The Phyical, Fiscal, & Governing Challenges of Rcovery

eBlog

May 3, 2019

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the obstacles to facilitating hurricane recovery assistance to Puerto Rico, before assessing the fiscal and physical status of Flint, Michigan.

Getting Aid to Puerto Rico. Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) has offered the Democrats on the Committee proposed language which would accelerate the disbursement of funds to Puerto Rico, albeit with greater supervision and restrictions—but, critically, which would unblock the impasse so far barring Congress from passing legislation to address recent natural disasters. While the Chair has not made public his proposed language, he has shared it with Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Chair Shelby’s proposed language would not include new allocations for the U.S. territory in addition to the $600 million in food assistance funds which have not been opposed by the President—and $5 million focused on studying the impact of that nutritional aid. Here, Chairman Shelby’s offer came hours after on the pending disaster allocation project was reportedly briefly discussed at Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.)—a meeting called by the President to discuss his newly proposed $2 billion infrastructure plan—a plan for which the proposed $2 billion remains unexplained and unfunded.

The Congressional Democratic Leaders left the session hopeful that there is interest to agree soon with consensus on a path to unblock critical natural disaster relief across the nation—relief to date blocked by the White House due to apparent opposition to any relief to Puerto Rico. There appeared to be some sense that the efforts have achieved progress—or, as one participant noted, in quoting the President: “I’m going to keep out” of this discussion—seemingly meaning he would not object. However, another source from the White House indicated that he understood that President Trump did not say that he would stay out of the discussions, but rather that an agreement must be reached; while Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla) tweeted that some progress was occurring in bipartisan talks. The House version approved at the beginning of the year includes $600 million in food assistance for Puerto Rico, $25 million to restore the Martín Peña Canal, $5 million to finance a study on the elimination of emergency nutritional assistance in the wake of Hurricane Maria—and restoration of the matching of funds that the government of Puerto Rico has to make in order to obtain the reimbursements of FEMA for the emergency measures. (In the wake of the President’s refusal to grant more funds to Puerto Rico, President Trump accepted that the Senate bill included the allocations related to nutritional assistance, but no other initiative for the island.

The negotiations come as the House is scheduled to pass legislation next week that adds another $3 billion in appropriations to address the March floods in the Midwest—legislation which retains the funds originally ratified for Puerto Rico last January. Indeed, at the White House meeting, the House and Senate Democratic leaders, and the President, agreed to work towards a legislative plan that allocates $ 2 billion to finance improvements to the transportation infrastructure of the United States—albeit without any agreement from whence such funds would come.

Wherefore Restoration of Self-Governance Authority? Meanwhile it appears President Trump plans to nominate the current PROMESA Oversight Board members to serve their terms through the end of August—plans which have gained praise from Democrats in Congress, as it may avert an interruption of the Board’s efforts to bolster the U.S. territory’s economy and fiscal management. The announcement came as the PROMESA Board prepared to launch law suits seeking to claw back payments made on and fees paid for more than $6 billion of Puerto Rico bonds. That is, the ongoing governance quandary with regard to whether a federal circuit court, the unelected oversight board, or the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico will actually be permitted to decide on the island’s future—a future further confused when, last February, the U.S. 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals held in favor of municipal bondholders that the method of appointment of the board, as found in the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, was unconstitutional: ergo, for the PROMESA Board to continue to operate beyond May 16th, the court ruled the President must nominate and the Senate confirm the Board members. The President, in a posting to the White House website, noted he intends to nominate the current seven members to serve out their terms. (According to the PROMESA each term is three years, so if the Senate confirms the members, their terms would end on Aug. 31st.)

It is unclear how the U.S. Senate will react—especially in the wake of a White House statement: “Mismanagement, corruption, and neglect continues to hurt the people of Puerto Rico who deserve better from their government…The most important component for future health and growth of Puerto Rico is financial constraint, reduced debt, and structural reforms…The work of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico is providing the stability and oversight needed to address these chronic issues that will bring hope of a brighter future for Puerto Rico.” Given the exploding debt and deficits under the Trump administration, the statement appears most ironic.

Nevertheless, House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Az.) hailed the move: “The President’s decision to nominate the members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico for Senate confirmation is welcome. Democrats supported PROMESA largely to enable Puerto Rico to restructure and reduce its debts. If the 1st Circuit’s ruling invalidating the original appointments had not been addressed, the Board would have collapsed and three years of work on debt restructuring would have been wasted….We are close to a final restructuring agreement on the largest remaining block of Puerto Rican debt, and it’s in the interests of the Puerto Rican people to finalize that agreement without interruption,” Chairman Grijalva noted, for his Committee, which oversees Puerto Rico. Similarly, Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y) noted: “To essentially start over with new appointments to the Oversight Board would have injected serious uncertainty and chaos into the debt restructuring process…While I support the reappointment of these members to the Board, I will continue holding them to account to ensure they are always acting in the best interest of the people of Puerto Rico…Austerity measures are not the answer for Puerto Rico, and I’ll continue pushing the Board to put ordinary Puerto Ricans before Wall Street creditors and hedge funds.”

The PROMESA Board also released a statement welcoming the President’s announcement, with its statement coming in the wake of its request to the U.S. 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals to extend the May 16 deadline for acting as the Board; the PROMESA Board has also filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court to review the appeals court’s February decision.

Not in Like Flint. Five years on, the Flint water crisis is nowhere near over: the state-caused fiscal and physical emergency devastating lives, assessed property values, and public trust continues. The Flint River courses some 142 miles through mid-Michigan, before a noticeable change occurs as it flows southwest into the city of Flint, where, abruptly, it is marked by concrete slopes, capped with wire fences, flank the water—adjacent to decaying bridge piers protruding from the center of the river. It is almost as if it were a cemetery to mark the five years since the city’s water source switch which, in a decision by a state appointed Emergency Manager—it is, rather, as studies have demonstrated, a municipality with drinking water lead levels nearly twice the amount that is supposed to trigger action under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards: That is, it is a municipality where the state action threatens adverse neurological effects in children, including reduced IQ and aggressive behavior; in a 6-month-old weighing 18 pounds, it takes just 12 millionths of an ounce of lead in the child’s bloodstream, about the same as one grain of salt, to exceed the level that the Centers for Disease Control considers a risk for children. That is, for a mother and father—leaving seems a vital goal—but for the municipality, such departures can have devastating implications for assessed property values and income taxes. Perhaps fortunately for the city, its budget only assumes some $4.6 million in property taxes—less than a third of what it anticipates in income taxes; however, therein lies a fiscal risk: while the city’s water system operators report they have significantly reduced lead since 1991, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency first adopted a rule that mandates monitoring and treatment to reduce contamination caused by corrosion and other factors related to lead pipes, EPA notified the Governor there remained “serious and ongoing concerns with the safety of Flint’s drinking water system,” including “continuing delays and lack of transparency” in the state’s response. Flint switched back to the Detroit water system three and a half years ago, but public health effects from lead exposure prompted emergency declarations from the state and federal governments in early 2016. The city then launched an aggressive rehabilitation campaign, and, in the past three years, crews have explored 21,298 homes and replaced lead service lines at 8,260. The work should finish in July, according to Jameca Patrick-Singleton, Flint’s Chief Recovery Officer.

The most recent testing of Flint’s drinking water, sourced again from Detroit, marked lead at four parts per billion, well clear of the 15 that requires action. Those results account for a 90th-percentile rating: in other words, 90 percent of the homes comply with the federal standard. Nevertheless, Mayor Karen Weaver notes that tests will continue, and according to Patrick-Singleton, Mayor Weaver will not lift the city’s emergency declaration until the scientific and medical communities clear the drinking water.

Governance: Creating & Responding (or failing to respond) to a Human, Physical, & Fiscal Crisis.  Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office has fired special prosecutor Todd Flood from the Flint water criminal prosecution team because of documents discovered in a government building, which Michigan Solicitor Fadwa Hammoud confirmed Monday. Here, the special prosecutor’s contract expired on April 16, and he had been advised last week that the state would not be renewing his contract. The Solicitor Mr. Flood’s termination to the recent realization that legal “discovery was not fully and properly pursued from the onset of this investigation.” Last Friday, prosecutors asked a Genesee County judge for a six-month delay in the involuntary manslaughter case against former Michigan Health and Human Services director Nick Lyon after finding a “trove of documents” related to the Flint water crisis in the basement of a state building. (Mr. Flood had been named a special assistant attorney general in the Flint criminal cases after serving as a special prosecutor, serving more than three years: an appointee of former Attorney General Bill Schuette, Mr. Flood’s authority was curbed significantly when Mr. Hammoud was put in charge of the Flint prosecution, and then brought in Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy to help the prosecution team.) Mr. Hammoud noted that Mr. Flood’s departure reflected the department’s commitment “to execute the highest standards” in the Flint prosecutions.

For his part, Mr. Flood noted: “In the time we have spent in Flint, we interviewed over 400 people, reviewed millions of
pages of discovery, and took pleas to advance the investigation: We conducted multiple court hearings and preliminary exams, placed hundreds of exhibits into evidence and successfully bound defendants over for trial. This complex case of official wrong-doing and betrayal of public trust has been prosecuted with the utmost attention to the professional standards that justice demands. I walk away knowing that I gave everything I had to give to this case. The people of Flint deserved nothing less.”

