Free Press editorial page columnist Brian Dickerson is conflicted about whether to give Kevyn Orr and unnamed benefactors a pass over covering his $4,200 monthly living expenses.
In the days after the Free Press disclosed the unusual arrangement in a front-page story, I did my best to convince myself it was much ado about nothing.
I admire Orr. . . . I appreciate the sacrifices he made to take the job, and I don’t begrudge him whatever $4,200 a month does to compensate for the forsaken comforts of his family and home. . . .
In the context of the tens of millions Detroit will pay the army of professionals that has been mustered to see it through bankruptcy . . . Orr’s monthly allowance barely qualifies as chicken feed.
And yet, a question nags:
Why, after committing so much taxpayer money to the enormous task of righting Detroit’s capsized fiscal ship, did Snyder turn to a small group of unidentified donors to bankroll such an insignificant portion of the bill?
The answer, I suspect, has less to do with the imperative of feeding and housing Orr than with Snyder’s need to satisfy his most powerful and affluent supporters’ appetite for recognition and exclusivity.
That "secret clubhouse" approach, as Dickerson dubs it, feeds "the suspicion that all public enterprise is ultimately designed to benefit some private interest,
Snyder’s practice of tapping anonymous private donors to subsidize government costs promotes the dangerous delusion that our state’s well-being is the responsibility of the few. . . .
The real damage wrought by such secret chicanery, it seems to me, is manifest in the average taxpayer/voter/citizen’s perception that he or she is a mere spectator to the democratic process, and that when Snyder and other elected leaders talk about “the great things we can do together,” he is talking to a “we” that does not include them.
-- Alan Stamm
