Jack Lessenberry from Michigan Radio

Despite appearances, those who make our laws sometimes do listen to those who elect them. Here’s one example happening right now. Anyone who drives knows that our roads are in terrible shape.Nobody remembers them ever being this bad, especially in major urban areas. But the Legislature has stubbornly ignored appeals from Governor Rick Snyder to fix them.In fact, a week or so ago, most of the Republicans were gung-ho to cut state income taxes instead. In terms of money back, this would have been utterly meaningless for all but the top one of two percent, and would have left the state with almost a billion dollars less every year to provide basic services.Services they are already failing to adequately provide.This provoked such an angry reaction that the tax-cutters are suddenly backing off, at least for now. By yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville was saying “I think I’d rather put the money into the roads at this point. I wouldn’t mind waiting until we’re structurally sounder before we start giving money back.”[asset-pullquotes[{"quote": "In other words, he doesn't want to be beaten up by angry constituents with broken axles.", "style": "inset"}]]In other words, he doesn’t want to be beaten up by angry constituents with broken axles. Currently the House and Senate are tussling over an appropriations bill that could include as much as $200 million in new money for road repairs.That’s better than nothing, but is really just a drop in the pothole.Transportation experts say we need to invest at least $1.2 billion a year for the next decade in order to prevent our roads from getting worse.That’s how much the Governor asked the lawmakers for last year, but led by Richardville, they essentially sneered at him.If you don’t solve problems, they get worse. Sometimes I wonder to what extent our lawmakers ever talk to real people at all.Last night, taking a cab from the airport, I met a young veteran named Tony, who was known in the Marines as Sergeant Al. The child of immigrants, he felt a need to give back to this country, so voluntarily served 12 years in the Marine Corps, including multiple combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.A Philadelphia native, he told me he moved to the Detroit area because one of his three best friends in the corps lived here. The other two were killed in action.Tony has a four-year-old son, and drives a cab while he waits to start his dream job as an officer with the Dearborn police force.[asset-pullquotes[{"quote": "Transportation experts say we need to invest at least $1.2 billion a year for the next decade in order to prevent our roads from getting worse.", "style": "inset"}]]Money is tight for Tony, who is 35 and also takes care of his ailing mother. He married a woman he met overseas, but his wife is having green card problems, which adds stress. He has to maintain his vehicle, and some nights has a hard time even breaking even.The last thing he needs is to have a tire or a wheel destroyed by a pothole.Tony, who insisted on calling me sir, wanted me to know how much he loved this country. I told him I thought he had proven that.I also think it’s about time our lawmakers prove they care about and appreciate the 10 million Tonys and Susies in this state as well.

Detroit’s bankruptcy process, like this long and dreadful winter, is unlikely to end anytime soon. While it is still officially a “fast-track” bankruptcy, it is definitely a muddy track.As of now, Federal Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes has a hearing June 16 to consider the city’s “plan of adjustment” bankruptcy proposal, but that now seems certain to be pushed back.We don’t yet know if the judge will approve the city’s latest proposed settlement with two big banks. We don’t know if the state legislature will do its part and step up to save some of the pension funds and the Detroit Institute of Arts. We do know that it is almost certain that some creditors will appeal and sue over any agreement that gives them less than what they want.The bankruptcy, again like this dreadful winter, is something everyone wants over as soon as possible. But there may be a silver lining to the final settlement being delayed. While the way in which the bankruptcy goes down is important, what’s more important is what happens afterwards.How does Detroit survive, stay solvent and be in a position to someday be prosperous again? Bankruptcy may get rid of the crushing debt. It may even free up some money to improve city services, like police protection and blight removal.But bankruptcy won’t solve any of the core troubles Detroit faces, which include hundreds of thousands of people who lack education and job skills. There will still be infrastructure problems, lots of poor people and tens of thousands of ruined buildings.For years, I’ve argued that the solution would be to merge Detroit with surrounding Wayne County. I still think that is the best option, and the one that makes the most sense.Especially now that it is clear that we need to press the reset button on county government, as well as the city. But here’s another idea that might be worth thinking about. A few weeks ago I met with former State Senator Jack Faxon, one of the few surviving delegates to our state’s last constitutional convention.Faxon, who has lived most of his life in Detroit, wrote the constitution’s language protecting state pensions. He went on to be the legislature’s leading patron of the arts. Yesterday, he offered me a new idea for fixing Detroit: Shrink it.There are parts of the city today that are largely vacant lots. Detroit has barely more than one third of its peak population.Faxon would have the Emergency Manager appoint a boundary commission to determine which parcels should be separated and return to township status. If they did that, he argued, the county would be responsible for providing those areas with services.Clearly the legislature, which has the power to create or dissolve cities, could allow that. This may sound bizarre.But Detroit hasn’t always been its present 139 square miles. Back in 1920, it was only 78 square miles, and had a lot more people than now. This may not be the right solution. But what nobody can deny is that Detroit in its present form doesn’t work — or that bankruptcy will magically fix that. Something major has to change.  

