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While over the many months Detroit City Hall has boasted about its aggressive demolition program, not all has gone well.
Mayor Mike Duggan on Monday disclosed that the city’s controversial demolition program was suspended by the U.S. Treasury Department last summer to address “mistakes” and “errors," Christine Ferretti writes at The Detroit News:
The federally funded program, Duggan said, had been at a standstill since Aug. 15 while the city and Detroit Land Bank Authority met with officials from Treasury and the Michigan State Housing and Development Authority to come up with a new set of practices. Treasury accepted the new procedures on Friday, he said.
Duggan declined to give specific examples of what went wrong, but noted some concern over paperwork, improper billing and misallocation of funds.
On Friday, the feds let the city resume the program that has been under investigation.
"No amount of error in the rules is tolerable,” Duggan said during a Monday news conference at City Hall. “We’re going to eliminate those mistakes with these new controls.” Federal officials allowed the housing authority on Friday to resume blight activities in Detroit financed by a program called Hardest Hit.