Mr. Flood originally charged 15 people in the Flint prosecutions; he struck plea deals with seven defendants who have pleaded no contest to misdemeanors; he successfully convinced 67th District Court judges to bind over for trial Mr. Lyon and former Chief Medical Executive Eden Wells on criminal charges related to the 2014-15 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak which led to the death of 12 individuals and sickened at least 79 others.

Preliminary exams against former gubernatorially-appointed Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, and Howard Croft, Flint’s former Public Works Director, were recently suspended as the Attorney General’s office continues its review of all of the criminal cases; it remains unclear what connection the recently rediscovered boxes have to Mr. Lyon, who has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak: he is accused of failing to warn the public in a timely manner about the respiratory disease before former Gov. Rick Snyder informed the public about it in mid-January 2016.

Will Justice Be Done? Mayor Weaver, in a statement Monday, noted: “I respect the decision that the Solicitor General has made regarding the changes to the prosecution team. I will continue to voice my desires to have truth, transparency, and justice for Flint residents…I ask that we not get caught up on the changes, but that we continue to keep the focus where it should be, and that is on making the residents whole after such a traumatic experience.”

The Governance Responsibility to Protect a City’s Children

October 10, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we report on the physical and fiscal challenges of the Detroit Public Schools, before zooming south to assess whether the complex municipal financing in Puerto Rico’s recovery has perhaps exacerbated the U.S. territory’s debt challenges.

Protecting a City’s Children. A key challenge in Detroit’s plan of debt adjustment from the nation’s largest chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy was restoring trust in its public schools—a critical step if families with kids were going to move from the suburbs into the emptied city. That, of course, required making the schools not just trustworthy places for learning, but also safe—and not just safe from a gang perspective, but especially here from water contamination—Flint, not so far away, after all, is on many parents’ minds. Thus, the school district is developing plans to make drinking water safe inside its buildings, especially after a review of testing data shows one school had more than 54 times the allowable amount of lead under federal law, while another exceeded the regulated copper level by nearly 30 times. The Detroit News reviewed hundreds of pages of water reports for 57 buildings which tested for elevated levels of lead and/or copper in the water to provide a detailed look how excessive the metal levels were in the most elevated sources.

The News effort comes as Detroit Public School Superintendent Nikolai Vitti noted: “‎We discontinued the use of drinking water when concerns were identified without any legal requirement to do so, and hydration stations will ensure there is no lead or copper in all water consumed by students and staff, with the Superintendent yesterday reported the system expects to spend nearly $3.8 million enacting a long-term solution to widespread lead and copper contamination in students’ drinking water, with the cost including $741,939 to install 818 hydration stations and filters, $750,000 for water coolers until completed installation of the stations in the summer of 2019, $539,880 for environmental remediation costs, $1.2 million for maintenance services, and $282,000 for facilities maintenance—a tab unanimously approved yesterday by the Detroit Community Schools Board, with long-term plan to get drinking water flowing again inside the 106 Detroit schools after faucets were turned off ahead of the school year. The announcement followed Monday’s by Supt. Vitti, when he reported that he and the school board will reveal corporate funders for some $2 million in hydration stations he wants to install across the district.

The need, as the survey revealed, is urgent: among the elevated levels reported by the Detroit Public School District includes a kitchen faucet inside Mason Elementary-Middle School which had more than 54 times the amount of lead permitted the Safe Drinking Water Act; a drinking fountain inside Mark Twain School for Scholars was tested at more than 53 times the federal threshold; a drinking fountain on the first floor near the kitchen of Bethune Elementary-Middle School that had copper levels at nearly 30 times the permissible level—even as DPS officials still await the test results of 17 more buildings. Nevertheless, from the results so far, there is a failing grade: more than half of the 106 schools inside Michigan’s largest school district have contaminated water. Indeed, with EPA recommending lead limits of 15 micrograms per liter or 15 part per billion, water samples at Mason found extreme elevations of lead at Mason, Twain, Davis Aerospace Technical, and Bagley, and extreme levels of copper at Bethune Academy of the Americas elementary-middle school and Western International. Unsurprisingly, public health and water safety experts report that schools should use a tougher standard for lead levels, and nationally recognized Virginia Tech water expert Marc Edwards said: “Those are not good. There is no doubt there are worrisome lead levels: Whenever you take hundreds of thousands of samples in a school, you are going to get some results that are shockingly high.” At a Board of Education meeting last month, Superintendent Vitti said the most practical, long-term, and safest solution for water quality problems inside the schools would be to provide water hydration stations in every building—systems currently used in public school districts, including in Flint, Royal Oak, and Birmingham, as well as Baltimore: these stations, in addition to cooling water, more importantly remove copper, lead, and other contaminants.

Drinking water screening reports demonstrate that water was collected at some schools in April and others in August, with school district officials reporting sampling began in the district in the spring and continued through last August. In September, Superintendent Vitti said that DPS, through its environmental consulting firm, ATC Group, is following EPA protocol for collecting water samples, adding: “If testing occurred at a school after the regular school year, then it was done during summer school, where nearly 80 of our schools were offering classes,” adding that many of the schools with high levels had already identified for concern two years ago—and that those were the first group of schools to move to water coolers. Supt. Vitti initiated water testing of the 106 school buildings in May and August after initial tests results found that 16 schools showed high levels of copper and/or lead. Another eight tested for elevated levels in the spring after they were identified with concerns in 2016. Last month, the DPS District received more test results, which found an 33 additional schools with elevated contaminant levels, bringing the total number of schools with tainted water to 57 in a District already overwhelmed by some $500 million in building repair needs; moreover, the bad gnus could worsen: the total number of schools with high levels could increase as school officials await more test results on another 17 schools.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, noted for her expertise in Flint, who is a pediatrician and public health expert, concurred that Detroit’s policymakers need to set a much more aggressive limit on allowable amounts of lead in schools. In addition, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s school sampling guidance recommends that schools address fixtures which measure above 5 micrograms per liter, the same EPA standard as bottled water, according to Dr. Hanna-Attisha; the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends an action level of just 1 microgram per liter for drinking water in child care facilities and schools. Thus, as Dr. Hanna-Attisha warns: “This should be the District’s action level,” in a letter she co-authored with Elin Betanzo, founder of Safe Water Engineering, a consulting firm—a letter with which Superintendent Vitti said he agrees.

Dr. Hanna-Attisha, who witnessed lead levels in some Flint homes reach 22,000 micrograms per liter, said U.S. EPA school sampling guidance encourages schools to sample every drinking water tap a single time unless lead is detected at greater than 20 micrograms per liter, noting: “One low single tap sample is not sufficient to clear a tap as a potential source of lead, because lead release is sporadic.” Her words come with the benefit of her experience and practice as an associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, as well as Director of the MSU-Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative. She adds: “It is not appropriate to use a single low sample that was taken as a follow-up to a high sample to conclude that a drinking tap is ‘safe to drink,’ although this is how many schools have interpreted sampling data.” Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the Director and Health Officer for the Detroit Health Department, said she recommends parents of children 6 and younger be tested for blood lead levels, because of the Motor City’s history of elevated levels for children, which has been primarily due to lead paint in homes, adding that the elevated rates in the tests were concerning: “I think, broadly speaking, I support Dr. Vitti in testing every water source in every school…For any school that comes back with elevated lead levels, the actual reasons for that school is not clear. It can be the infrastructure or the drinking fountain. Providing bottled water and other sources is the right thing to do.”

According to Michigan health officials, children are at higher risk of harm from lead, because their developing brains and nervous systems are more sensitive. Lead can cause health problems for children, including learning problems, behavior problems including hyperactivity, a lower IQ, slowed growth and development and hearing and speech problems. That risk is not just physical, but also fiscal: A key part of Detroit’s chapter 9 plan of debt adjustment approved by the U.S. Judge Steven Rhodes was its focus on the importance of provisions to give incentives for families to move back to the Motor City‒a difficult parental choice in the wake of, four years ago, the Detroit News investigation which reported that nearly 500 Detroit children had died in homicides since 2000.

Notwithstanding the terrible health tragedy in Flint, Michigan has no rules mandating the state’s school districts to test for lead in their water supply, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. According to the GAO, at least eight states require schools to test for lead, and many others assist with voluntary testing. Dr. Khaldun said she supports creating a state law to mandate testing of water sources inside schools—a proposal which would entail substantial costs, creating the query: who will pay—and how?

According to Tiffany Brown, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Department supports any schools which wish to test, and the Department can offer technical assistance and general information on sampling, result interpretation, and recommended remedial actions in the event of elevated lead and/or copper results, adding that there are fiscal resources “available through the Michigan Department of Education,” and that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is providing information and guidance on best management practices for drinking water in schools to protect the health of students and staff.” In the meantime, the Detroit Public School District is spending $200,000 on bottled water and water coolers for the next several months, with the cost to have stations in every school, one for every 100 students, projected to be $2 million, with Dr. Vitti noting the goal is to deliver clean water, not replace the pipes, or as he put it: “We are not looking to replace the plumbing. The stations address the issue of older plumbing along with weekly flushing.”  

