Desperate times call for bold steps, public affairs commentator Jack Lessenberry believes.
He's resurrecting a dramatic idea that's such a long shot the word "remote" understates its chance of happening. And yet . . .
Detroit and Wayne County are at pivotal points in their history, so discussing a government merger -- as Lessenberry suggests in a Michigan Radio commentary -- might gain at least a bit of attention.
It is time for a radical but necessary step. The legislature can and should pass a law merging Wayne County and Detroit into one combined entity. . . .Kept within its current boundaries, with its current problems, Detroit is simply not viable. Yes, you can, with draconian cuts and bankruptcy, get rid of the $20-billion dollar debt and balance the books. But then what? Hard to imagine the city, in its present weakened state, being competitive.
However, when you combine Detroit and Wayne County, you get something that in size and demography resembles Detroit at its prosperous peak, when the rest of the county was pretty sparsely populated. Yes, it would cost Wayne residents to build up Detroit. But it costs them now to share a county with a city in ruins.And Wayne taxpayers are paying hundreds of millions for the messes made by their dysfunctional government.
In Friday's commentary, Lessenberry notes that city-county mergers in Nashville and Indianapolis have "made both entities stronger."
Another example is Louisville, where voters approved a city and county merger in 2001 to create the nation’s 17th largest city with 741,000 residents.
-- Alan Stamm
