City Council proposing 2300 layoffs to keep emergency manager away

DETROIT (WXYZ) - Detroit City Council members want two things: They want to help get Detroit's fiscal house in order and they want to keep an Emergency Manager away.

Council President Pro-Tem Gary Brown says he and his colleagues are discussing ways to trim the city’s budget.

“What was discussed Monday?” he told 7 Action News. “Mostly it was about $68 million worth of cuts that will help out with the cash flow issues we have.”

A lot of layoffs are also in the council's latest recommendations, including 500 in police and fire, 2300 in all.

The mayor is proposing 1,000 layoffs with hopes of avoiding the public safety cuts. But Brown says that is just not enough.

“If the unions give us no concessions, we'll gonna have to have 2,300 layoffs in order to receive the savings that we need,” Brown says. “We want to go with more of a drastic number and then if additional revenue comes in and it is unexpected, we could always bring the people back. But if we go with 1,000 and we're short, then we risk getting and Emergency Manager coming in.”

Council is also proposing a hike in the DDOT bus fair up to $2 and $1 to ride the People Mover. Council also wants to cut all executive salaries to $100,000.

Brown says they are hoping the mayor will work with them in order to keep an Emergency Manager out of town.

“We shouldn't be worried about the governor or the state having a big stick over our heads to fix the problems,” he says.”

Brown says the latest council recommendations have been sent to the mayor and he hopes he will embrace them, because Brown says he believes it is the right thing to do.

“We shouldn't be doing this because we're trying to avoid the Emergency Manager, “says Brown. “We should be structurally fixing our budget because it's the right thing to do for Detroit.”

Brown says that there is another option, short of the governor appointing an Emergency Manager that is called a consent agreement made possible by Public Acts 4.

That would give the mayor some powers of an Emergency Manager, but it would keep an Emergency Manager away.

It would let the mayor privatize some of the services, consolidate some of the departments and sell some of the assets and renegotiate some contracts.

Right now, they’re all options. They’re looking at everything. The situation is pretty desperate.