Twenty years ago, Jack Kevorkian went on trial for the first time for assisted suicide charges in Wayne County Circuit Court. In one sense, it was the best of all the Kevorkian trials.The prosecutor, Tim Kenny, who now is a judge himself, fought hard but clean. The case was heard by a no-nonsense judge, Thomas Jackson, who was respected by both sides.Kevorkian and his attorney, the flamboyant Geoffrey Fieger, pushed the envelope a bit, but not enough to turn the trial into a circus. Kevorkian was clearly guilty – he admitted to breaking the law.But the jury refused to convict him. Why? Some of them later told me the dead man was suffering hopelessly, wanted to die, and they thought his fate should be his choice.Wayne County Prosecutor John O’Hair realized that further Kevorkian prosecutions would be a waste of time. But his counterpart in Oakland County, Prosecutor Richard Thompson, wouldn’t admit it. So he charged Jack Kevorkian again. Four times.The county spent thousands bringing in expert witnesses at taxpayers’ expense. Fieger brought in others. Everyone grandstanded. Juries listened, deliberated…and acquitted Kevorkian, every time.Then, when the next primary election rolled around, Prosecutor Thompson was challenged by a young unknown named Dave Gorcyca. Gorcyca had one simple slogan: If elected, he would stop wasting taxpayer money on the fruitless prosecutions. When the votes were counted, he won easily.I’ve been thinking about those Kevorkian trials, ever since the current same-sex marriage and adoption trial got underway in federal district court in Detroit. In a time of scarcity, when other prosecutors lack basic resources, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has been mounting a highly-expensive, full-court press in an effort to try and prevent the court from finding two things: That same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children, and marry if they please. In a time of scarcity, when other prosecutors lack basic resources, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has been mounting a highly-expensive, full-court press in an effort to try and prevent the court from finding two things. Evidence indicates Schuette is on the wrong side of history on marriage, and that this is a poor case on which to fight same-sex adoption. Everybody concedes that nurses April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse have taken fine care of their three special needs children.Additionally, there’s clearly been a dramatic change in the last few years in attitudes towards same-sex marriage. Now, you can argue that just because something is popular doesn’t make it right. But the marriage issue is not going to be settled by this case or in this state.Similar cases like this are being argued all over the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court is certain to make the final decision. At most, this case will be bundled with several others.Which means Schuette doesn’t have to tie up major prosecutorial resources, both human and financial. He would be perfectly justified in arguing that Michigan voters passed a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage – and that this is a matter that should be left up to the states.But instead, he has behaved as if he represented the state’s social conservatives alone.I’d suggest our attorney general, who is clearly politically ambitious, might want to have a chat with old Dick Thompson, who today works at an obscure Christian law center. That would be a conversation I would love to overhear.

There are many reasons to lament the slow disappearance of newspapers. But here’s one you may not have considered: the loss of cartoons and comic strips.You might be startled that an old political and news analyst would say that. But in fact, comics, both overtly political and not so, have always been great political and social barometers. Back in the late 19th century, Boss Tweed, the corrupt New York City political boss, was largely done in by Thomas Nast’s cartoons.Before he was carted off to jail, Tweed complained bitterly. He didn’t care what the reporters wrote. After all, many of his supporters didn’t read. But Tweed said “them damned pictures are killing me!”  Thanks to Nast, he died in jail.Nationally syndicated political cartoons aren’t as big as they were when Feiffer and Herblock reigned supreme. In modern times, the national mood seems to be captured more often in comic strips. Doonesbury was the must-read of the 1970s; Bloom County captured the 1980s.Today, however, there’s a modern strip that, to me, captures life in this millennium better than anything: "Pearls Before Swine," written by a “recovering lawyer” named Stephan Pastis.Pastis, who lives in Northern California, is making his first-ever trip to Michigan this week; he will appear at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor Thursday night to sign copies of his two hilarious children’s books, about a child private detective named Timmy Failure."Pearls," however, is aimed at adults. The main characters are a selfish, egocentric and obnoxious Rat, a naïve and trusting Pig, and an intellectual and withdrawn Goat.Plus, there are a family of homicidal crocodiles, a weapons-obsessed guard duck, and a vast assortment of other characters. There’s a moral in Pastis’s own life. Now 46, he wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist since the second grade. But since he also wanted to eat, he became a lawyer instead.He found law horribly boring. So he started drawing cartoons, and sending them to syndicates. They were swiftly rejected, though one editor did say he liked Rat. But Pastis didn’t give up.Finally, 12 years ago, "Pearls" appeared in its first newspaper, the Washington Post. Today, it runs in more than 600 papers. Savagely funny and subtle, it mostly avoids anything that smacks of partisan politics. Pastis, no fool, doesn’t want to lose half his audience. But he did have the crocodiles campaigning for Newt Gingrich because they assumed he was a reptile like them.The militaristic Duck gets in some difficulty for nuking a blighted urban area, till Rat convinces voters he was just fast-tracking urban revitalization. Pastis, who was a political science major, wants to make people laugh, but also make them think.He told me he worries about whether democracy can survive big money and gerrymandering, and he’s not alone.Perhaps our politics need to break the usual boundaries. "Pearls Before Swine" certainly does. Characters from other strips appear; so does Pastis himself, usually when his characters invade his office and berate him for being stupid.Some mornings, I read "Pearls" before the headlines, drinking coffee out of a mug labeled WWRD: What Would Rat Do?Sadly, I know that when I turn to the news, I’ll find out. 

