Here's how Kevyn Orr rolls, literally: He'll take bankers on a bus tour of streets unlike any they've seen up close, in all likelihood.
Bondholders will ride a Detroit Department of Transportation bus, not a chartered coach. The route includes Grand River Avenue, the Brightmoor neighborhood and Gratiot Avenue.
It'll be a welcome-to-Detroit reality check next Wednesday for two dozen or so city creditors, intended to "raise some empathy capital with them in hopes that they’ll avoid forcing Detroit into bankruptcy," editorial page editor Stephen Henderson writes in the Free Press.
He heard details Wednesday after Orr taped a segment of "MiWeek," a public television program hosted by Henderson and two Detroit News journalists, Christine MacDonald and Nolan Finley.
Henderson quotes the emergency manager's strategy:
“If they can see what it’s like for Detroiters, what they endure every day in this city, I think they’ll begin to understand what’s at stake. . . . I hope they start to see that no city should be like this. Not in America. . . .
“I think people don’t really believe it when I describe it. Even my friends in Washington say it can’t be as dire as what I’m describing. But it is.”
Henderson thinks the eye-opener is a smart move. "Those of us who live here have become inured to what it’s like to drive through the city’s neighborhoods for the first time," he writes. "The conditions you can find in any urban center, but the depth and breadth of it? Nowhere else."
"MiWeek" airs Friday at 7:30 p.m. on WTVS. -- Alan Stamm
