latin and making them the new city motto.

But there is one set of figures that has to dominate the conversation about the city's future from now on: $14 billion in long-term liabilities, $2 billion set to run past due in the next five years.

The city's bond, pension and retiree health care liabilities are gripping tighter around residents' necks. The payments required to maintain those liabilities stretch somewhere between 35 and 42 cents of every dollar, meaning services - streetlights, cops, firefighters, snow removal - all compete for what's left over.

The only way to fix that is to restructure those liabilities in a big way - and you'll need quite a bit of cash to do so.

Detroit's best alternative, at least the best one I see, is to begin talking seriously about how to leverage its assets - through creative leases, other revenuegenerating agreements or, yes, sales - to raise the few billion dollars needed to put the city in a less obligated state.

The water department. The parking department.

The city has to start weighing the need to monetize (or sell) those assets against the value of keeping them in their current state.

It's not dissimilar from a family. If you spend 40% of your income on liabilities, you can cut all the other expenses you want - get rid of cable, buy your clothes secondhand, eat Ramen noodles every meal - without changing the fact that you owe more than you can support. You need relief from the liabilities.

This city sometimes feels like one big dysfunctional family - fighting and blaming and screeching to avoid obvious solutions.

And for the past year, the state has been a little like the crazy, visiting uncle. Two officials in Mayor Dave Bing's administration, program manager William (Kriss) Andrews and Chief Financial Officer Jack Martin, were appointed to help everyone else face reality. That never happened.

I suspect the problem is largely the city's political culture. The most minor discussions about city assets - such as the proposal to let the state manage Belle Isle - inspire paranoid fantasies of loss of control and self-governance.

But it's time for more sober discussion. What's the benefit to the city, for example, of owning a water department? Profits can't be spent enhancing or maintaining other services. And the water department's assets are so encumbered (with debt and the cost of deferred maintenance), that it can't even be leveraged reasonably to support other services.

From a purely financial perspective, its greatest value may lie in a sale, or an agreement with a private party to operate it. Either could raise significant cash for the city - and that cash could help restructure the city's liabilities, freeing more money to provide crucial services.

The city has about $5.7 billion in unfunded responsibilities for retiree health care, for example. With cash (you'd have to be talking hundreds of millions), you could begin thinking about how that liability can be off-loaded into a voluntary employee beneficiary association (VEBA), managed by the unions, with contributions from city coffers that decline over time and eventually end.

The city's bondholders might also be convinced to take haircuts - cash payments that equate to cents on the dollar of what they're owed, but represent a better, more certain payout than standing in line in bankruptcy court.

What stopped Bing, the City Council, or the state-chosen financial gurus from suggesting or pursuing these ideas?

Nothing, other than Detroit's toxic political environment - and, frankly, a longstanding lack of leadership.

If we need an emergency manager to finally break that stalemate, I say bring it on. 

By Stephen Henderson

In January, a 6-year-old boy died in a southwest Detroit house fire because the city's depleted ambulance corps could not get to him in time.

The same month, an 85-year-old woman's home burned to the ground because it took firefighters 21 minutes to respond, their trucks rumbling past closed stations closer to the fire.

This is Detroit. This is life for Detroiters.

And this is the breach unto which Gov. Rick Snyder will now dispatch an emergency financial manager, a last-ditch effort to seal the gap between the promise of functional city government and the reality of a citizenry that suffers - and dies - from the utter collapse of basic service delivery.

Detroit's elected leaders have been unable, and in many cases unwilling, to confront the horrible fiscal imbalances that leave insufficient money for EMS rigs, fire trucks, police officers and public lighting.

Now they'll lose power to someone who will.

The governor's announcement last week stirred an instant debate about the "importance" of local governance, and the cost to elected officials' authority.

City Council members say they may sue to block the appointment of the emergency financial manager, principally because they're worried about whether the manager might cut them too far out of decision-making.

But I'm reminded of the council's decision, just a few weeks ago, to forgo a plan to make Belle Isle into a state park, which was part of the fiscal stability plan a majority of the council signed onto last year.