Unequal Treatment? The Financial Oversight and Management Board in Puerto Rico reports that over reliance on outside consultants with conflicts of interest and the failure to invest in a competent workforce have imposed huge costs on and severely weakened the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and other Puerto Rico government agencies, with the report including an entire chapter just on interest rate swap agreements, a complicated and high risk investment which, it estimates, has cost Puerto Rican government entities nearly $1.1 billion when they repeatedly bet the wrong way on interest rate movements—meaning that, instead of these investments reducing Puerto Rico’s debt, government entities, including PREPA, had to take on more debt to pay for the losses. It appears that the swaps, a novel means of transactions to Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank (GDB), where officials made these interest rate bets, or, as the report found, many of the GDB Board members who were required to approve the swap transactions, “were not familiar with the mechanics and risks associated with swaps. Many told us outright they could not describe how a swap worked. Instead, the GDB Board members told us they relied on the advice presented to them by the swap advisor.” That appears to denote that the GDB board members effectively ceded control over their investments in these very risky financial instruments to a third-party swap advisor—an advisor  that earned, and will garner fees for as long as the government of Puerto Rico continued to invest in the swaps, regardless of the outcome—an outcome in this case which entailed enormous losses. Moreover, the report demonstrated that, more generally, as the financial condition of Puerto Rico deteriorated, the deals became more complex and less transparent. An example of the utility PREPA’s overreliance on an outside restructuring advisor, AlixPartners, to lead PREPA’s debt restructuring negotiations with its municipal bondholders, as well as developing PREPA’s business plan and savings initiatives, revealed that PREPA paid Alix Partners $45 million in fees for a debt restructuring deal which was ultimately rejected by the PROMESA Oversight Board, which found the proposed financial agreement called for PREPA to pay more debt than the economy of Puerto Rico could support, and as the Puerto Rico Energy Commission found that the review lacked appropriate due diligence over the ongoing fees for legal counsel, financial advisors, and underwriters that would have accrued had the PREPA restructuring deal moved forward: the Commission specifically noted that the restructuring team charged with ensuring the reasonableness of advisor fees “includes the very advisors whose fees are in question…that is not the arm’s-length relationship necessary to protect consumers from excess fees.”

Investment in Good Governance. For elected state and local leaders, over reliance on consultants can go hand-in-hand with a failure to invest in the technical capacity and expertise of government staff. As noted by a Kobre & Kim report prepared on the evolving fiscal situation in Puerto Rico, PREPA has suffered over the years from a high degree of political interference, including the appointment of hundreds of political appointees to managerial and technical positions without regard for qualifications—appointments which appear to have not only cost considerably from a fiscal perspective, but also weakened the managerial competence of the agency. However, instead of recognizing this reality and implementing labor reforms designed to sharply curtail the influence of political appointees within the agency, the PROMESA Board has instead sought an across-the-board salary freeze and benefit cuts, even as the Board recognizes that PREPA has lost 30% of its workforce since 2012 and has severe shortages of skilled workers in key areas—and that it has developed no plan for workforce training and development, effectively seeming to force PREPA to continue to depend on consultants, rather than build its own expertise.

Post Municipal Bankruptcy Futures

September 21, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we report on the unsafe conditions of Detroit’s public schools, and dismissal by the Trump administration for self-government in Puerto Rico, and, a year after Hurricane Maria’s devastating strike on Puerto Rico and underwhelming federal response, the U.S. territory’s continued inequitable status.  Unlike in corporate bankruptcies, in municipal bankruptcies, the challenge is not how to walk away from accumulated debts, but rather how to fiscally resolve them.  

Detroit’s Future? In Detroit, where, last week, organizations gathered at the Marygrove College campus to announce a new cradle-to-career educational partnership, including a state-of-the-art early childhood education center, a new K-12 school, and the introduction of an innovative teacher education training modeled after hospital residency programs; Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has announced the closure of thirty-three more schools because of high levels of copper and/or lead, bringing the total number of schools with tainted water to 57 buildings. The Superintendent’s warning noted: “Of the results just received, 33 of 52 schools have one or more water sources with elevated levels of copper and/or lead…This means that 57 of 86 schools where test results have been provided have one or more water sources with elevated levels of copper and/or lead (this does not include the previous 10 Di-Hydro schools where copper and/or lead was detected).” He added the results were incomplete: the district is still awaiting results for 17 schools. He noted: “As you know, drinking water in these schools was discontinued as we await water test results for all schools. Although the kitchen water has only been turned off in schools where levels were determined high, we have been using bottled water to clean food in all schools: As a reminder, we have not used water to cook food in our kitchens for some time and instead have delivered pre-cooked meals to students. We plan to install filters for kitchen sinks to remedy challenges in kitchens.” Last week, the Superintendent, in a state hyper aware of the physical and fiscal threats of contaminated or unsafe water, that a $2 million water station system would address water quality issues, and School Board Member Deborah Hunter-Harvill confirmed, in the wake of the tests: “We completed our community meeting, and we’ve taken down recommendations and suggestions to make certain our kids are safe.” But who will finance the corrections is unclear: School Board member LaMar Lemmons said he supports spending $2 million to fix the water problems, and he continues to blame the state for neglecting school buildings during a decade of state control, which ended in 2017: “Under the $2 billion (spent) for new school construction and renovation, they did a terrible job. There is no excuse for these schools to not have been maintained.” Supt. Vitti said the most practical, long-term, safest solution for water quality problems inside the schools would be water hydration stations in every building, system currently in use in Flint, Royal Oak, Birmingham and in Baltimore, he noted, adding, in an email earlier this week: “Moving forward, we will continue to use water coolers district-wide and are actively working through the bid processes to make a recommendation to the board for the use of hydration stations. This will occur within the next couple of weeks. The hydration stations would be installed in all schools by next school year and replace the need for water coolers.”

The health apprehension came in the wake of, just days before the first day of class at the beginning of this month, the Superintendents’ decision to shut off drinking water inside all 106 school buildings after finding, in an initial check at 6 schools, high levels of copper and/or lead. The checks themselves are costly: they require stations in every school, one per every 100 students, with a resulting tab of $2 million, after taking into account stations in faculty rooms and gymnasiums, according to Supt. Vitti, who stated he intends to provide information to the Detroit School Board to consider next month, noting that, if the funds are approved, the system could be installed in the next school year. The delay comes at a physical and fiscal cost: the school district is spending $200,000 on bottled water and water coolers for the next several months, with Supt. Vitti reporting the cause of the water contamination is likely the result of the aging of the system’s public infrastructure, as well as older plumbing systems, warning that lower usage of water due to smaller enrollment sizes can lead to copper and lead buildup. Because DPS’ schools were built for use by thousands of students, the sharp decline in attendance has adverse effects, and, as the Superintendent noted: “The reality is our schools are vastly different: some are new, some are old. Some have outdated systems, some have outdated sinks and plumbing,” adding he had consulted with the Governor’s office, the Michigan Departments of Environmental Health, as well as Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, whose critical leadership exposed the Flint lead water crisis, noting: “They have provided lessons on Flint. They gave the recommendation for me to think about piping in general and a long-term solution.”

Despite the tragedy and ongoing Flint related litigation, Michigan has no rules mandating that public school districts test for lead in their water supply. That means, according to the Superintendent, that there are even newer schools built within the last decade which have water-quality issues, noting these problems could be blamed on inadequate piping or non-code compliant piping, adding he had i initiated water testing of DPS’ 106 school buildings last spring, with the testing evaluating all water sources, from sinks to drinking fountains—but learning that the actual source of the contamination remains uncertain—albeit the school system’s widespread infrastructure problems are likely causes: last June, a district report said it would cost $500 million to repair its buildings. The district has said it needs $29.86 million to repair or replace plumbing, according to the facilities report, not related to the current water problems.

Physical & Fiscal Recoveries. Maria was the worst storm to hit Puerto Rico in nearly a century: nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives, according to a study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government. The storm devastated the economy: thousands of small businesses have been shuttered; some big businesses are leaving, and, in a demographic omen, the exodus of the young, productive population has accelerated. Over the last year, the island’s economy has contracted by 7.6%, according to the latest fiscal plan prepared for PROMESA Board. 

American Inequality. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló this week asked President Trump to recognize that “Puerto Rico’s territorial status is discriminatory and allows for the unequal treatment of natural-born U.S. citizens.” In his letter to the President, coming one year in the wake of the devastating fiscal and physical impact of Hurricane Maria, the Governor wrote that Puerto Rico’s territorial status had negatively affected post-Maria recovery efforts, noting: “As we revisit all that we have been through in the last year, one thing has not changed and remains the biggest impediment for Puerto Rico’s full and prosperous recovery: the inequalities Puerto Rico faces as the oldest, most populous colony in the world.”

