Nobody expected what Duggan has done in Detroit
Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined Detroit’s black voters electing a balding, pudgy white guy from the suburbs as their mayor.
Or that, when he ran for re-election four years later, he would get 68 per cent of the vote in a crowded primary, beating a man with the most revered name in black city politics by well over two to one. Yet that’s what Mike Duggan did last month.
You might think he’d be coasting now, the general election a mere formality. But you would be wrong. “I never feel like I’ve had enough success. I never get up in the morning and say, hey, we’re ahead of schedule,” he said.
But, in a lengthy interview, he added, “if I do get reelected, we’ve got a lot of new initiatives we are going to roll out.”
There are few stories in Michigan politics as fascinating as that of Mike Duggan, the 59-yearold son of a federal judge who started out in county politics, did a stint as Wayne County prosecutor, then in 2004, took over the troubleplagued Detroit Medical Center.
In the five years before Duggan took over the group of city-based hospitals, the DMC lost US$430 million. Under his leadership, the hospitals cut costs, drastically improved services and generated $230 million in profits before 2010.
The hospitals were then sold to Nashvillebased Vanguard Health Systems in a $1.5 billion deal that included guarantees the new owner would make major capital improvements and not reduce services for at least a decade.
That challenge behind him, Duggan, who lived in Livonia his entire adult life, bought a house in Detroit to run for mayor. This happened as the city was crashing into bankruptcy and emergency management. Many were skeptical black Detroiters would vote for a white mayor.
But Sheila Cockrel, a longtime member of city council, told me at the time: “They’d vote for a purple cow if they thought it could make the police come when they needed them.”
Detroiters thought that someone was Duggan. When he was kicked off the 2013 primary ballot due to a technicality, an amazing majority of voters wrote his name in.
He won the general election easily, but technically could have been a figurehead, since the city was still under emergency management. Instead, he worked closely with manager Kevyn Orr until state control ended in December 2014.
Following that, Duggan launched a series of eye-opening initiatives, nearly all of them successful. Within months, overhead lights were restored to every street in Detroit. Demolitions of ruined buildings rapidly increased — until the city got in trouble for not complying with state and federal requirements.
“If I had to do it over, I would have made sure we had a compliance bureau set before we did so many demolitions,” the mayor said, adding, “but I tell my staff, I will never fault you if you make a mistake going too fast.”
If Duggan has any vulnerability, it’s that Detroit’s recovery is not being equally shared by all neighbourhoods, a major theme for his opponent, 34-year-old state senator Coleman Young II.
Duggan acknowledges growth has been uneven, but adds “If anyone has a better plan for the neighbourhoods, I want to hear it.”
There have been persistent rumours that if elected, Duggan may run for the Democratic nomination for governor next year — something he stoutly denies.
There are those who think a second Duggan term might be an anticlimax. The mayor disagrees.
“Actually, if I do get re-elected, I think the next four years are going to be a whole lot more fun,” he said. “You know, the first four years, everything was about managing detail. The city bureaucracy had to relearn accountability. There’s nothing fun about grinding out street lights and getting the grass cut.
“Now we are shifting to, ‘How do we create enough affordable opportunities for housing for everyone coming back to the city? How do we get the opportunities and jobs?’ Now that should be fun.”
Mayor Duggan might be crazy to trade the city he is building for an uncertain future in Lansing. But given what he has accomplished, if a Democrat does get elected president in a few years, it’s easy to imagine Duggan as secretary of housing and urban development.
If, that is, he has any interest in the job.