We still don’t know how Detroit’s bankruptcy is going to play out. We don’t know how much pensions will finally be cut. We don’t know whether the state will kick in the funds needed to save the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts.But we do know two things.In the end, a lot of people – pensioners – who don’t have much money now will have even less.And we also know this: bankrupt, poor Detroit and the state are going to spend more than $250 million to build a new hockey and entertainment arena for Mike Ilitch, who owns the Detroit Red Wings.That’s more than half the entire cost of the project.This is the second arena the city has helped build for the Red Wings. The team now plays in Joe Louis Arena, which was built 35 years ago.They give a small cut of their proceeds to the city - about $7 million a year for Detroit, but once the new arena is finished, know how much the taxpayers will get? Nothing.Olympia Development, the Ilitch family holding company, gets everything. Money from ticket sales, money from concessions, money from parking.Detroit gets nothing.To my utter bafflement, this deal sailed through Detroit City Council, the same body that didn’t want to let the state fix up Belle Isle.Why would anybody agree to this?Well, for two reasons: first, the threat that the Red Wings would leave town, and then there is the will o’ the wisp that cities never seem to tire of chasing, no matter how often they are disappointed, the hope that a new sports arena will revitalize the area around it.Indeed, there was a story in yesterday’s Detroit Free Press that said as a result of this deal, “the city gets to keep the economic benefits from [the] projected job growth at the new arena.”That sort of baffled me. I thought the same ushers who now work at the Joe would just drive over to this stadium instead. There’s no doubt the new stadium is going into a formerly rundown area.But except for perhaps a new sports bar, there aren’t going to be any neighborhood economic benefits. Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago, did a study a few years ago of the impact of sports arenas on cities. His conclusion: “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter.”To add to the absurdity, only a tiny fraction of those who attend hockey games actually live in Detroit. We know that’s the case for Ilitch’s other major league team, the Detroit Tigers. Red Wings tickets tend to be even more expensive, and only about three percent of National Hockey League players are black.Regardless, the bottom line is this: In a city that doesn’t have enough cops, ambulances or street lights the development authorities think it is a good idea to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars to build an entertainment complex for a family worth more three billion. A deal from which the city will get nothing back.I would like to know why this is not insane. 

