Update, Friday night: A sharp political rivalry resurfaces. Four-time mayoral candidate Tom Barrow of Detroit, who ran against Mike Duggan in the 2013 primary, claims the mayor "is engaged in bid rigging" for home demolitions.
"Our city is in deep trouble because of snow blindness," posts Tom Barrow, referring to the mayor's race. (Facebook photo by Ramon Burnham)
Although he has no independent information about how demolition contracts were awarded, the persistent adversary makes that accusation based on a Fox 2 report and interview by Charlie LeDuff. (Video is below.) Barrow makes two references to race.
In a Facebook post Friday evening that shares Deadline Detroit's link to this article, Barrow comments:
My God folks, take the time to watch this interview. . . . Look at his body language. What he did is a crime and I know federal dollars are involved.
This is criminal and it makes me so angry at the boldness with which the mayor of the city does this. . . . I am floored. . . . These are crimes!
Folks need to stop kissing his a&$ simply because of his skin color and see what is right in your face!! . . . Our city is in deep trouble because of snow blindness!
Barrow vigorously challenged Duggan's eligibility to run in 2013. He initially filed a claim that Duggan hadn't fulfilled the residency requirement for office and later sued in an effort to get him removed as a write-in candidate.
The four-time election loser, a native Detroiter with two degrees from Wayne State University, became a certified public accountant in 1973. He ran against Coleman A. Young in 1985 and 1989, and against Mayor Dave Bing in 2009.
He was convicted in 1994 on 11 counts of bank fraud, filing false tax returns and other charges. Barrow was sentenced to 21 months in prison and fined.
On Friday, the News wrote that Duggan said there was nothing unusual or improper about bidding for the bulk demolition initiative, which was a pilot program and discontinued last year when it failed to lower costs.
Original article, Friday morning:
The cost of demolishing a home in Detroit has spiked from less than $10,000 a house during Dave Bing's administration to about $20,000 under Mayor Mike Duggan, Charlie LeDuff reports.
In a nearly 10-minute Fox 2 report, LeDuff suggests demolition costs should be far less and that the Duggan administration colluded with contractors by negotiating a fixed price for work they later bid on. City contracts forbid officials from meeting with anyone to fix prices before public bidding, the broadcast journalist notes.
Duggan appeared Thursday night on Fox 2's "Let It Rip," with LeDuff and hosts Huell Perkins and Charlie Langton, where he said he resented the report earlier in the broadcast -- particularly the part suggesting collusion. He called it unfair. (See "Let It Rip" video below)
Bidding was transparent and above-board, the mayor insists, adding that it was done with the knowledge of the state agency that controls and approves the bidding. He said all companies bid on the work at the same fixed price that had been determined after talking to some major contractors that had massive equipment to take on big, multi-home demolition projects.
He said the state knew the city set a fixed price. Duggan said not all companies had enough machinery or the desire to take on major demolition projects.
"It’s not collusion when you’re sending a letter to the state (saying) here’s the set price," Duggan said.
"If we didn't have a fair price, no one was going to bid. There's no point in putting it out" if no one was going to show interest, Duggan said. He said the three companies that the city discussed a fixed price with landed the contracts, but they were the only ones interested in doing the work.
In LeDuff's news report, Duggan says: "It was a negotiated price, there's no question about it. I don't believe it was collusion."
Duggan went on to explain in detail the reasons for the rising costs of demolitions. He said costs increased significantly when the city decided to increase the number of demolitions per month. He cited overtime, asbestos removal and increased trucking costs for hauling landfill as some key reasons for escalating costs.
But he conceded to LeDuff:"We’ve dramatically sped up the rate of demolitions. It’s much more expensive to demolish it fast," Duggan said.
"I think there are things we can do to bring the cost back down."
Mayor Duggan and Charlie LeDuff on "Let It Rip." (Fox 2 photo)
Duggan says on "Let It Rip:"
When we started this project in the Spring of 14 there had been no demolitions for six months. If you look back historically, the city had knocked down 25 houses a week. And when I looked around the country that was the most. Cleveland was doing 15 or 20.
We had 40,000 abandoned houses. If we kept going at 25 houses a week it would have taken 30 years to take the houses down. There would have been no neighborhoods left.
I did what I believe is the right thing and I think today’s story was totally unfair...I brought in two outstanding construction people, Dave Manardo and Jim Wright, and I said, "We can’t do 25 a week. If we can do 100 a week, we can get the houses down in eight years. If we can do 200 a week we can get the houses down in four years. Do what you have to do.
And they said to me, "you need to understand, the faster you demolish, the more expensive each house gets. Because most of the houses demolished in the past...They left the asbestos inside and just knocked it down.
You start demolishing a hundred a week, the state Department of Environmental Quality is going to make you take that asbestos out of each house. That’s another $3,000...You start asking them to do 50, 75, 100. They’ve got people on overtime. It’s going to stress the system and the single biggest impact on cost, is that when you’re doing 25 a week, there’s always some place you can get fill dirt; somebody is building an office building... At 25 a week that was fine. When we started to hit 200 a week, we were having to send trucks to Port Huron and Lake Orion to truck the dirt in from quarries to fill the holes because we were filling hundreds of holes a week. And the trucking costs blew through the roof.
There seems to be some discrepancies in the number of homes being demolished. Duggan pegged the figure at 7,000 for 18 months. LeDuff suggested the number was far less under the Duggan administration and far more than Duggan was giving the Bing administration credit for.
Regarding the bids, LeDuff says to the mayor on "Let It Rip" that the three big companies that secured contracts knew about the fixed price several days before the bidding process began, and therefore, they had an advantage over the smaller companies, which had less time to figure out if they wanted to bid.
"Should we have had more time in the process? Maybe," Duggan replies.