Members dickered over control and concerns about the state's "intentions." And several complained that the debate over Belle Isle had become a big deal; it would save the city only about $6 million a year, members said.

But $6 million could buy a lot of new EMS rigs, or pay to keep far more on the road than Detroit has now. And $6 million could pay for at least 60 new police officers or firefighters. It could have meant better staffing and maintenance at dozens of other rundown parks across the city.

Detroit's elected leaders have just lost perspective about what matters, and what's significant about their jobs and people's lives in this city.

The emergency financial manager is coming to repair the covenant between government and the governed, to return the focus of the city's infrastructure to its most basic responsibilities. Keep the streets safe. Pick up the trash. Run the buses on time. Fight the fires and rescue the wounded.

That's what the council and the mayor have failed to do, consistently. Instead, they've allowed debt, liabilities and a morass of egos and dysfunction to overtake nearly everything else.

I'd love to believe that with one more chance, one more agreement, the city's political class could get its act together and start digging Detroit out of its financial hole, rather than continuing to dig deeper.

I'd also like to believe in unicorns and gold pots at the end of rainbows, though.

An emergency financial manager, someone with near unfettered authority to make change and set finances right, is a more realistic bet right now. Snyder has to be sure, of course, that he picks the right man or woman for the job, and that the standard for performance is a high one.

The fix that matters is not ultimately about fiscal balance - it's about the people who live here, and improving their lives.

At minimum, let's say people in the city shouldn't be dying, waiting for services that never come.

The governor says Detroit can't wait.

I say it's Detroiters, the victims of the spectacular failure of local governance in this city, who can't afford any more delay. 

By Stephen Henderson

That a small but energetic number of Detroiters are gathering to protest the appointment of an emergency financial manager in Detroit is understandable. The right to petition government for redress of grievances is guaranteed in the First Amendment, and it's one of the things that makes this nation great.

But there's a profound intellectual disconnect between what the protesters seem to be saying and what they're doing.

Their argument - voiced by City Council members Kwame Kenyatta and JoAnn Watson, and activists like New Black Panther Nation head Malik Shabazz and the Rev. Charles Williams II, who leads the local chapter of the National Action Network - is that we, as Detroiters, can fix our problems by ourselves. Outsiders need not meddle, and certainly shouldn't be swooping in to take the reins.

But their actions so far - blocking traffic with freeway slowdowns on the Lodge and I-94, the threat of a human chain blocking access to the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center - are just about grabbing attention.

I'd have more respect for their efforts if, say, they organized a group of Detroiters to go out and pick up around Belle Isle on a Sunday morning, when the trash piles over the curbs and overwhelms city park staff.

Or what if they lined the darkened streets of the city's most destitute neighborhoods during early morning hours, when children walking to school wonder what danger lurks in the rows of abandoned houses?

What about getting a group of Detroiters to volunteer to staff the city's recreation centers this summer?

Those are the things we need done here in Detroit, and they're things city government has not been able to do because of the declining population and tax base and sustained, awful decision-making by our elected leaders.

It strikes me that the best way to protest the state's intervention (and to make a strong point about city government's dysfunction, to boot) is to do things that make the need for state help less dire. Show how dedicated Detroiters, working together, can actually make things better. Take control of the city's trajectory. Make a difference.

A protest that slows traffic? That just shows disrespect for metro Detroiters commuting to work, people paying what little taxes the city still has the ability to collect. Not to mention that if an ambulance gets stuck behind the wall of slowmoving cars, the protest could turn destructively embarrassing.

A human chain around city hall? It's a bit inane and focused on the idea of power, rather than results.

This is more than a nitpicking criticism, too.

Demagoguing, or playing on people's worst instincts and fears for one's own political gain, has long been a problem here in Detroit, and its prevalence among leadership has helped lead the city to this low point.

The protests over the emergency financial manager in Detroit appeal to the most base and craven instincts, seeking to tell a people who can't count on the most basic services that their biggest problem is the outsiders who are tasked with restoring order.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s was successful precisely because it avoided that kind of indulgence. Demonstrations were effective because they focused attention on the problems that needed changing, not just on the people staging them.