Gov. Rosselló, who campaigned on the promise of promoting statehood for Puerto Rico, added in his letter that FEMA’s bureaucratic processes—processes in which Puerto Rico has no say—had worked to delay disaster recovery, writing: “The ongoing and historic inequalities resulting from Puerto Rico’s territorial status have been exacerbated by a series of decisions by the federal government that have slowed our post-disaster recovery, compared to what has happened in other jurisdictions stateside.” He requested that the President reconsider a State Department request to dismiss a case in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights with regard to the U.S.’ international responsibility regarding Puerto Rico’s status—a case in which the Commission is investigating complaints that the United States is violating the human rights of its citizens in Puerto Rico, because they lack the same political rights as other U.S. citizens, including the right to vote for President unless they relocate to one of the states or the District of Columbia, and, because they have no voting representation in the Congress. The Governor added he felt “compelled to respectfully address the most egregious errors in a [State Department] missive,” which sought to dismiss Puerto Rico’s concerns, noting, especially, the Department’s reference to Puerto Rico as a “self-governing territory,” rather than what the Governor believes is really a “territorial colony,” noting that defining Puerto Rico as self-governing “ignores that Congress often uses its plenary powers over the territory to impose a multitude of federal laws without the Commonwealth’s residents having any voting representation in the U.S. Senate and only a single Resident Commissioner in the U.S. House of Representatives, who cannot vote on the floor of that chamber.” He also disputed the State Department’s assertion that Puerto Ricans are not “banned” from voting for President, writing: “[T]he only way for U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico to vote in such an election and be counted is to leave Puerto Rico. If that is not a ban, then what is?” He further wrote that the current governance upholds an “inherently racist logic that deem the people of Puerto Rico as inferior and unable to fully participate in the institutions of democratic governance.”

The letter also touches on two referenda which statehood supporters have won in Puerto Rico, but that have not been deemed official results by the Department of Justice. The most recent, in 2017, was boycotted by local opposition parties, and the ballot never received final DOJ approval.  While that referendum only had a 23% participation rate, the pro statehood vote was an overwhelming 97%.

Gov. Rosselló added his apprehension in the wake of the U.S. Justice Department’s non-approval of Puerto Rico’s 2017 referendum, noting that “after the legislature even amended the format of the vote to meet the recommendations of the U.S. Justice Department,” the Trump administration had nevertheless “failed” to certify the ballot. Thus, he noted that asking an international body to dismiss its complaint was tantamount to asking it to “turn a blind eye to an inconvenient truth, that Puerto Rico remains the unfinished business of American democracy.” Finally, Gov. Rosselló ended his letter with an appeal to President Trump’s leadership, asking him to “work together to abolish this century old territorial-colonialism once and for all: Statehood for Puerto Rico is not only about realizing Puerto Rico’s full potential. It is about America living up to its most noble values by creating a more perfect Union.” (The Trump Administration has advised the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that if Puerto Ricans want to vote for President, nothing prevents the government of Puerto Rico from calling for a referendum to determine the position of its residents regarding candidates for the U.S. Presidency—a referendum which, however, would be symbolic.)

The apparent position of the Trump Administration reflects its views that Puerto Ricans, in addition to being able to participate in Presidential primary elections, they may also, according to Kevin Sullivan, the U.S. Deputy Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS), organize and vote in presidential elections. Thus the U.S. representative asked the inter-American tribunal to dismiss the independent complaints filed by lawyer Gregorio Igartua and former governor Pedro Rossello alleging that the lack of participation of Puerto Rico’s residents in Presidential and Congressional elections represents a violation of their human and civil rights. Secretary Sullivan, who asserted that the government of Puerto Rico maintains a “broad” self-government, in a recently disclosed communication from the end of last June, maintained that within the colonial relationship with the U.S. territory, there are some electoral processes related to the federal government. Within this group of electoral processes, he thus sought to highlight as significant the ability for Puerto Ricans to vote in those for presidential primaries, as well as for its non-voting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Nevertheless, Secretary Sullivan recognized Puerto Ricans’ first vote in favor of statehood via the June 2017 plebiscite, describing that vote as having launched a process of requesting statehood before Congress, which outcome the “United States cannot predict.”

Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s non-voting Member of Congress, said she would have preferred the recognition of the undemocratic nature of the territorial status, and that statehood remains as “the only viable political status with a relationship with the United States, not territorial and not colonial.”

Puerto Rico Progressive Party representative Jose Aponte noted that it seemed unfortunate “at this point” that the federal government intends to develop some theory with regard to Puerto Rico’s self-government, especially in the wake of enacting the PROMESA law, thereby imposing the PROMESA Board, likening it to colonialism, and emphasizing what he views as Secretary Sullivan’s specious claim in which he advises Puerto Rican leaders that Puerto Ricans, “if they wish…are also free to move to any state,” noting: “It is hypocritical to hide the fact that they have a regime in which we cannot govern with the faculties and minimum rights that any human being deserves.”

Promising Good Gnus? Even if perceived by many Puerto Ricans as colonial overseers, the PROMESA Board, acting in a quasi-Emergency Manager role, such as Kevyn Orr did in putting together and managing the plan of debt adjustment for Detroit, is offering some hope for fiscal promise, as the Board is poised to lift its fiscal forecast and predicting a budget surplus in the wake of the recovery from the devastating Hurricane Maria, predicting a cumulative surplus, prior to debt payments, of in excess of $20 billion through 2058, or 500% greater than its quasi plan of debt adjustment certified by the PROMESA Board last June. PROMESA Board Executive Director has indicated that plan will be certified “in the coming weeks,” adding: “The changes in the fiscal plan will come from new data in actual FY18 revenue and expense figures, budget to actuals, and disaster spending.” Earlier last summer, the PROMESA Board, in certifying the most recent fiscal plan, had estimated that Puerto Rico would have a cumulative surplus of about $4 billion over the next four decades; the new projection, incorporating higher than expected disaster aid and tax receipts, would lift that projection to more than $20 billion.

The End of State Usurpation of Local Elected Authority? Uneasy shelter from the Fiscal and Physical Storms?

August 31, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the end of the State of Michigan to usurp local authority via the appointment of an Emergency Manager, the safety of school drinking water has become an issue in Detroit—especially after Flint, and we consider the extraordinary revisions in the projected Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rica—and the White House response.

Protecting a City’s Children. Detroit Public School Superintendent Nikolai P. Vitti has directed turning off drinking water across the district’s 106 schools  in the wake of after discovering higher-than-acceptable levels of copper and lead in some facilities, with Superintendent Vitti noting his decision came out of caution “until a deeper and broader analysis can be conducted to determine the long-term solutions for all schools.” he said in a statement. Test results found elevated levels of lead or copper in 16 out of 24 schools which were recently tested. Supt. Vitti stated: “Although we have no evidence that there are elevated levels of copper or lead in our other schools where we are awaiting test results, out of an abundance of caution and concern for the safety of our students and employees.” His actions, no doubt affected by fiscal and water contamination in Flint, came even as Detroit officials and the Great Lakes Water Authority sought to assure residents that water provided by the authority is safe to drink: they pointed to the city’s aging infrastructure as the problem.  Superintendent Vitti said he will be creating a task force to determine the cause of the elevated levels and solutions, noting he had initiated water testing of all 106 school buildings last spring to ensure the safety of students and employees. Water at 18 schools had been previously shut off. He added: “This was not required by federal, state, or city law or mandate: This testing, unlike previous testing, evaluated all water sources from sinks to drinking fountains.” The District does not plan to test students: a spokesperson for the school system noted: “Dr. Vitti said…he has no evidence at all that children have been impacted from a health standpoint.”

Fiscal & Physical Challenges: Earlier this summer, Supt. Vitti released details from a facilities review which had determined the school district would need to spend $500 million now to fix the deteriorating conditions of its schools—an effort for the system projected to cost as much as $1.4 billion if there is a failure to act swiftly, with the Administrator pointing to the failure by former state-appointed emergency managers to make the right investments in facilities while the system was preempted of authority and state-appointed emergency managers from 2009 to 2016 failed to make the right investments, sending what Dr. Vitti described as “the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit.” The remarks raised anew questions with regard to Michigan’s governance by means of gubernatorially chosen Emergency Managers.  

Superindent Vitti said he had notified Mayor Mike Duggan of his decision to shut off the drinking water, and a spokesperson, John Roach, noted: Mayor is “fully supportive” of the approach Supt. Vitti has taken, adding: “We will be supporting Dr. Vitti in an advisory capacity through the health department and the DWSD (Detroit Water and Sewerage Department) has offered to partner with the district on any follow-up testing that needs to be done.” At the same time, the Great Lakes Water Authority issued a statement in an effort to assure “residents and customers of GLWA’s regional system that they are not affected by the lead and copper issues,” noting: “Aging school infrastructure (i.e. plumbing) is the reason for the precautionary measure of providing bottled water,” adding water treated by the authority meets and surpasses all federal and state regulations, albeit adding: “A task force will be formed consisting of engineering and water quality experts” to will help the district “understand the cause and identify solutions.” (Initial results this past week showed elevated levels of copper, lead or both at one or more water sources in 16 of 24 school buildings, according to the statement. Water bottles will be provided at the schools until water coolers arrive. The district also found water-quality issues in some schools in 2016.)