In an apparent attempt to pander to voters, the Michigan Legislature is rushing to pass an election year income tax cut. This is a little baffling, because the voters don’t want one.The state has a budget surplus – on paper, anyway – of a little less than a billion dollars. Two weeks ago, an EPIC-MRA poll found only 11% of the voters thought a tax cut was a good idea. The rest were divided about evenly between those who wanted it to go to schools and those who want it to go to our roads.You would think that would be that.Especially since Governor Snyder doesn’t want an across-the-board tax cut, but wants one aimed at those who need it most, those “hardworking Michiganders who get up every day and pack their lunch and go to work.”But there was a fallacy behind this poll: That’s an assumption that lawmakers, like Macomb County State Senator Jack Brandenberg, care what voters want.They don’t.They care what rich campaign contributors want, and they want to appease Tea Party fanatics so they don’t challenge them in the August primary.The Michigan Constitution, by the way, outlaws graduated income taxes, so any income tax cut has to be the same for the richest and the poorest people.Earlier this week, the folks at the Michigan League for Public Policy did some calculations on what the income tax rollback Brandenberg wants would mean.the famous one percent would get an average yearly tax cut of more than $2,600, enough for a trip for two to Paris.", They then expressed that vividly, this way. As the League’s Judy Putnam put it, to the lowest fifth of income earners would see an annual tax cut of about $12, or about enough to buy a cherry pie at a bakery. Those in the middle would get an average tax cut of $88, which wouldn’t even fix a blown tire.However, the famous one percent would get an average yearly tax cut of more than $2,600, enough for a trip for two to Paris. Meanwhile, the state would have even less money for roads and schools.The governor wants instead some kind of minimal targeted homestead tax credit which would largely help seniors. But there is a simpler way of cutting taxes that would help the people who really need it and the state’s economy.Three years ago, our lawmakers slapped a big tax increase on Michigan’s working poor, by cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, usually known by its initials, EITC. This is not welfare, but something for working families, designed to offset other taxes that disproportionately fall on the poor.Cutting it amounted to almost a $600 tax increase on a family of three scraping by a minimum wage salary.Restoring the tax credit would lift something like 12,000 Michigan children out of poverty, the League estimates."This would be the one rational way to help this state and cut taxes.",Plus, this extra income would quickly be spent by those who have it in their communities. That would help create jobs and stimulate growth, especially among small businesses.This would be the one rational way to help this state and cut taxes. And the outrage is that none of our elected leaders, even those from urban areas, are making this an issue.Sometimes, I think that maybe they, indeed, really don’t care.

I have very few inflexible notions, but one of them is this: It is better to learn than be ignorant. Unlike many dogmas, this one passes the practical test. Those who are better educated generally make more money and have happier and more fulfilled lives.There’ve been a lot of crises in education in recent years. Most have been about money. But this year, it’s weather. This brutal winter has meant many schools have been closed for more “snow days” than usual. Legally, schools are allowed to miss up to six days. After that, they have to make up the time, or lose some of their school aid money. None of them want that, of course.So how do they make up the lost days? My guess is that any elementary school kid who has ever tackled a “story problem” could come up with the right answer: You add more days to the school year to make up for the ones that were missed.Unfortunately, some of our politicians have it wrong: Most notably, State Representative Phil Potvin, a Republican who runs a concrete company in Cadillac. Potvin has sponsored a bill that would allow districts to lengthen school days instead of adding new days.That’s an idea, as one member of the state board of education told me, is “incredibly stupid.” Here’s why. All of us, but kids especially have a limited attention span.It’s been a long time since my own public school experience, but I can tell you this: My own education suffered because l was scheduled for Algebra II the last hour of the day.Michigan’s entire state board of education agrees that trying to make up lost days with longer days is a stupid idea. They’ve issued a statement that says the board “strongly encourages school districts to replace additional lost days with full days of student instruction.” They added, “this is the better strategy to ensure that students will be ready for career, college and community.” Not to mention, a better strategy for Michigan’s future.State Superintendent of Schools Mike Flanagan is even more emphatic. He notes that Michigan used to require kids to be in school at least 180 days a year. We’ve dropped that by ten days. Meanwhile, some other nations are having their students spend 200 days or more in school. Nations whose economies are eating our lunch.That doesn’t seem important to Potvin, however. When asked about the state superintendent’s views by the Center for Michigan’s Bridge Magazine, Potvin said: “He hasn’t signed any checks lately for transportation,” apparently meaning the cost of school buses. In other words, for Potvin, it is all about the short-term bottom line.Perhaps that may make sense in his concrete business. But we do know that shortchanging education will cost this state dearly.Potvin did this last year, and, Governor Rick Snyder, who should know better, signed a one-time bill allowing districts to add hours rather than days. Now, they want to make that permanent.That’s a bad idea, if we want Michigan to be competitive.If that doesn’t matter, well, we could help our short-term bottom line even more by not having school at all.