In Detroit, our problem is the lack of services and the fiscal imbalance that make it impossible to manage a sustainable urban center. Trash. Darkness that helps make streets horribly dangerous.

I'd love to see a series of protests that drew attention, especially right now, to those issues and the solutions that Detroiters themselves could help effect.

By Stephen Henderson

A few weeks ago, at the height of the imbroglio over whether the Detroit Institute of Arts might have to sell art to help the city dig out of its financial hole, someone close to the restructuring negotiations described what was happening in terms we all ought to get used to.

"Nobody's wanting to sell art out of the museum," this person said. "But Detroit pawned all of that, and everything else it owns, decades ago. And it has pawned it several times over since then. Kevyn (Orr, the emergency manager) is just the guy holding the ticket."

In other words, the events that will take shape to recast Detroit's financial fortunes were set in motion long ago.

This is what happens when you systematically disinvest from a region's core city over half a century, while the suburbs grow and regional leaders cheer the economic and social divide that opens up and swallows the area's vitality.

This is what happens when those left behind in the city borrow 33 times what the whole place is worth, and continue to make promises - to employees and residents - that are the most irresponsible form of economic fantasy.

And this is what happens when the bill for all that irrationality comes due.

Stuff gets sold. People get hurt. Pledges and promises shatter on the hard, cold floor of reality. And everyone who lives in southeast Michigan - indeed, everyone who helped make this mess - will be affected.

Orr's plans to offer the city's creditors just pennies on the dollar (we owe billions) is just the first of many stunners that will be revealed over the next few weeks.

The city's retirees will be told of their expected sacrifice at the same time. (I'm still hopeful the city can find a way to keep at least most of its promises to retirees intact; these are people who planned their later lives around those pledges, and in most cases have no opportunity to earn more on their own.)

Soon after, a broad reorganization of city services - one I'm told will include department eliminations, privatizations and the creation of authorities to offload responsibility - will start to be unveiled.

This is what Orr has been doing for the past two months, for those who have been wondering. His plan, nearly complete and almost ready to go to all the stakeholders, touches on all of the city's financial dysfunction and managerial chaos.

The goal is simple: restructure the debt so more of the money that comes in can be spent directly on services; and restructure the way the city provides those services to ensure they're done efficiently and effectively. It won't get done without tremendous sacrifice - and perhaps precious losses - but those are the fruits of our own sour plantings, not Orr's.

The plan is a blueprint in a couple of ways: It's what he will ask creditors and the unions to agree to, but also will serve as the starting point for a municipal bankruptcy, which will be unavoidable if anyone refuses to go along with Orr's requests.

My bet is that bankruptcy is where we're headed - no way will all the creditors and all the unions agree to the terms. They're too stark, and the number of parties at the table is too many and their interests are too disparate.

But it's still key that Orr has developed the plan, because it will give the city a stronger bargaining chip in bankruptcy. Chapter 9, which governs municipal court-supervised reorganizations, already gives the city the upper hand by preventing creditors from submitting their own restructuring plans and prohibiting the courts from ordering asset sales.

Orr's work to put together a plan that makes the city solvent while preserving assets and improving services will be hard to beat - even by "the banks," which some folks feared would have their way with the city and its assets through this process. It's pretty clear from Orr's plan that those who took a risk on lending to Detroit will get more than their share of a haircut if he has his way.

The auto company investors howled over bankruptcy payouts that were a few dimes on the dollar. No one will be happy with pennies.

The next few weeks will be tough for Detroit, for southeast Michigan and especially for Detroiters, whose suffering predates this climax by decades. We all laid the groundwork for it, though, and should be prepared to accept that the consequences are necessary for the city to move forward, and, someday, to thrive again. 

By Stephen Henderson

Last year, when I was writing about the persistent darkness near my house owing to streetlights that had been out for months, Mayor Dave Bing's office proffered a fastidious explanation.

