It probably was just a matter of time before Dave Bing chafed openly at the tight leash of emergency management.
The time came this week during a legal deposition related to the bankruptcy filing, a draft copy of which was obtained Tuesday by The Detroit News.
"We don’t even have a line item in our budget for training," Mayor Dave Bing testified in a deposition this week.
The mayor said department heads are “frustrated as hell” by the consultants running City Hall and said he agrees with an assessment that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr is “not doing a competent job” restructuring city operations, Darren Nichols reports.
“My big concern there is at some point in time we will come out of bankruptcy, and if you don’t have the people internally that know the system and you have all these consultants doing the job that city employees ought to be doing, when Kevyn leaves . . . you haven’t developed anybody to run the city on a day-to-day basis,” Bing said.
“That’s my biggest concern. We don’t even have a line item in our budget for training. Somebody’s got to get trained to do these jobs on a long-going basis.”
Bing was responding to questions from Anthony Ullman, an attorney representing a committee of Detroit retirees. The mayor testified that Orr's "strength was in dealing with the long-term liabilities and not operations.”
The deposition appeared to underscore the chilly relationship that developed between Bing and Orr after the emergency manager was appointed in March. . . .
Bing testified some members of his team were let go in favor of people with less experience, including former City Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown.
“Kriss (Andrews) was replaced by Gary Brown, who was a ... city councilman who has never run anything, much less 11 different departments reporting to him,” Bing said. “He was a police officer before he became a city councilman and he took Kriss’ place.”
Orr’s spokesman told Nichols: “We don’t comment on depositions.”