The incident in Detroit raises a host of fiscal and governance issues—especially in the wake of the tragedy in upstate Flint—with, in both cases, the state’s history of appointing Emergency Managers to preempt the authority of local elected leaders. In the case of DPS, Dr. Vitti has contacted the Mayor, the Governor, and a task force of engineers and water experts to understand the cause and possible solutions; Superintendent Nikolai P. Vitti opted to close the water taps out of caution “until a deeper and broader analysis can be conducted to determine the long-term solutions for all schools,” with the decision coming just days before the school district’s 106 schools are scheduled to open next Tuesday. (Water bottles will be provided at the schools until water coolers arrive.) Water officials have blamed aging infrastructure as the cause of the public safety threat. Now Dr. Vitti has asked Mike Duggan and Gov. Rick Snyder to convene a task force of engineers and water experts to determine the cause of the elevated lead and copper levels, and to propose solutions. 

Importantly, it seems the public safety risk is limited to Detroit’s public schools: water officials released a statement Wednesday assuring residents and customers of the Great Lakes Water Authority and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that they are not affected by the lead and copper issues at the school district, noting: “Aging school infrastructure (i.e. plumbing) is the reason for the precautionary measure of providing bottled water…The water at GLWA’s treatment plants is tested hourly, and DWSD has no lead service lines connected to any DPSCD building. The drinking water is of unquestionable quality.”

Nevertheless, the threat to public safety—combined with the heartbreaking, long-term threats to Flint’s children from that city’s public water contamination—could add further challenges to Detroit’s recovery from the nation’s largest-ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy: a critical part of the city’s plan of debt adjustment was to address its vast amassment of abandoned houses by enticing young families with children to move from the suburbs back into the city—an effort which had to rely on a perception of the quality and safety of its public schools. Now, for a system itself recovering from bankruptcy, DPS faces a bill of at least $500 million to repair its buildings: approximately 25% of the system’s school buildings are in unsatisfactory condition and another 20%are in poor condition, according to the report. The district noted nearly $223 million of high-priority repairs involving elevators and lifts, energy supply, heating and cooling systems, sprinklers, standpipes, electrical service and distribution, lighting, wiring, communications, security system, local area networking, public address and intercoms, emergency lights and plumbing fixtures.

Mayor Duggan’s office and the Detroit Health Department Wednesday issued a joint statement supporting “the approach Dr. Vitti has taken to test all water sources within DPS schools and to provide bottled water until the district can implement a plan to ensure that all water is safe for use,” noting: “We will be supporting Dr. Vitti in an advisory capacity through the health department and the DWSD has offered to partner with the district on any follow-up testing that needs to be done. We also will be reaching out to our charter operators in the coming days to work with them on a possible similar testing strategy to the voluntary one Dr. Vitti has implemented.”

Restoring Municipal Authority. Mayhap it is ironic that Michigan’s relatively rare authority for the Governor to appoint an emergency manager to preempt local elected authority reflects the uneven results of the program—a program I well remember from meeting with Kevyn Orr, whom Gov. Rick Snyder had appointed as Emergency Manager  (EM) to preempt all governing authority of Detroit’s Mayor and Council, at the Governor’s office in Detroit on the first day the city entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history—and after the grievous failure of a previous gubernatorially-appointed Emergency Manager to help the Motor City. The very concept of state authority to appoint a quasi dictator and to preempt any authority of local leaders elected by the citizens, after all, feels un-American.

Yet, from that very first moment, Mr. Orr had acted to ensure there was no disruption in 9-1-1 responses—and that every traffic and street light worked. Unlike the experience under an Emergency Manager in Flint, Mr. Orr was intently focused on getting Detroit back on its fiscal and physical feet—and restoring elected leadership to today’s grieving city.

Now, as of this week, Michigan no longer has any local government under a state appointed emergency manager—and observers are under the impression the state program to preempt local authority may be quietly laid to rest. It has, after all, been a program of preemption of local democracy with untoward results: while it proved invaluable in Detroit, it has proven fiscally and physically grievous in Flint, where it has been blamed for contributing to Flint’s water contamination crisis. Indeed, two of Flint’s former EMs have been criminally charged in connection with the crisis. Their failures—at a cost of human lives, appears to have put the future of state pre-emption of local governing authority—may well make state officials leery of stepping in to usurp control a local government, even as some municipal market participants and others see state oversight programs as a positive credit feature. The last municipality in Michigan to be put under a state-imposed emergency manager was Lincoln Park—an imposition which ended three years ago. Michigan Treasury spokesperson Ron Leix noted: “Each situation that led to the financial emergency is unique, so I can’t give a broad-brush assessment about how the law will be used in the future…For the first time in 18 years, no Michigan municipality or school district is under state financial oversight through an emergency manager. This is really about the hard work our local units of government have achieved to identify problems and bring together the resources needed to problem-solve challenging financial conditions.”

In Michigan, the emergency manager program was authorized twenty-eight years ago, granting the governor authority to appoint a manager with extensive powers over a troubled municipality or school district. By 2012, Michigan voters repealed the emergency manager program in a referendum; notwithstanding, one month later Gov. Snyder and legislators re-adopted a similar intervention program—under which local governments could opt among three new options in addition to the appointment of an emergency manager who reports directly to the Governor: chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, mediation, or a consent agreement between the state and the city to permit local elected officials to balance their budget on their own. (In Michigan, municipalities which exit emergency management remain under the oversight of a receivership transition advisory board while executive powers are slowly restored to elected mayors and city councils.)

The state intervention/takeover program had mixed success, according to Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone, who noted: “In some cases it’s worked well, like Allen Park where the situation was pretty clear-cut and the solution was pretty clear as to what needed to be done.” (Allen Park regained full local control of its operations and finances in February of 2017 after nearly four years of state oversight. Last June, S&P Global Ratings upgraded the city to investment-grade BBB-plus from junk-level BB, crediting strong budgetary performance and financial flexibility more than 12 months after exiting state oversight. But the appointment, in Flint, of emergency managers demonstrated the obverse: the small city had four emergency managers: Ed Kurtz, Mike Brown, Darnell Earley, and Gerald Ambrose—where the latter two today are confronted by charges of criminal wrongdoing stemming from the lead contamination crisis and ensuing Legionnaire’s disease outbreak that claimed 12 lives. It was the gubernatorially appointed Mr. Earley who oversaw the decision to change Flint’s water source to the Flint River in April 2014 as the city awaited completion of a new pipeline—a decision with fatal human and fiscal consequences. Indeed, two years ago, Gov. Snyder named a task force to investigate the Flint crisis and review the Emergency Manager law—a review which recommended the Governor consider alternatives to the current approach that would engage local elected officials. (No action has been taken to change the law.)

Because only a minority of states have authorized chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, there is no uniform state role with regard to city or county severe fiscal distress and bankruptcy. Jane Ridley, senior director in the U.S. public finance government group at S&P Global Ratings and sector lead for local governments, has noted that state oversight is considered as part of the rating agency’s local GO criteria: “We do think that having a state that has oversight, especially if it’s a proven mechanism, can be very helpful for struggling entities…If they ended oversight entirely it would likely have an impact on the institutional framework scores and their sub scores.” A Moody’s analyst, Andrew Van Dyck Dobos, noted: “While an EM is in most cases is a last option, the ability for it to implement some policies and procedures is going to be typically viewed, at least at the onset, as a credit positive.”

Ending Shelter from the Storm. U.S. District Judge Timothy Hillman yesterday ruled that temporary housing given to hundreds of Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria will end next month, meaning Puerto Ricans will be forced to check out of temporary housing provided by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as part of the agency’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program. Judge Hillman, in his decision, wrote: I strongly recommend the parties get together to find temporary housing, or other assistance to the Plaintiffs and other members of the class prior to that date,” with his decision coming the same week Puerto Rico updated its official death toll from Maria to 2,975, a vast increase from the original count of 64. Judge Hillman’s decision also comes about two months after a national civil-rights group filed a lawsuit which had sought a restraining order to block FEMA from ending the program. The group, LatinoJustice, argued in the suit that it would lead to families’ evictions. It also came as, two days ago, President Trump met with reporters to respond to questions with regard to the mounting death toll—a session in which the President told the reporters: “I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico.” Some 1,744 Puerto Rican adults and children were in the FEMA program when the lawsuit was filed. U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin temporarily extended the program to the end of last July, and subsequently extended it until today—and then, once more, to September 14^th.

Now, the White House is responding to a new estimate which increases the number by about 33% more to 2,975 after an independent study. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed in a statement that the back-to-back hurricanes which hit last year prompted “the largest domestic disaster response mission in history.” She added that President Donald Trump “remains proud of all of the work the Federal family undertook to help our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.” She also says the federal government “will continue to be supportive” of Gov. Ricardo Rossello’s accountability efforts and says “the American people, including those grieving the loss of a loved one, deserve no less.” The new estimate of 2,975 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. It was released Tuesday.

The Human Costs of Misgovernance

August 7, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the awful physical, fiscal, and human challenges of municipal governance.

