The central flaw of the emergency manager solution is that it misdiagnoses the nature of the problem, Peter Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University, writes in the Free Press.
The city's financial problems have deep structural roots. A state-imposed "solution" that fails to address those roots will not succeed. Worse, the imposition of an emergency financial manager and its subsequent failure could leave the city in an even more damaged position. There are three key problems with the emergency financial manager model.
While recent experience in Ecorse cautions against overgeneralizations, Michael Stampfler, former emergency financial manager for the City of Pontiac, argued that the greatest problem with the emergency manager situation was its displacement of civil society. After budgets have been cut, public assets sold and services privatized, there may be no healthy set of civic institutions to which to give back control of the city. One cannot destroy the city in order to save it.