They'd love to get the lights on East Lafayette Boulevard back on, they said, but the fixtures were old, and so was the wiring. They would attempt a temporary fix (which th eventually did, and the street is now bathed in light again), but couldn't promise a permanent mend until there was money to replace and update the infrastructure.

There just wasn't enough money - because of the city's crushing debt and the financial demands of employees and retirees - to maintain a service you'd find in Mexico City where, despite the third-world economy, the night sky isn't nearly as dark as it is in half of Detroit.

The equation's all wrong. Creditors and employees come first. Residents and services get what's left over.

And that's exactly what emergency manager Kevyn Orr proposes to change, in a big way, in his 134-page restructuring proposal.

Services and residents will come first. And at least for now, he'll stop making debt payments. And he'll ask workers and retirees - who, to be fair, have already sacrificed a fair amount - to give even more in the name of re-prioritizing the city's denizens.

That's a fundamental change in the way government in Detroit has been managed for many decades, and it's the strongest reason Detroiters should be lining up in support of Orr's plan. It's not pretty. And it will be painful - and there may yet be some further sacrifices that city residents need to make in order for it to work.

But for the first time in a generation, someone has put forth a real plan to focus on what should matter most in city government: the people who live here, and the services they need.

Orr says he'll immediately begin reinvesting $125 million annually in city services, money that will help modernize our police force and get lights on in neighborhoods. But if Orr's plan is successful - either through a negotiated settlement with creditors and employees or a bankruptcy proceeding - it would free hundreds of millions more each year for vital services.

Right now, the city spends about 46 cents of every dollar on public safety, and another 38 cents on its debt and long-term obligations. The rest of city government - everything from trash pickup to buses and finance and lighting - squeaks by on the 16 cents remaining.

Every penny that Orr can siphon out of that 38 cents (and frankly, everything he can maximize in the 46 cents already going to public safety) means more money for everything else.

Imagine that. The vast majority of the taxes Detroit collects could actually pay for services.

The metaphor that leaps to my mind is geometric. A right triangle has three sides, all of which depend on the others to form the structure. But its defining elements are the angle formed by the intersection of the two inferior sides, and the superior third side that's created as a result.

Orr is assigning the interests of creditors and employees to those inferior sides. Residents and services are the dominant side, whose interests should be nurtured by the intersection of the other two. You borrow money to build infrastructure for residents. You hire employees to provide services - for residents.

A few months ago, I wrote that Gov. Rick Snyder's decision to appoint an emergency manager, somewhat ironically, was about repairing the covenant between the governed and the government in Detroit. This is exactly what I was talking about.

Orr's plan, if successful, would return Detroit government to the basics: Keep the lights on, keep the streets safe, get the garbage picked up. And it would deemphasize the other conceits (unmanageable, irresponsible debt; acquiescence to the special-interest-class behavior of some employee unions) that helped create the city's fiscal crisis, and left residents living in a service wasteland.

It's stunning that some creditors will be offered just pennies on the dollar for the city's debts. And it's tragic that some retirees who made plans around the city's promises of pensions and health benefits will become victims of mismanagement.

But city residents have seen their taxes return pennies on the dollar in services for decades. They've been the victims of broken promises since before I was born. Orr's plan begins to make them whole again, and at minimum asserts their right to expect decent services, and efficient government.

There's a lot to be done before we can say this was a success. Deals must be made and honored. And the city's political class will have to embrace the new structure Orr leaves behind, and execute the new paradigm.

But this is a step forward Detroiters ought to leap to embrace - and one that could pay off far beyond its financial implications. 

By Stephen Henderson

The bankers blinked and waved off Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr's plan to have them tour some of the city's most blighted areas.

It's an optic win, if not a substantive one, for Orr, who is trying to convince many of the city's creditors to take just a fraction of the $11.4billion they're owed to help the city avoid municipal bankruptcy. If Orr can get the bankers to keep blinking, he might just pull it all off.

