Here's a fresh example of the family-level impact from Detroit's bankruptcy: The city wants to cut pension and health care benefits for survivors of police officers and firefighters.
Yes, you read that right: Widows and orphans will lose money.
It may sound like a 19th century Charles Dickens tale, but Joe Guillen has the 2013 Detroit version in the Free Press.
Fire funeral image from Fox 2 News.
His Page One lead article quotes 47-year-old police widow Melissa Alexander-Huff, raising a 13-year-old son, as saying:
“It’s not only cold, it’s somebody demonic or evil that would only want to step in and include the widows in everything they want to cut and take away. Haven’t we lost enough?
Shall we bury ourselves and jump into the graves with our husband? Because that is what the City of Detroit is basically doing to us. They’re killing us and our children.”
Her husband, Officer Brain Huff, was fatally shot in May 2010 as he entered a vacant east-side duplex to investigate a break-in.
Orr’s spokesman, Bill Nowling, tells Guillen the pending pension and health care cuts are part of negotiations among lawyers for the city, labor and retiree groups and pension funds.
In all, the Freep reports,150 family members of Detroit police and firefighters killed on duty get survivors' pension benefits from the Police and Fire Retirement System, one of two pension funds for Detroit employees.
Because they are paid from the same fund as retired cops and firefighters, the surviving family members are considered in the ongoing bankruptcy case as creditors of the city, just like thousands of retired city workers.
Since the city was ruled eligible for bankruptcy, emergency manager Kevyn Orr has said he plans to cut pension benefits as part of his financial plan to stabilize Detroit. . . .
Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes has ruled that pensions can be cut in bankruptcy. Rhodes, however, has warned Orr that his ruling doesn’t mean he will approve a plan that includes pension cuts, and that any cuts must be “fair and equitable.”
Orr insisted during a meeting with Free Press that he is aware of the “human dimension” of the city’s bankruptcy and its impact on pensioners. But he also said he believes there is no way to fix the city’s balance sheet without cutting pensions. He said he will be thoughtful and humane while doing so.
Guillen also speaks with speaks with Detroit police widow Diane Philpot, 52, whose husband Jerry was 28 when a gang member gunned him down in an alley in 1995, and with Andrea Torkos, a Troy mother of two young daughters who became a Detroit fireman's widow in 2007. Here's part of what Torkos says:
"There’s just no way to survive on anything lower than this. The other major creditors, the banks, I’m sure they have insurance. But we don’t. . . .
"Everyone was so promising. Now all the promises are going down the drain.”