Human Costs of Misgovernance. In the ongoing trial in the Flint water case, Genesee District Judge William Crawford yesterday heard oral arguments in the case of Dr. Eden Wells, the state’s chief medical executive. Judge Crawford said he will make his decision only after all transcripts are completed and after attorneys are given seven days to file additional briefs with the court, meaning that Dr. Wells will likely have to wait several weeks before she learns whether or not she will have to stand trial on charges, including involuntary manslaughter, related to the Flint drinking water crisis—a trial where she faces charges of manslaughter, related to the Flint water crisis. Yesterday, Special prosecutor Todd Flood told Judge Crawford that Dr. Wells had a duty under Michigan state law to warn the public of Legionnaires’ outbreaks in the area during the 17 months that the City of Flint used the Flint River as its source of water—a source turned to under the direction of a state-appointed emergency manager, rather than the city’s elected leaders. The trial proceeded in the wake of the dismissal of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder from the suit after, last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Judith Levy had ruled that the suit filed on behalf of residents and businesses did not claim that Gov. Rick Snyder was aware of risks when the city switched to Flint River water in 2014—unlike other defendants who testified they knew and disregarded the hazards involved. The pending case is over claims filed on behalf of 12 Flint residents and three businesses: it names twenty-seven defendants, including state and local agencies and officials. The plaintiffs are asking the Court to establish a Flint Victims Compensation Fund, providing the affected Flint residents with medical and financial assistance. Should the state lose, such a decision could pose a financial burden for the recently upgraded state’s credit rating. Moreover, such a decision could have adverse implications for Michigan’s Emergency Manager law for distressed local governments.

Special Prosecutor Todd Flood testified: “The defendant neglected or refused to perform that duty. She knew about it…it was reasonably foreseeable that someone was going to get sick‒that someone was going to get harmed,” arguing that state officials, four of whom face criminal charges related to the Flint water contamination, and Dr. Wells, in particular, was required by her official position to halt the flow of the contaminated water she knew could create a threat.  

The arguments deemed Dr. Wells a hero during the water emergency, in no small part because of her giving credence to the work of Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Hurley Medical Center pediatrician who had studied the blood levels of Flint’s children—and concluded that the percentage of elevated blood levels doubled in the wake of the state decision to change the source of the city’s drinking water. Dr. Wells, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon, and Gov. Snyder ultimately provided public notice of the outbreaks of Legionnaire’s disease in the city related to the Flint water contamination; however, that notice was not given until January of 2016—long after the fatal damage to human health had occurred—and months after the city’s reliance on the contaminated water source had ceased—reliance which resulted in at least 10 deaths—or, as we previously noted, U.S. Judge Judith Levy’s opinion finding that “some government officials disregarded the risk the water posed, denied the increasingly clear threat the public faced, protected themselves with bottled water, and rejected solutions that would have ended the crisis sooner.  

The human health and safety crisis arose from a governing issue: the State of Michigan’s reliance on substituting state appointed emergency managers over municipal elected leaders. Thus, Gov. Ric Snyder, named Darnell Earley as Flint’s emergency manager—displacing the city’s Mayor and City Council—in September of 2013—at a time, according to some to the document before the court in which the plaintiffs allege the defendants knew, prior to the fatal drinking water switch, that the Flint River had been was professionally evaluated and rejected as a drinking water source, with the decision to source water from the Flint River made on April 25, 2014, after the city’s contract with Detroit to receive Lake Huron water ended and the city was awaiting the completion of the new Karegnondi water pipeline—a $285 million pipeline to provide Lake Huron water to Flint and Genesee County. Flint has since entered into a long-term primary water agreement with the Great Lakes Water Authority. (Two and a half years ago, Mr. Earley was one of fourteen officials named as defendants in a class action lawsuit brought in federal court by Flint residents, a complaint alleging that “Defendant’s conduct in exposing Flint’s residents to toxic water was so egregious and so outrageous that it shocks the conscience,” and that: “For more than 18 months, state and local government officials ignored irrefutable evidence that the water pumped from the Flint River exposed (users) to extreme toxicity.” The suit also named Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, and former Flint Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose.

Fiscal, Physical, & Human Challenges of Municipal Governance

August 6, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the awful physical, fiscal, and human challenges of municipal governance.  

An Enduring State of Emergency. Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan was in West Michigan yesterday morning: he was touring a water system construction site in Parchment, a municipality in Kalamazoo County of less than 2,000. The construction here includes a new pressure reduction system, which will allow Parchment to transition to the City of Kalamazoo water system. The city’s water supply is being flushed out, and the city of Kalamazoo will provide water to Parchment and Cooper Township residents. The transition, raising eerie memories of a previous transfer by the Governor in Flint, comes in the wake of finding that water in Parchment was contaminated with man-made chemicals called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). City residents were warned to stop using the water due to the contamination on July 26^th, after water tests showed the PFAS level in Parchment was 20 times higher than the EPA recommended amount of 70 parts per trillion. A local state of emergency has been set for Parchment, and neighboring Cooper Township, after, just last week, Gov. Snyder declared a state of emergency for Kalamazoo County.

Fear for children—fear that the impact of Flint’s lead-tainted water could last decades—and distrust in the state and local governance to make decisions affecting children whose development could be hurt, is, unsurprisingly causing generations of residents to lose trust in government. It is, of course, at the same time tainting the assessed property values of homes in cities in Michigan so adversely affected for decades to come by state-imposed emergency managers. What parents would wish to move to a municipality knowing the drinking water would have long-term devastating consequences for their child?

What are the fiscal challenges for municipal elected leaders—especially in a state where the long-term physical and fiscal damages were wrought by state-imposed emergency managers? What do the long-term health effects for children exposed to the lead-tainted water mean for a municipality with regard to legal vulnerability and to financing a long-term recovery? At a conference at the end of last week, Detroit News reporter Leonard Fleming noted: “They don’t trust government officials: It could take a generation or two for residents to trust the city and state again and its water.”

At the conference, Dr. Lawrence Reynolds, who was on the Governor’s Flint task force, said some health officials have tried to minimize the effects of the water on residents; nevertheless, he warned there are babies who drank lead-tainted formula for six to nine months who could experience serious disabilities later in life: “It was a civil rights crisis, a human rights crisis, an environmental racism, and there is no excuse for what was done.” Moreover, there appears little end in sight: Cynthia Lindsey, an attorney representing Flint residents in a class-action lawsuit, said it could take three to four years for the legal process to play out. That is, Flint is held hostage by decisions imposed upon it by a state-imposed emergency manager, and now the question of who will finance—and how long will it take to replace all the city’s pipes, provide it access to safe and affordable drinking water, and long-term health care appear to be decisions to be made in a courtroom.

The fateful decision that led to the lead water contamination was not a municipal decision, but rather one made by the state in 2011 via a state imposed emergency manager, Darnell Earley. That was a decision which led to the finding that hundreds of children have since been diagnosed with lead poisoning; a dozen Flint residents have died of Legionella from drinking river water. Today, some 15 state public employees have been indicted by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette for their roles in the water crisis—indictments on charges ranging from obstructing an investigation to involuntary manslaughter.

Now Attorney General Schuette is running to replace the term-limited Governor Rick Snyder. Some in the state claim the candidate is using the Flint charges to “make himself look like a hero.” In the Democratic gubernatorial primary, ex-state Senator Gretchen Whitmer (D-Lansing) has released a plan to speed the replacement of lead pipes, while former Detroit health director Abdul El-Sayed received the endorsement of “Little Miss Flint,” the student whose letter brought former President Barack Obama to the community.

Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, who lost his first race for that position in 2009 to a car dealer named Don Williamson, but, when former Mayor Williamson resigned to avoid a recall for lying about the city’s budget deficit, was elected in a special election to replace him: he was elected after promising “to transform Flint into a sustainable 21st-century city with new jobs, safe neighborhoods, great schools and opportunity for all.” Candidate Walling reports that his own trust in government is lower than it was prior to the city’s drinking water contamination; now he claims he wants to take the hard lessons he has learned to the place he sees as the major source of Flint’s problems: the state capitol in Lansing.

Representation could matter: over the last four decades, assessed property values fell more than 40 percent—and with them property tax receipts. That led to, after the city’s police union’s refusal to accept pay cuts, laying off a third of the police force—meaning that for a period of time, the city, with about 100,000 residents, was sometimes able to put only six officers on the street at one time. Unsurprisingly, murders nearly doubled between 2009 and 2010—a year when Flint had the nation’s highest murder rate—and the year when Gov. Ric Snyder announced he was appointing an emergency manager, Ed Kurz, to preempt local control and authority in an effort to eliminate the city’s $10 million general fund deficit. Just prior to that preemption of local authority, the Flint City Council had endorsed a plan to detach the city from the Detroit water system, due to what the Council believed to be unaffordable rates, and join the new Karegnondi Water Authority, which planned to build a pipeline from Lake Huron. Mr. Kurtz authorized an engineering study to prepare the city’s water treatment plant to process Flint River water instead. A sequential state-appointed Emergency Manager, Darnell Earley, implemented the changeover—a fateful decision with precipitous health and human safety and fiscal consequences. Mr. Earley has been charged with false pretenses, conspiracy, willful neglect of duty, misconduct in office, and involuntary manslaughter—charges which will be aired next Monday at a hearing, where he is likely to maintain That the City Council had decided to draw from the Flint River until the new pipeline was completed, and that he was, therefore, only executing their orders. (Mr. Kurz, who has not been charged, has previously testified before Congress that his responsibility was “strictly finance,” thus, he bore no responsibility to ensure “safe drinking water.”