As most of the world knows by now, yesterday, the longest-serving congressman in our nation’s history announced his retirement.I wasn’t the least surprised. After a long lunch with John Dingell last fall, I had become convinced this was going to happen.Ten years ago, I would have bet that he would die in office. In fact, that’s what he told me he intended to do. Told me more than once, in fact.“Do you know your history, young man? He asked me long ago. “Do you know about John Quincy Adams?”Yes sir, said I, and I think that pleased him.Adams was the only president who returned to the House of Representatives after the White House. He served there till he collapsed and died on the floor.For a long time, Big John intended to do the same. The House really was his home.He first walked into Congress holding the hand of his father, a newly elected New Deal congressman, in 1933." That was more than 81 years ago.Dingell worked there as a page and an elevator operator when he was old enough, then won a hasty special election in 1955, after his dad, who he still idolizes, died of tuberculosis.He’s never wanted to leave.Every year, he would introduce a bill his father once did, a bill calling for universal health care coverage. Every year, his bill would be ignored. Then, four years ago, something close enough to his father’s dream actually passed.The Affordable Care Act made Dingell very happy, but that was one of his last true happy moments.Dingell’s Washington was a place where Republicans and Democrats might bash each other on the stump, but later would go out for a beer, sit down and figure out how to get a compromise they could live with.He told me he always tried to get the strongest bill that was politically possible. His Washington was a place where politics stopped at the water’s edge, especially during the Cold War. And woe be unto any official of any administration who was called before his committee and tried to cover up waste, fraud or, abuse.Late last summer I asked him if he would want a career in Congress if he were 29 now. “If I knew what I knew now, I probably wouldn’t,” he said. He told me that the quality he valued most was decency, and there is too little of that in public life today.Yesterday, I realized that John Dingell became a member of Congress when I was three years old, and before he leaves, I will be technically eligible for Social Security.He is old enough to be my father. Yet in today’s world, we are a couple of old guys who still read words on paper."Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.Yesterday, watching his announcement, the words that spontaneously came into my head were from Shakespeare. Macbeth, in fact: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”John Dingell, who never lost an election, is leaving under his own terms.Washington won’t be the same place without Dingell. In fact, it hasn’t been the place he knew and loved for some time. Which is part of why he is leaving.

Well, the shoe finally dropped last Friday, or maybe it was a hammer. At any rate, we now know the details of Detroit’s proposed bankruptcy “plan of adjustment,” and they include pension cuts. Pretty massive pension cuts. Most pensioners would see their monthly checks cut by 34%. Police and fire retirees, whose pension fund is in better shape, lose 10%.For many, this would be devastating. Devastating, and unfair.There’s no doubt that Detroit’s pension funds were poorly managed. There’s also no doubt that the city was too liberal in its pension policy.There are some folks who spent 30 years in a low-stress clerical job, and then were able to retire, move to Florida and collect a pension for life starting at age 52. That policy doesn’t make any sense even if the city of Detroit could afford it, and it never could.My guess is that in the future, there won’t be any pensions for new city workers, just a defined contribution savings plan.However, there’s a whole lot wrong with cutting pensions for those already retired. First, it means our government is not living up to the contract they made with these people.They took these jobs and stayed in them, in many cases because they knew they were assured of collecting a pension.There are other problems, too. Those collecting City of Detroit pensions get an average of $19,000 a year. If they have to take the proposed cut, that will be reduced to $12,540 a year."When poor people have money, they don't put it in offshore banks. They tend to spend it on necessities in their neighborhoods."Those cuts would be slightly reduced if the unions don’t protest and just sign and promise not to sue, but that isn’t going to happen, so imagine what that will do to a 90-year-old just managing to scrape by.These cuts are also bad from the standpoint of the entire economy. When poor people have money, they don’t put it in offshore banks. They tend to spend it on necessities in their neighborhoods. This has a multiplier effect in terms of generating economic activity and stimulating growth.It needs to be remembered that these cuts are not set in stone.U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes could reject them as being too Draconian and tell Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to go back to the drawing board.The bad news is that, in the end, things could end up being much worse for the retirees than this.As I read the bankruptcy plan, this is all contingent on the state Legislature agreeing to cough up $350 million to supplement the pension fund. That’s far from a sure thing, and if they don’t, the pension cuts could be worse, and creditors may again go after the treasures in the Detroit Institute of Arts.What should happen instead is simple.Earlier, I said our government is proposing breaking its contract with the pensioners.That’s true even if you have never lived in Detroit. Cities are creatures of the state. In Ohio, the state has ultimate responsibility for government pensions at all levels. That should also be the case here.Michigan has an obligation to guarantee municipal pensions. If we believe in honesty, fairness and integrity, we can do no less.

