Detroit is the broken tooth in Michigan’s smile. Nevertheless, the preternaturally optimistic governor, from whom never is heard a discouraging word, cheerfully describes his recent foray with a crew cleaning up a park in a particularly, well, challenging neighborhood:
The weeds, says Gov. Rick Snyder, were so tall you could not see the sidewalks, or even the playground equipment. Concealed in the underbrush were some old tires. And a boat. And, he notes with an accountant’s punctiliousness about presenting a complete record, they also found “a body.”
Never mind. Now another block of an almost cadaverous city has been reclaimed.
Snyder, who has called himself “one tough nerd,” began life after the University of Michigan as an accountant and is tough enough to have strengthened the relevant law and then wielded it to put Detroit under the governance of an emergency manager, an appointed autocrat. Detroit is the sixth Michigan city, together with three school districts, to have earned its loss of autonomy.
Snyder is neither surprised nor dismayed by the Obama administration’s prompt refusal to consider bailing out the city: “I had made it clear I wasn’t going to ask them” for a bailout. One example of Washington’s previous costly caring is Detroit’s “People Mover,” the ghost train that circulates mostly empty. Snyder dismisses this slab of someone else’s pork as “part of the 60 years of failure.” He has largely forsworn attracting businesses to the city by offering tax credits, which he calls “the heroin drip of government.” He speaks not of “fixing” but of “reinventing” Detroit, by which he means a new “culture of how to behave and act.”