Why Michigan has been hit by crisis after crisis
Fleeing residents, budget issues are recurring themes
On Wednesday afternoon, President Barack Obama put a glass of filtered Flint, Mich., water to his lips and took a sip.
His message was clear: “I’ve got your back,” Obama told residents in a televised address, drawing cheers from the audience.
Obama’s visit to Michigan this weekwas a gesture of support for Flint residents, after government regulators allowed the city’s drinking water to be poisoned with toxic lead after improper treatment.
But his arrival also underscored a painful truth: Michigan is still lurching from crisis to crisis years after the decline of manufacturing jobs in the state first began sending local governments into a tailspin.
This week, Detroit public schools shut down for two days, when teachers protesting a funding crisis that has left the state’s largest school district almost $500 million in debt took their sick days en masse. They were concerned the district might not have enough money to pay their salaries for the next two months.
Michigan’s House of Representatives is considering a Republican-backed package that would send $500 million in state aid to the school district. But state Democrats are concerned the funding isn’t substantial enough, according to The Detroit News, and would impose too many restrictions on collective bargaining.
The school system’s funding crisis comes three years after the city of Detroit — which operates separately from the school district — filed for America’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, having accumulated $18 billion in debt.
“What happened in Detroit must never happen again,” Judge Steven Rhodes said when the city emerged from bankruptcy in 2014.
Though each crisis has been distinct in its particulars, there are recurring themes: fleeing residents and budget shortfalls following the decline of Michigan’s once-mighty manufacturing industry.
“The urban decay, the abandonment of Detroit and Flint is the common denominator,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan think tank.
Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Michigan was the only state to lose population. Detroit has fewer than half of the 1.8 million residents who lived there during its heyday. Flint had more than 200,000 residents in the 1960s; now it has fewer than 100,000.
The cities’ tax bases shrank as residents fled to the suburbs, leaving government officials holding the bag on retirement obligations and other pricey services, with fewer people to pay for them.
Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, first elected in 2010, has called Michigan “the comeback state” in recent years, pointing to declines in unemployment, a return of some manufacturing jobs and a more stable state budget. But the recent problems in the state, especially in Flint, have threatened the final term of Snyder’s administration.
In a state budget proposed in February, Snyder identified Flint and the Detroit school crisis as two of the biggest challenges facing Michigan.
Detroit’s public schools have been near bankruptcy after nearly half its students fled the district since 2002 — either to follow their parents out of tow nor to go to charter schools. That posed a painful budget problem for the district, since the state ties funding to student enrollment.
“It sounds good in theory,” Lupher said of the model. But when the funding plan was implemented more than two decades ago, “I don’t think they had in mind the sort of economic decline that the state would go through the first decade of the century and the effect of charter schools on the whole thing.”