They used to say that the definition of chutzpah was the boy who killed his parents and then asked the court for mercy since he was an orphan. But that was improved on twice this week.First, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan began talking about making a bid for the Democratic National Convention two years from now.That’s a nice “comeback kid” idea, but there are two major problems.The entire metro area probably doesn’t have enough hotel space. Detroit could barely host the Republican Convention in 1980, and Democratic conventions have more delegates.Plus, conventions are expensive.They are good for parts of the private sector, but they cost cities many millions, and I would bet there isn’t any money in the Detroit Emergency Manager’s “Plan of Adjustment” for that.However, Detroit’s chutzpah was out-chutzpahed when word came that riot-torn Ukraine intends to make a bid for the Winter Olympics eight years from now. Ukrainian officials argued that this was in fact logical, and that the bloody violence is bound to be over by then. (Sure.)What is troubling here in Michigan is a nagging fear that maybe the system is incapable of working anymore, for all sorts of structural and ideological reasons. Think of our incomprehensible failure to fix the state’s roads.Every survey shows whopping majorities in favor of paying higher taxes for fewer potholes, but that seems to be irrelevant to legislators who seem worried only about primary challenges from even more irrational Tea Party supporters.The state isn’t meeting its basic responsibilities in a number of areas. We have systematically starved higher education for years, weakening it and pricing many kids out of the market just when it is clear that Michigan needs higher education more than ever.Nevertheless, the Legislature is talking about a tax cut. Earlier this week I was asked to lunch by two powerful behind-the-scenes movers and shakers. One is a Republican, the other a Democrat.They have been in politics and run large enterprises for a long time. Both were dismayed by what appears to be the collapse of any real possibility of meaningful mass transit in the Detroit metropolitan area.Last month, John Hertel, who was to have run the new regional Rapid Transit Authority, resigned in frustration after the Legislature refused to appropriate money for him to hire the needed staff.Both these men said they thought the time might be ripe for a new common-sense based political party that would completely ignore social issues, and concern itself only with public sector needs – education, transportation, police and defense.My reaction was while that sounds appealing, it would be hard to imagine launching a new party. It would need, right from the start, to have competitive candidates for everything from school boards to state legislatures to Congress.Launching a campaign to eliminate term limits and standing up for rational behavior sounded more doable to me.We’ve done hard things before, after all, and there is a lot that isn’t broken in Michigan, and even Detroit. Maybe, just maybe, someone will unite us around a simple desire to spend money where needed to make things work.All I know is that we better hope so.

The city of Detroit actually has a person whose title is Director of Community Engagement. Yesterday, her job was to tell people to go out and clear ice and snow away from the drains on their streets to prevent flooding.The city no longer has enough manpower to do this, she explained. They’ll be lucky if they can keep the drains open on the main streets. So the residents need to do it, and while they’re at it, clear the hydrants in case there is a fire.Nothing wrong with that. I’ve done the same with both snow and leaves from the drain on my suburban street.But it indicates in a small way one of the big problems Detroit is going to have after the bankruptcy is over. There is not enough money to provide basic services, or to maintain basic infrastructure.Bankruptcy isn’t really designed to fix that. It is designed to get rid of debt. We are still waiting for Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s plan to get there. He does talk about directing more money into basic services, such as police and fire and removing blight.That’s nice, and very necessary. But I worry that we aren’t thinking enough about what happens with Detroit when the bankruptcy is over. The city may be shorn of debt.But how will it run basic operations and stay solvent? Much of that debt was accumulated because the city didn’t have the money to do what it needed to do. So it borrowed to pay the bills.Detroit isn’t going to be able to borrow when the bankruptcy is over; its credit will be effectively ruined.So how will Detroit function? Where will the resources come from to give it a shot at prosperity?Were this a rational society, our leaders would be saying that  we all have to bite the bullet, and pour billions and billions into not only repairing the infrastructure of Detroit, but of society as a whole. This devastating winter has been hell on our roads.I have never seen potholes so bad. But they are going to be a lot worse when the spring thaw starts in earnest. Yet our legislature seems entirely disconnected from reality. For years, the governor has tried to get them to appropriate the billion plus dollars a year that will be needed just to get our roads back to reasonable shape.Our lawmakers completely refuse to do it. The other day, State Senator John Pappageorge from Troy, normally a hard-line conservative, sponsored an amendment to provide 100 million dollars to help local communities cope with the devastation this winter has wreaked on our roads.“What I am hoping people will realize is infrastructure is important,” he said. But yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville said he thought 100 million was too much.Perhaps they don’t drive on his planet.Meanwhile, a House legislative committee yesterday voted to cut the income tax rate, which would further cripple our state’s ability to provide basic services. This is, frankly, insane. Once upon a time, we expected leaders to think about our future.Today, they seem unable even to face up to the needs of the present. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.  

