Mike Duggan has so much power in Detroit he's "making old Putin look like a piker," Bill Clinton says.
The mayor was on stage Wednesday at a Clinton Global Initiative event in Denver when the ex-president made colorful comparison during a neighborhood revitalization discussion, The Detroit News writes:
Clinton said that being mayor of Detroit could be America's "most coveted municipal job." . . .
[He] heralded Detroit's turnaround after the Motor City's exit from a record setting Chapter 9 bankruptcy restructuring, and jokingly compared the city's mayor to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. . . .
Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy restructuring allowed Duggan to "basically become the most powerful municipal official in the country. He controls over half the land mass in the city of Detroit now. He's making old Putin look like a piker — and people actually like (Duggan)," Clinton said to laughter, according to video of the event posted online by the Clinton Foundation.
Another panelist, Kresge Foundation president Rip Rapson, likes the line.
"That's a great image. I like to think of Mayor Duggan as our Mayor Putin. That's terrific. I think that's going to stick," Rapson said.
Duggan didn't directly respond to the Putin comparison, says The News' unbylined summary.
The city owns nearly half the city's property, Duggan said, or about 40,000 vacant parcels. Clinton compared Detroit to the "Homestead Act" in 1862 that convinced Americans to help settle the west by offering them free land.
