Despite the MLK Day march against Public Act 4 and an ongoing petition to repeal the act, Governor Snyder said he stands by
the legislation.
“Public Act 4 was good legislation,” he said. “We’ve had emergency manager legislation in the state going back to Governor Blanchard. But as time passed, it turned out to be not as effective as it should be. It had a couple major issues. One major issue is there was no early warning system.
“The long-term best answer is to help communities avoid ever needing a manager situation. We put in this process of preliminary review teams, a lot of good things to deal with communities and help them be successful before you get to that.
It’s a failure point if you have an emergency manager. I never want to appoint one.”
Representative Sean McCann, Democrat of Michigan’s 60th District, agreed with the protestors.
“I think the emergency financial manager act was an overreach. The powers it provides are too broad. They go to the point of really undermining democracy,” McCann said.
“I think that’s what the protests and the petition gathering are about. People think it’s gone too far in its ability to supplant locally elected officials and the powers that the people who elect them give them.”
Snyder stressed that a few small number of Michigan cities have needed an emergency manager and that enhancing the preexisting emergency manager legislation was essential to empowering the managers to help the communities they served.
“If you look at it, in 2010 we had six situations. We added one more in 2011. We’re talking about a very small handful of situations,” Snyder said. “If you have an emergency manager situation, too often they were there too long because they weren’t fully empowered to do what they needed to do so they could get their job done and get out…So we enhanced the ability of the emergency manager to do their work better, faster, and quicker…and get the communities back on a stable footing and on a positive path to success.”
McCann said that ultimately the bill undermines the communities it’s supposed to help.
“The bottom line is that the state really isn’t supporting communities in a way that’s a constructive way to help them get back on their feet. It’s really like a deal where we’re going to pull the rug out and totally rearrange, sell public assets, supplant elected officials, break union contracts, and that’s how we’re going to solve communities’ problems.
That’s not how you solve Michigan’s issues in a grand sense,” he said.
“Why can’t we do that in a way in our struggling communities that doesn’t cast aside people who have been rightfully elected by the populations?”
Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Pontiac, Highland Park Schools, and Detroit Public Schools currently have emergency financial managers.