Congresswoman Candice Miller understands the importance of the Great Lakes. She grew up on the water in Harrison Township. She is a proudly conservative Republican, not crazy about government spending.But she knows that if the Asian carp get into the Great Lakes, the waterways may be largely destroyed. Destroyed, that is, as a center of recreational and commercial fishing and boating, activities worth billions every year.Two species of Asian carp, silver and bighead, have been working their way up the Mississippi River ever since escaping from catfish farms in Arkansas in the 1980s. They suck up vast quantities of food, starving out native species of fish. Silver carp, which can weigh 60 pounds, also have a nasty habit of jumping, injuring people and damaging boats.Miller knows if we do nothing more than we have been doing, odds are that the carp will be established in the lakes, and once they are there, we’ll never get them out. So earlier this month, she introduced a bill that would actually do something about it.HR 4001, the Defending Against Aquatic Invasive Species Act of 2014, would authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to permanently close the canals connecting the Mississippi with Lake Michigan within six months after the bill is passed. These are artificial waterways dug in the 19th century.This, she believes, is the only sure way of keeping the carp out of the lakes. “We would just be undoing the damage we did to Mother Nature years ago,” she told me.The congresswoman is right about all of that. But her bill faces very long odds. Earlier this year, a long-awaited Corps of Engineers study presented a series of alternatives for stopping the carp. Sealing off the canals was seen as the most drastic and most expensive option. They said it would cost at least $18 billion and take more than a quarter of a century.Candice Miller is one of a number of analysts who don’t think it would take anywhere near that long or cost that much. The dirty little secret is that the canals were dug in the first place to allow Chicago’s raw sewage to flow away from the city and into the Great Lakes. Some of that price tag involves building a new wastewater treatment plant for Chicago.Miller is sympathetic to the concerns of barge operators and others who would be hurt by closing the canal. She would even be open to compensating them.But unless there is a drastic change in attitude, her bill has little chance of going anywhere. Her fellow Republican, Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, attacked it immediately. President Obama, who is from Chicago, opposes closing the canal.Yet the Congresswoman’s bill has drawn a lot of editorial support in both the United States and Canada, and has been endorsed by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission and the Michigan United Conservation Clubs. It is well known that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.Congresswoman Miller is proposing doing something radical and radically important. What is undeniable is that if we don’t take this threat more seriously, we are all going to pay.   

I heard something startling last weekend from a woman with whom I used to work. “So Matty Moroun is going to build a second bridge after all!” she said.To which I said a very profound “huh?”Oh yes, she said. She had read it in the newspaper. She said the Canadians had given him the go-ahead to build a second span, next to his Ambassador Bridge.That didn’t make any sense to me, since I have talked to Canadian officials and diplomats about this for years. Suddenly, I realized what she was talking about.There was a story in the papers on Valentine’s Day saying that Moroun’s Detroit International Bridge Company had gotten environmental clearance from Canada for a new span.Actually, it quoted officials of the bridge company as saying this. However, there were two problems with most versions of that story.The minor problem is that what Moroun claimed – a claim reflected in the headlines – wasn’t quite true.The Windsor Port Authority and Transport Canada did indeed issue a decision saying that a replacement for the Ambassador Bridge was unlikely to do serious damage to the environment.That is, a replacement bridge – not the second twin span that Ambassador Bridge officials are talking about.This assumes that the Ambassador would be taken out of service and, presumably, torn down. But the major flaw in these stories is that gaining environmental clearance is irrelevant.There is still no way Matty Moroun will be allowed to build a second bridge. For one thing, he needs environmental approval on this side from the U.S. Coast Guard, plus a presidential permit.For another, as bridge expert Joel Thurtell pointed out on his blog, Joelontheroad.com, Moroun doesn’t own the American land where the second bridge would be anchored. That land is in Detroit’s Riverside Park, and the city has refused to sell it to him.So what about the real new bridge, the New International Trade Crossing, which is to be built about two miles south of the Ambassador? That bridge has all its permits and approvals.But one thing is holding it up: Washington is dragging its feet on appropriating $250 million to build a customs plaza.I might remind you this is the most economically important border between the United States and Canada. The Canadians have agreed to pick up all the rest of the $2 to$4 billion the new project will take. But President Obama and Congress haven’t stepped up.That prompted Gord Henderson, who works for the Windsor Star, to write a blistering column:“How did a nation once labeled the planet’s sole remaining superpower become a country that can’t or won’t pay its fair share? Why hasn’t the Obama administration been a full partner in getting this done? What happened to the America that built the Panama Canal and sent men to the moon?”And, Henderson added, why can’t the country that wasted hundreds of billions on the war in Iraq find a little money to complete a vital bridge with its most important trade partner?I think those are completely legitimate questions. Ones for which we need to start demanding answers.