To me, the message that Orr was trying to send the bankers with the tour was clear: Here are the assets against which you've lent billions. City buses with no air-conditioning. Mile after mile of urban devastation - abandoned homes, burned-out structures, deterioration and desertion on a scale unmatched in other American cities.

Orr has to convince the banks, particularly the ones he is treating more harshly than bankruptcy rules might, that his offer is the best they'll ever get. There's nothing left here to give. Their money, for better or worse, is gone. Bankruptcy will be a long, expensive journey that would net creditors not much more than what's being offered.

That the bankers didn't want to see up close, or feared a news media spectacle while they were touring, is frustrating. But it also suggests the other prong of Orr's tour - essentially a play for empathy with city residents whose suffering will be enhanced by a prolonged fight over the pennies left to divvy up - had some legs.

Orr will need to keep pressing that case, in as many ways as possible, over the next few weeks. For the record, it's worth noting that Orr's tough stance on paying back the city's creditors effectively lays waste to the criticism that he was sent here only to take care of the banks' interests.

The municipal lending community is screaming bloody murder over Orr's reordering of long-held notions of secure debt, and a showdown, either in or outside of bankruptcy court, now seems inevitable. Creditors want their money, but also know their future ability to make money through lending depends on keeping a strong relationship with cities like Detroit.

Orr knows that Detroit has no reasonable way to pay back what it has borrowed, but also must preserve the city's ability to operate and rebuild in the future.

The negotiations between the two sides could set important precedents nationwide for the way big, debt-laden urban communities try to restructure their finances.

Already, Orr has run into opposition from one creditor, Ambac Financial Group, which is challenging Orr's decision to treat the general obligation bonds that company backs as unsecured and worth just pennies on the dollar. Ambac says the move would threaten future lending to Detroit and other municipalities; if there is no security for the debt they're issuing, they might not do it. Bonds for capital projects and infrastructure could become unattainable.

But Orr says general obligation bonds are secured by only tax revenues, which in Michigan have legal limits, and in Detroit have reached a practical limit.

Orr is also now suing Syncora Guarantee, a backer of lending that helped the city refinance its pension obligations, to stop it from withholding casino revenues (which were offered up as security when the city's deteriorating finances jeopardized the deal) from the city.

Again, Orr's position boils down to the idea that banks have made all there is to make off Detroiters; it's now time to refocus money on residents through services.

The tour could have been a key data point for creditors to consider; even if it made little difference in their overall calculations, it would have painted them a sobering picture of what their investments look like, and what life is like for those who live here.

But I think the point was made. Advantage: Orr - and by extension, Detroiters who need a resolution to this debate that leaves the possibility for a better-functioning city on the back end.

By Stephen Henderson

The White House's we'll-keep-an-eye-on-that response to the biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history is an astounding puzzler and suggests a dangerous lack of urban vision - and no understanding of Detroit's unique issues.

White House spokesperson Amy Brundage said the president was "monitoring" the situation and remained "committed" to a partnership in recovery.

Vice President Joe Biden was even more aloof. "We don't know" how the federal government can help Detroit, he told MSNBC on Friday morning.

Really? No agenda or ideas for helping the nation's auto capital, once its fourth largest city, get back on its feet after a 60-year decline that owes, in large part, to spectacular, federally subsidized abandonment, scattered and inconsistent manufacturing policy and retiree issues that are beginning to sink cities around the country?

Let's provide some much-needed direction for President Barack Obama and Clueless Joe.

Detroit's rebirth is what they ought to be focused on, thinking about how federal dollars can help fuel the city's economic growth, shore up its services and attract the businesses and residents who will ply its future.

Given the other cities struggling with the same problems Detroit has - underfunded pension and other retiree obligations - it would be quixotic to argue for a bailout of any kind.

But Detroit is also different from other cities. Its problems are deeper, born not only of crushing legacy obligations but of staggering population loss (a million people over 60 years), abandonment and tax-base erosion. And the biggest difference would be the city's bankruptcy filing, which is an aggressive measure to restructure its debt burden and set the city up for responsible governance.

