The City of Detroit is in full meltdown mode.

There've been big layoffs of police and fire personnel, thanks to a $300 million budget deficit. The city's bond rating has been downgraded.

Casino revenues aren't keeping pace with projections, and your next Big Mac Attack in the city that the magazine Men's Health dubbed the U.S.'s fattest for 2004 might cost more if an envisioned fast-food tax is enacted. Meanwhile, comes news the official, legal, mayoral slush fund - long a Detroit tradition - was used to supplement the now ex-police chief's salary, and teach table manners to the city's First Lady.

Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is embroiled in scandal, thanks to his abuse of a city credit card and taste for pricey liquor at taxpayer expense.

In this editorial today, the Toledo Blade sums up Detroit's dysfunction:

It would be hard to exaggerate how dreadful times are in Detroit. The population has been plummeting for decades, the city is hovering on the brink of bankruptcy, the schools are worse, and the mayor, 34-year-old Kwame Kilpatrick, acts all too often like an overgrown frat boy whose parents have foolishly given him a credit card.

Last week, shortly after Detroit announced it would have to lay off more than a thousand workers, including badly needed members of the police and fire departments, it was revealed that the mayor had put more than $210,000 on his city-issued credit card in less than three years on the job.

The charges included expensive champagne and cigars and lobster dinners at swanky out-of-town restaurants. An aide said lamely that his honor had been trying to drum up new business for the city. But while Detroit's mayor is easy to lampoon, his city's biggest problems started before he was born...

...the coming of the freeways opened the way to cheap land in the suburbs. When people and industry left, there was no mechanism for sharing the tax revenue. Soon, a vicious circle developed in which a cash-starved municipality had to increase taxes on those who were left, further emptying out the city.

....Detroit's real problem is that the city and the suburbs have failed to realize that they are one region, and need to share not just the common benefits but the burdens as well. For three decades, white politicians in the suburbs bashed the city and refused to pool resources, and black racists in Detroit did much the same.

The result was that everyone lost. Today, even Detroit's black middle class is in flight. Experts think it is likely that within a year or two, the city will fall into receivership, in which case it will be run by the state, a development that Joe Harris, the city's auditor general, scathingly said "will be preferable to the dysfunctional government to which our citizens are being subjected."

How to fix Detroit? Some good ideas in this '01 series by the Detroit News, titled, "Broken Detroit: Building Blocks." But I didn't see promoting black economic separatism on their menu.

The Detroit Metro Times opined that some form of metro, or regional government is crucial, but that prickly race relations between city and suburbs make that impossible.

In the meantime, things may get worse before they get better.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 16, 2005 08:19 PM

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