If the United Auto Workers Union was ever going to succeed at organizing a non-traditional plant in the South, the Volkswagen facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee should have been it.The company stayed strictly neutral and did not try to block the union. UAW officials said they were open to creating a German-style council that would give workers a say in important plant decisions.Yet the results were a crushing blow. When the vote was announced on Valentine’s Day, more than 53 percent of Chattanooga workers rejected the UAW. This is bound to raise questions about the union’s long-term survival.The UAW has been in steep decline for a long time. Less than 40 years ago, the union Walter Reuther built reached a peak of more than a million and a half workers. Today, membership is less than 400,000, and a growing number of those have nothing to do with the car industry.In recent years, the UAW has oddly succeeded in organizing such unlikely groups as post-doctoral scholars at the University of California and employees of the Sierra Club. But they have had no success at organizing a single one of the “transplants” – the Japanese, European and Korean auto factories that have sprung up, mostly in the South, over the last 30 years. Those factories now employ more than 50,000 workers.When Bob King was elected the UAW’s tenth president four years ago, he promised to make organizing the transplants a priority. In fact, he’s said that unless his union does succeed in organizing these plants, it has no future. He vowed to bring the union into at least one transplant before he left office.But Bob King has failed, at least in a personal sense. He will leave office this summer, without having organized a single foreign-owned plant, or having done anything to roll back the hated two-tier wage rate the union accepted seven years ago, just before the industry went through its near-death experience.Not everybody thinks the situation is completely dire. Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California who specializes on labor issues, insists that Chattanooga was “more setback than rout.” Yesterday, he told me “this is a disappointment, I won’t deny that. But it doesn’t mean the end or the death of the UAW.”Shaiken noted that while Volkswagen stayed neutral, the “the entire Republican party of the state made defeating the union a top priority.” That was certainly true of the governor and especially Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who was a vocal opponent of the bailouts that saved General Motors and Chrysler five years ago.Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, paid for lurid billboards that showed scenes of devastation with the slogan “Detroit: Brought to You by the UAW.” Shaiken thinks the union will redouble its organizing efforts, and try another vote in a year. He may be right. But it is also clear that the UAW didn’t succeed in selling Chattanooga workers on the union. Workers there are among the best paid in Tennessee. Some feared that if the plant was organized, Volkswagen might leave the state.In the end, unless the UAW can convince transplant workers that it can improve their lives, the union really will be doomed.

Today is Valentine’s Day, and Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer hope that it will be the last they spend unmarried, and without both being the legal parents of their children.They may not have long to wait. Eleven days from now, a trial in federal court in Detroit could determine the constitutionality of the two key laws that stand in their way: Michigan’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, and Michigan’s adoption code, which prevents any two unmarried people from jointly adopting a child.Ten years ago this would have been a national sensation. Today, the question may be: Is this trial really necessary? Our legal system functions largely on precedent. Most of the time, judges look to other legal decisions as guides for how they should rule. In this case, the train is leaving the station at incredible speed.Last night, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Arenda Allen said:“government interests in perpetuating traditions … and favoring one model of parenting over others must yield to this country’s cherished protections that ensure the exercise of the private choice of the individual citizen regarding love and family.”Two days ago, another federal judge in Kentucky ordered that deep red state to recognize same-sex marriages performed in the 17 states where they are now fully legal. Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s anti same-sex marriage law. The lower court rulings will all be appealed.But the only remaining question seems to be whether the high court will allow individual states to ban same-sex marriage at all, or find that marrying who you want is a right that no state can deny.Last fall, attorneys for April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse were hopeful Judge Friedman would just strike down Michigan’s gay marriage ban, but instead he sent the case to trial.Originally, this wasn’t a case about marriage at all. Rowse and DeBoer are two nurses who jointly fostered and loved three special needs babies.When they found they couldn’t adopt the children jointly, one adopted two, the other the third. But then they realized that if something happened to one of the partners, the survivor would have no parental right to that woman’s children. That’s why they sued.But U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman suggested they broaden the case to challenge Michigan’s same-sex marriage statute as well. Based on the other recent rulings, it is highly unlikely that Michigan’s marriage ban has a chance of surviving.Yet Bill Schuette, Michigan’s flamboyant attorney general, intends to wage a massive battle against same-sex marriage, at taxpayer expense. The attorney general claims the state has a vested interest in “regulating sexual relationships,”’ so that they benefit rather than harm society.It might be hard to see how legally recognizing and protecting the bond between April and Jayne and the family they made would harm society, but that’s what this trial will decide.Half a century ago, there were people who thought our democracy would be destroyed if black people won the right to stay in any hotel they wanted. I remember those days, and suspect that a half century from now, people will say of same-sex marriage bans, “what were they thinking?’