Today, Mr. Walling, currently working as a public policy consultant for Michigan State University, notes he believes there ought to be changes in the relationship between Flint and the State of Michigan, noting: “The distress of Michigan’s cities, starting with Detroit and Flint, is a direct result of policies made in Lansing,” adding: “The only good news is that policy changes at the state level can help restore Michigan’s once-great cities.”

According to a Michigan State University 2015 study: “Beyond State Takeovers: Reconsidering the Role of State Government in Local Financial Distress, with Important Lessons for Michigan and its Embattled Cities,” by Joshua Sapotichne, Erika Rosebrook, Eric A. Scorsone, Danielle Kaminski, Mary Doidge, and Traci Taylor; the State of Michigan has the second-most stringent local taxation limits in the nation—limits which impose what they term “tremendous pressure on local lawmakers’ ability to generate critical revenue.” The fiscal pressure on the state’s local governments has been intensified by decisions to divert revenue sharing, the former program intended to address fiscal disparities, to instead enable state tax cuts. The decision disproportionately impacted the state’s most fiscally challenged municipalities: Flint’s loss was $54 million; Detroit lost $200 million, contributing to its 2013 chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy. Indeed, the state decision indirectly contributed to state imposition of nine emergency managers.

Thus, unsurprisingly, former Mayor Walling has a list of the new policies he wants to enact as a state representative: Allow cities to charge commuters the same income tax rate as residents (instead of just half); broaden the sales and use tax to services; provide state pension retirement assistance. This would have especial import for Flint, where the city’s taxpayers are currently financing the pensions of employees who worked for the city when it had 200,000 residents—pension payments now consuming, he says, a quarter of the city’s budget.

Trust & Intergovernmental Tensions. By candidate Walling’s own admission, throughout most of Flint’s drinking water crisis, he believed assurances from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that Flint’s water met safe drinking standards. When residents confronted him with discolored, foul-smelling water, he said: “I thought that water had come out of their tap because of a failure in the system at their house or near the house,” adding that it was not until three years ago when, in the wake of listening to Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha describe her discovery that Flint children were showing elevated levels of lead in their blood, did he finally realize the city’s entire water system was tainted, asserting that it was at that moment in time that he ordered the city to issue a lead advisory, advising mothers not to mix hot tap water with formula, and for all residents to filter their water and flush it for five minutes. (In her recent memoir, What the Eyes Don’t See, Dr. Hanna-Attisha devotes an entire chapter to her meeting with Mr. Walling, criticizing him for opting out of joining her news conference on lead levels, because he was more concerned about traveling to Washington to meet Pope Francis.)

Candidate Walling’s campaign flyers assert: “My priorities are roads, schools, jobs.” they declare. As he challenges incumbent Mayor Karen Weaver, he says most voters he interacts with want to talk about the shabby state of Michigan’s roads or the excessive auto insurance rates paid by residents of Flint and Detroit. But, it appears, he is willing to support repeal of Michigan’s Emergency Manager law—a concept which journalist Anna Clark notes, in The Poisoned City, her new history of the water crisis: “The idea of emergency management is that an outside official who is not constrained by local politics or the prospect of a reelection bid will be able to better make the difficult decisions necessary to get a struggling city or school district back on solid ground.” But in Flint, emergency managers made decisions based on saving money, not the health and safety of the citizens with whose well-being they had been entrusted. Candidate Walling, in retrospect, notes: “I wish that I had never been part of any of it: “This has all happened to a community that I deeply love, and it is motivating me to make sure policy changes are made to make sure this never happens again.”

The Complex Challenges of Implementing a Municipal Bankruptcy Plan of Debt Adjustment

July 31, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider post-chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy challenges for the City of Detroit, before turning to learn about good gnus from Puerto Rico.

The Steep Route of Chapter 9 Debt Adjustment. Direct Construction Services, minority-owned firm, which has participated in Detroit’s federally funded demolition program, is suing Mayor Mike Duggan, the city’s land bank, and Detroit’s building authority as well as high-ranking officials from each division—alleging racial discrimination and retaliation. The suit asks the court to award damages and declare the actions of the city, its land bank and building authority as “discriminatory and illegal.” The suit alleges that some contractors had been asked to change bidding and cost figures “to reflect compliance” under the federal demolition Hardest Hit Fund guidelines. Filed in federal court, it charges that Service’s managing member, Timothy Drakeford, was treated unfairly based on his race and that officials in the program conspired to have him suspended for refusing to falsify documents and for cooperating with federal authorities. Mr. Drakeford, who is barred from bidding on federally funded demolition work, is also suing for breach of contract and discrimination against black contractors. The suit charges that some contractors, including Mr. Drakeford, had been asked to change bidding and cost numbers “to reflect compliance” under the federal Hardest Hit Fund guidelines; indeed, the suit alleges it was subsequently suspended—not because of the quality of its work, but rather “because of the refusal to change numbers in bid packages.” The suit adds: “This case arises because of defendants’ breach of contract, concert of action, due process violations, and discrimination on the grounds of race in its implementation of the Hardest Hit Homeowner demolition program, including failure to timely pay black contractors in comparison to their white counterparts, improper and disparate discipline and retaliation.”

This issues here are not new—and have previously been the focus of FBI, state, and city investigations, especially over bidding practices and rising costs. As we have previously noted, the city’s plan of debt adjustment efforts to raze abandoned homes was a particular focus—a program through which federal assistance was misappropriated while the city worked to demolish homes after its bankruptcy—in that case involving federal funds allocated via the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. The suit contends that Direct Construction was awarded three contracts for demolition work by the land bank, and asserts that payments were delayed and harder to obtain from the land bank than for “larger white companies,” such as Adamo and Homrich, two firms awarded the largest percentage of the work to date. The suit asserts Direct Construction was under contract for several demolition packages, but still has not been paid, and references in excess of $143,000 in unpaid invoices, noting: This “repetitive process has gone on for over a year now, with no success,” contending that it had been performing work on two contracts which it had been awarded for a total of 48 homes—before, on December 19, 2016, being hit with an “immediate stop work order” from the land bank, without explanation. A year ago in February, Direct received a letter regarding an Office of Inspector General report, which suggested that photographs submitted for repayment of sidewalk work had been falsified and that the company would not be compensated—a letter followed up the next month by a notice of suspension. (Direct was among a few businesses suspended last year on claims of manipulating sidewalk repair photographs to obtain payment.)

Detroit Corporation Counsel Lawrence Garcia yesterday noted: “The Office of Inspector General found that not only did Mr. Drakeford personally manipulate a photo of a demolition site to conceal tires that had not been removed from the lot, but also gave information that was not truthful to the OIG’s investigators. For the penalties issued with respect to these matters, the Detroit Land Bank, the DBA and the city followed the recommendations of the independently appointed inspector general…These facts more than justify the city’s actions.” Indeed, that office, at the request of the land bank, had initiated investigations in December of 2016 into allegations that sidewalk repair photographs were being doctored. (The land bank mandates that its contractors to take “before and after” photographs of sidewalks, drive approaches, neighboring residences, and surrounding areas to document conditions.) The Office, the following February, flagged Direct Construction over five of its submitted photographs, concluding the photos had been modified to disguise incomplete work; it recommended the company be barred from doing work in the city’s demolition program until at least 2020. (The Michigan State Housing Development Authority began placing greater emphasis on sidewalk replacement photographs in October of 2016, when a new set of practices went into place—at a point in time when federally funded demolition had been suspended for two months after a review by the Michigan Homeowner Assistance Nonprofit Housing Corp.).

Since Mayor Duggan’s election in 2013, the city has razed nearly 13,000 homes—a task that has fiscal and physical consequences—reducing assessed property values and property taxes, but also leaving medical scars: over that time, the percentage of children 6 and younger with elevated lead levels rose from 6.9% in 2012 to 8.7% in 2016, according to state records. Early last year, the land bank repaid $1.37 million to address improper expenses identified by auditors for the state. The land bank last summer reached a settlement with state housing officials to pay $5 million to resolve a dispute over invoices the state determined to be improperly submitted. Detroit’s administration has claimed the city has been transparent with its demolition program and cooperated fully with all inquiries.