Detroit should emerge from Chapter 9 reorganization poised to thrive again, and targeted federal investment - in what will help forge the city's 21st-Century economy - would make sense in a way that bailouts never do.

In the New York Times on Saturday, Steven Rattner, the banker who led the auto turnaround team, argued for federal assistance for Detroit, saying it was a "mistake" that "neither the state nor the federal government has evinced any inclination to provide meaningful financial assistance."

Sources close to emergency manager Kevyn Orr also have told me that he lobbied hard with Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett (a longtime friend) for federal help and has been frustrated by the White House's lack of engagement.

In "The Metropolitan Revolution," their book about the importance of innovative economies emerging around the world, the Brookings Institute's Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley argue that cities (including Detroit, with its downtown and Midtown revivals) are finding their own way to vitality in the face of a declining role for centralized, federal government.

But why shouldn't Detroit, as classic a case of the horrible consequences of federal and state disinvestment, be the model for a re-examination of what specific federal investment might build?

This city didn't rise along the Detroit River by accident. It sits along a strait that, three centuries ago, was key to the fur trade and is now the most significant international crossing between Chicago and Montreal.

Detroit's 21st-Century wheelhouse will be forged around our unique geographic advantage, plus our tremendous infrastructure for manufacturing and innovation. Think of the possibilities that will open up with a second bridge across the Detroit River, or the continuing development of Metro Airport as a passenger and freight hub.

This is part of the case Orr has been making to the city's creditors: Yes, we're broke and you're going to absorb a big part of our losses. But Detroit is poised to come back strong, and the banks who once lent money against the city's failing assets could be in position to benefit from a much stronger economic investment in Detroit's rebound.

The White House needs to start thinking about what that could mean: If Detroit is now a unique symbol of the greatest fiscal decline of an American city, it's also poised to be unprecedented in its renaissance. And what's done to help Detroit could be unique, too. We don't need a bailout, but an investment in an iconic city with unique problems - and unique promise.

Investment could start at Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport, a potentially key asset as a connector to the world, whose potential has never been realized. It sits essentially fallow, draining millions a year from city coffers.

Why not dedicate federal funds to unlocking its abilities? It's near two key rail lines, but adjacent to the 48205 ZIP code, which in 2011 led the city in shootings and homicides. Building it into an economic driver would lift the entire city and the immediate surroundings.

Education in Detroit could also use a huge boost. If issue No.1 in Detroit's residential exodus is crime, education is close on its heels. What would happen if there were a massive federal investment to help create a system of schools in Detroit that were a magnet for families from all over southeast Michigan?

The public system is crumbling as families flee and state oversight fails to do more than cut budgets to keep up with the decline. Nonprofits like United Way and the Skillman Foundation have begun building increasingly high-quality, highly accountable educational options for city families - but foundations can't do it alone.

Joblessness in Detroit is also a horrible drag. The official unemployment rate is in the 30s, but we all know far more people are actually out of work. Even worse, too many Detroiters won't be qualified to compete for the high-tech and innovative jobs being created in downtown and Midtown.

But there is tons of work to be done around Detroit. About $100 million in federal funds will help with demolition. Could that be augmented to include money to clear and mow vacant lots, or restore some grand housing stock (sturdy, brick single-family homes) that is beginning to deteriorate even in our best neighborhoods?

If the use for the city's 139 square miles should be rethought and some places might be refashioned to higher or lower density, could federal dollars help pay Detroiters to do the work?

It's not hard to imagine dozens of ways Washington might help fortify a Detroit that emerges from bankruptcy without the financial burdens that crippled it. The state has a role to play, too - not only leveraging its resources but lending its voice to the call for Washington to play a bigger role. Gov. Rick Snyder should be one of the city's biggest advocates inside the Beltway.

But we need the president to get it. We need the White House to get off the sidelines. Detroit is waiting. 

By Stephen Henderson

Maryland State Delegate Howard P. (Pete) Rawlings was shouting into my ear over the phone, more exercised than I'd ever heard him, over the Baltimore Sun's mayoral endorsement in the summer of 1999.

