An intruder beats a storeowner to death with a baseball bat. A gang assaults a world famous gospel singer and steals his fancy car. Officials break ground for a shopping center.
The mayor tells a lie.
Compared to some of the other newsworthy happenings, good and bad, going on in Detroit over the past few days, it’s difficult to rank the lie that Mayor Dave Bing told Thursday.
Bald-faced mayoral lying is disconcerting. True, most politicians lie, but this was a lie about a very important issue, and Bing’s lack of skill in both executing the lie and recovering from it was startling.
Plus, when combined with the sensational crimes, the looming cutbacks in already decimated city departments and the general uncertainty over the city’s financial future, the clumsy untruthfulness contributes to a sense that Detroit is slowly spinning out of control.
Bing’s control of the city actually never has been certain. The rapid turnover among his top aides, the vacillating positions on various issues -- including the light rail project and the need for an emergency manager -- and the confusing approaches to what was supposed to be his signature innovation, the re-sizing of the physical city, have created an impression of an administration that stumbles from one crisis to the next.
Bing is an honorable gentleman whose integrity has been indisputable. His dedication to Detroit is evident just by the fact that he ran for the thankless post that he won.
Yet now, as the city attempts the complex job of fixing its finances while maintaining some semblance of providing basic services to its citizens, his hold on authority is increasingly shaky and there are more and more questions about his judgment.
The mayor's most recent problem developed when the Free Press reported that the law department chief, who works for the mayor, had written a letter to state officials. In it, she argued state law and the city charter bar the city from entering into any contract – such as the consent agreement concerning city finances -- with the state. The reasoning: The state, she said, owes the city money.
State officials basically laughed at the letter. Bing, in speaking to reporters Thursday morning, initially said he “absolutely did not” authorize the letter. Later, his office issued a written statement from Bing that actually repeated the lie, saying, “I did not authorize, nor do I entirely agree with, Counsel’s opinion.”
Taken at face value, that statement alone raised questions about Bing’s grasp of what’s going on in his administration.
Then today, at a breakfast meeting in Birmingham, Bing acknowledged he had failed to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth the day before.
This is what Bing said Friday morning, according to the Free Press: “I was knowledgeable of the fact that a letter was going to be sent to the governor, and I was supportive because I think by law all of us there around the table that we're going to follow the law, we're not going to break the law.
"But I had some issues, quite frankly, because if we look at getting into the legal ramifications of a potential lawsuit, I don't think that we've got the capacity to get into a lawsuit and try to do the things to fix the city."
Huh? What exactly was the mayor trying to say?
Lying with such little panache is another example of how Bing seems like a fish out of water.
It increasingly seems like Bing is a lame duck. His age – 69 – his recent health problems, the turbulence of his first three years and the city’s problems make it almost certain he will be a one-term mayor.
But as of today, he has a little more than a year and a half left in office, as his nearly bankrupt city embarks on the uncertain experiment of right-sizing government and stabilizing the finances.
That is one gargantuan challenge. Is it too late for Bing to demonstrate he is the person for the job? Sadly, he is not giving us many reasons to believe.