I was the paper's deputy editorial page editor, and the Sun had backed Carl Stokes, an African-American former city councilman. Rawlings, the first African-American legislator to chair the powerful Maryland House Appropriations Committee and a kingmaker in local politics, was backing Martin O'Malley, a white city councilman.

O'Malley and Stokes were competing to succeed Kurt Schmoke, the city's first elected black mayor. In the few empty spaces between Rawling's furious verbal assaults, I tried to explain the paper's thinking. All things being equal, I said, we thought the city's African-American population was entitled to leadership that reflected their majority (Baltimore was then about 65% black). O'Malley was a good choice, but so was Stokes. We thought Stokes would make a fine mayor, in touch with the needs and experiences of the city's population, and we believed he would be key to developing future leaders.

Rawlings stopped me dead. "You dummies, the future of black leadership in Baltimore, in fact the future of all leadership, runs way more through Martin O'Malley than it does through Carl Stokes," he said. "You're using race as a crude tool for simple analysis. I wish you could see that it's more complicated than that."

Rawlings' lecture has been ringing in my ears all year, revived by Detroit's racetinged mayoral campaign.  

In the simplest terms, Benny Napoleon versus Mike Duggan is a choice between black and white. Right?

Napoleon and his supporters sure have played that up, in barely cloaked messages, such as the "must have forgot" ads that remind Detroiters not to go "backward" on civil rights. Duggan's campaign has been outwardly race-neutral, but that's an effort to tamp down the fears about him becoming the first white mayor in 40 years.

Today, the Free Press endorses Duggan, because he's clearly the more accomplished candidate - a record of turnarounds, a vision that will focus on management and accountability in the mayor's office. Napoleon has had many chances to lead and impress, but has never really delivered.

But I also believe backing Duggan reflects the more sophisticated (and productive) interpretation of the racial influence on this election.

Our biggest problem in Detroit isn't about what color our leaders are, but a crisis of competency among them. The bar's set so low for Detroit right now that we're grateful to current Mayor Dave Bing chiefly because, well, he didn't diddle his chief of staff or steal our money.

We need the next mayor to be a magnet for the best and brightest of all colors, and to lead the city in a way that demonstrates for future mayors how it must be done. How a city can deliver services rather than make excuses for failure, keep its finances intact, and grow communities and neighborhoods and commercial districts for the benefit of the people who live and work here.

When I look through the Duggan campaign, I see African Americans like Bryan Barnhill, a Harvard grad and former chief of staff to the City Council president. I see state Sen. Tupac Hunter, the Democratic floor leader and one of the Detroit delegation's brightest lights. I see former state Sen. Buzz Thomas.

I'm not really concerned that Duggan will be unable, or is unwilling, to help gird and grow the next generation of Detroit leaders. In fact, I'd argue his legacy could well be shaped by the people he develops and prepares.

Napoleon has a lot of people I admire in his campaign, too. But the one decision Napoleon has made about the kind of leadership he'd bring to city hall was his invitation to former corporation counsel Krystal Crittendon (whose spectacular misread of her duties is one of the city's epics tales of ineptitude) to be deputy mayor.

Really? Shouldn't we be trying to do better than that? Again, competency has to come before race. They are not mutually exclusive considerations, but for far too long in Detroit, the playing to the latter has wiped out proper attention to the former.

It's foolish to pretend that race doesn't matter. But it's equally ridiculous to use it as a crass litmus test to achieve simplistic outcomes.

Rawlings was trying to tell me that in 1999.

In Baltimore, O'Malley won the mayor's race, and delivered on his biggest campaign promise (bringing homicides under 300 each year) pretty quickly. The city also enjoyed a stunning influx of investment and growth during his tenure; Baltimore still has many deep ills, but it is, without question, eons ahead of Detroit by any number of measures.

O'Malley went on to be governor, and Rawlings, unfortunately, died of cancer a few years later.

But he was right about O'Malley.

Baltimore's current mayor is a political scion of O'Malley's, someone he worked hard to mentor and prepare to lead the city. She's an African American with impeccable credentials. Her name is Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. She is Pete Rawlings' daughter. 

By Stephen Henderson

“The city needs help.”

On the drive to work Tuesday, listening to reports of U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes’ Detroit bankruptcy ruling, I got rerouted by the massive police raid on the Martin Luther King housing project, part of a citywide crackdown on hot spots for Detroit’s imposing crime.

Rhodes’ ruling will shape the city’s trajectory — and my work — for months to come.

The housing project is where I grew up.

I live in the city where I was born, so I’m used to jarring reminders of how my own history converges or deviates from the path Detroit has taken over the past four decades.

The city’s triumphs, lost opportunities and even horrible misfortunes all have personal touchstones for me, all over town.

But Tuesday’s reminder was particularly troublesome. I watched city cops, state police and other authorities drag 40 people into custody from my childhood home, while a federal judge was laying out the stark and inarguable terms of Detroit’s fiscal failure in his courtroom.

“The city needs help.” Rhodes said that as he explained how broke Detroit is, how war-torn it looks and feels, and how little of the money collected in taxes actually goes to services for the people who live here.

He could just as easily have been describing what was going on at the housing project.

I’ve got a lot of faith in the promise the bankruptcy process offers Detroit, principally because I believe deeply in the strength of the rule of law.

Chapter 9, which provides protection for government entities like cities, is structured to prevent the fleecing of assets for financial reorganization and to preserve the chance that a city can get back on its feet, rebuild and revitalize.

The law gives tremendous precedence to the plan emergency manager Kevyn Orr will unveil to restructure the city’s $18.5 billion in debt and liabilities. It limits creditors’ objections to specific legal grounds and prevents them from submitting their own plans. They can’t propose asset sales that Orr hasn’t included. They can’t demand draconian cuts to the city’s emaciated complement of services.

I fear what bankruptcy will mean for the city’s retirees and their pensions; Orr made clear he sees no way to balance the books without asking for some sacrifice from them. But I also believe that whatever happens in federal bankruptcy court has nothing to do, ultimately, with the state’s obligation, imbued in our constitution, to keep the pensioners whole.

Orr said he doesn’t think it’s his job to ask Gov. Rick Snyder or the Legislature to honor that, but Attorney General Bill Schuette has made clear that he believes that obligation is real, and local officials, including Mayor-elect Mike Duggan, ought to add their voices.

If bankruptcy works the way the law is structured, Detroit could emerge with a balanced ledger and a much more manageable debt burden, which will give us more money for police and fire and all the other services that matter.

That’s an opportunity, not a curse. The low point of insolvency could lead to the most stable financial footing the city has seen in four decades.

I’m more concerned, though, about what I saw at the housing project Tuesday, what it says about our deepest problems and how much work there is to do.

We weren’t the typical family in the King Homes, as we called the project when I was a kid. My mother’s meager income qualified us for subsidized housing, but she also made enough to send my sister and me to private schools; she knew education was the way forward for us, so she scrimped on housing.

It was no garden spot back in the 1970s and early ’80s, when Detroit was often the world’s murder capital and always in the national news for its crime rate. But we lived there without ever being crime victims. And when we moved out after my mom got a higher-paying job, my sister and I missed the place. Our family found opportunity, and a path forward, from there.

Now, it is a place so ravaged by crime that a multi-agency task force is sweeping it for offenders. For months, reports have talked about the prevalence of drug dealing and violence, and of how scared residents are there.

That’s not progress, nor is it any way to live. This city won’t bounce back until places like the King Homes are safe for less fortunate families, and given the frequency of these raids around town, it’s clear we have a long way to go before that’s true.

The bankruptcy can’t fix that, only free up resources that could help.

The work that needs to be done — not just cracking down on crime, but spreading more opportunity — is daunting and systemic.

The city needs help. Rhodes’ bankruptcy declaration hints at the deep core of the city’s problems, but can only begin to make all the changes Detroit desperately needs.