Good Gnus. In Puerto Rico, Governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares and the Labor Secretary Carlos Saavedra are celebrating a turnaround in employment in the U.S. territory: between May and June, some 11,000 people joined the island’s labor market, dropping Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate to its lowest level in half a century. Gov. Rosselló Nevares yesterday reported the unemployment rate to be 9.3%, the lowest rate in the last 50 years, noting: “On this occasion, unemployment drops and the participation rate increases are all numbers going in the right direction.” Sec. Saavedra explained the increase between May and June reflects summer employment programs, but at a level considerably better than in previous years, especially in the commercial and self-employment sectors—and, as he noted: “We have seen a substantial increase in self-employment,” apparently reflecting many involved with repairs and reconstruction for damage caused by Hurricane María, especially electricians, and builders. Economist Juan Lara explained that jurisdictions which have suffered deep economic declines as a result of a natural disaster experience a period of rebound that leads to growth, but cautioned: “[T]his can hardly be maintained in the long-term without a change in the economic model.” He estimated that in the next five or six years, federal investments could keep the economy in positive territory, noting: “The important thing is to remember that these funds do not last forever and that the economy needs sustained redevelopment.”

For his part, Gov. Rosselló stressed that the current economic improvement is occurring without the federal government having released a penny of the more than $1.8 billion in promised HUD assistance. Nevertheless, there can be little question but that the more than $3 billion in insurance claims already paid, according to according to Iraelia Pernas, the Executive Director of the Puerto Rico Insurance Companies Association have had a positive, if one-time, impact. Similarly, the island is anticipating, in August, a large CDBG grant.

Gov. Rosselló Nevares attributed the jobs upturn, interestingly, to emigration: many who were unemployed left Puerto Rico for the mainland, even as he reported the total number of citizens employed has increased, as well as the labor participation rate (not seasonally adjusted), which rose from 40.5% in May to 41.1% last month. percent in June. In the first months following Hurricane María, nearly 200,000 people left Puerto Rico. Many, however, have returned.

Informacion Mejor? PROMESA Oversight Board Executive Director Natalie Jaresko has reported the Board “welcomes the publication” of fiscal information mandated by the Board, after, on July 10^th, the Board had sent a letter to FAFAA Executive Director Gerardo Portela Franco, complaining of a failure to submit documents, including documents comparing the General Fund budget to actual spending; PayGo balances; and public employee payroll, headcount, and attendance. The board said that, according to the approved quasi-plan of debt adjustment, the first two documents had been due on May 31^st, and the third on June 30th. FAFAA released the PayGo report on July 17, and the other two reports last Friday.  Ms. Jaresko wrote: “The Oversight Board welcomes the publication of the General Fund to Actual Report, the Human Resources Report and the Payroll Report: Full monthly public reporting is essential to increase transparency of government finances, increase accountability, and monitor compliance and progress as per the fiscal plan and budget objectives in order to eliminate Puerto Rico’s structural deficits…The Oversight Board is committed to continuing this important work of monitoring full compliance by the government with reporting requirements, in order to achieve PROMESA’s mandate of restoring fiscal responsibility and market access to Puerto Rico.”

Restoring Power–and Recovering Governing Authority

July 10, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the challenges of restoration of electric power (as opposed to political power) in Puerto Rico, and then try to explore the risks of powers of appointments of emergency managers by a state—here as the City of Flint, Michigan is still seeking to fiscally and physically recover from the human and fiscal devastation caused by the State of Michigan.

Adios. Walter Higgins, the CEO Puerto Rico’s bankrupt PREPA Electric power authority resigned yesterday, just months after he was chosen to oversee its privatization, an appointment made in an effort to fully restore power some ten months after the human, fiscal, and physical devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. Now his resignation adds to PREPA’s uphill climb to not only fully restore power, but also to address its $9 billion in debt. Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said in a statement that Mr. Higgins had resigned for personal reasons, while Mr. Higgins, in his resignation letter, wrote that the compensation details outlined in his contract could not be fulfilled—with his written statement coming just one month after the Commonwealth’s Justice Secretary said it would be illegal for him to receive bonuses. According to a PREPA spokesperson, Mr. Higgins will remain as a member of the PREPA Board. Nevertheless, his appointment was stormy itself, after, last month, Puerto Rican officials had questioned how and why he had been awarded a $315,000 contract without authorization from certain government agencies—in response to which PREPA’s Board advised the government as a consultant, rather than filling the vacancy for an executive sub-director of administration and finance. Unsurprisingly, his departure will not be mourned by many Puerto Ricans in view of his generous compensation package of $450,000 annual salary compared to the average income for Puerto Ricans of $19,518.  

Nevertheless, PREPA officials, announced that current Board member Rafael Diaz Granados will become the new CEO—with nearly double the compensation: he will assume the position on Sunday and receive $750,000 a year—a level which Puerto Rico Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz described as the “kind of insult that to Puerto Ricans is unacceptable,” as the government and PROMESA Oversight Board continue to struggle to address and restructure Puerto Rico’s $70 billion in public debt. Nevertheless, as PREPA crews continue restoring power to the last 1,000 or so customers who have been without power since Maria hit nearly a year ago and destroyed up to 75% of transmission lines across the territory, the federal government is still operating 175 generators across the island.

Indeed, U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rob Bishop (R-Utah) has scheduled a hearing for July 25^th to assess and inquire about the status of the Electric Power Authority and to examine the functioning and plans for the privatization of PREPA assets, an issue which the territory’s non-voting Congressional Representative Jenniffer Gonzalez noted “has been under the Committee’s jurisdiction for the past two years.” Rep. Gonzalez added: “I’m surprised with the salary: I did not expect that amount. I do not know the elements which affected Mr. Higgin’s resignation, and I believe that these changes affect the process of recovery on the island.”

Meanwhile, Chairman Bishop had announced a second potential hearing—this one to assess the operation of the PROMESA statute and how the PROMESA Oversight Board is working, after, last week, postponing an official trip with a dozen Members of Congress to assess the physical and fiscal recovery on the island, after meeting, early last month in San Juan with the now former PREPA Director Higgins, and after, in the spring, Chair Bishop, Chair Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), of the Subcommittee on Island Affairs, and Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) had announced a probe into “multiple allegations of corruption and serious allegations of maladministration” during the restoration of the electric service after the storm.

Out Like Flint? Meanwhile, in a criminal and fiscal case arising out of Michigan’s Flint water crisis in the wake of fatal decisions by a gubernatorially appointed Emergency Manager, closing arguments in the involuntary manslaughter case against state Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon began yesterday before Genesee District Court Judge David Goggins, who will determine whether Director Lyon will go on trial in the Flint water crisis prosecution on charges of involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office connected to the 2014-2015 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Flint region which killed at least 12 people and sickened another 79 people. A misdemeanor charge of “willful neglect” to protect the health of Genesee County residents was added last week. Director Lyon is receiving assistance in his defense from John Bursch, a former Michigan Solicitor General, who was hired for that position by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette—who has brought criminal charges related to the Flint water crisis against Director Lyon and 14 other current and former city and state government employees. Flint still faces financial questions after years of emergency management.

The criminal trial comes as questions still remain with regard to Flint’s long-term financial health, despite six years of state oversight that overhauled the city’s finances, after a 2011 state-ordered preliminary review showed problems with Flint’s finances and ultimately recommended an emergency manager for the city. Last April, State Treasurer Nick Khouri repealed all remaining Emergency Manager orders, with state officials claiming the city’s financial emergency has been addressed to a point where receivership was no longer needed, and, as the Treasurer wrote to Mayor Karen Weaver: “Moreover, it appears that financial conditions have been corrected in a sustainable fashion,” and Flint CFO Hughey Newsome said that while emergency managers had helped Flint get its financial house in order; nevertheless, Flint’s fiscal and physical future remains uncertain: “The after-effects of the water crisis, including the dark cloud of the financials, will be here for some time to come: We’re not out of the woods yet, but I don’t think emergency management can help us moving forward.” In the city’s case, the fateful water crisis with its devastating human and fiscal impacts, hit the city as it was still working to recover from massive job and population losses following years of disinvestment by General Motors. CFO Newsome said the crisis affected the city’s economic development efforts and may have left potential businesses wanting to come to Flint wary because of the water.

Flint’s spending became more in line with its revenues, changes were made to its budgeting procedures, and retiree healthcare costs and pension liabilities were reduced while under emergency management. Nevertheless, past financial overseers have warned the city about what would happen if Flint allows its fiscal responsibilities to slip. Three years ago, former Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose, in a letter to Gov. Snyder, wrote: “If, however, the new policies, practices and organizational changes are ignored in favor of returning to the historic ways of doing business, it is not likely the city will succeed over the long term: The focus of city leaders will then likely once again return to confronting financial insolvency.”

Today, there are still signs of potential fiscal distress, notwithstanding  the city’s recovery; indeed, Mayor Weaver’s FY2019 budget plans for a more than $276,000 general fund surplus—even as the municipal budget is projected to grow to more than $8 million by FY2023, with that growth attributed by CFO Newsome to ongoing legacy costs and a lack of revenue—or, as he put it: “My last two predecessors have really delivered realistic budgets: I definitely don’t see this administration being irresponsible in that regard, and I don’t see this Council rubberstamping such a budget either.”

And, today, questions about criminal and fiscal accountability are issues for the state’s third branch of government: the judiciary, in District Court Judge William Crawford’s courtroom, where the issues with regard to criminal charges relating to the governmental actions of defendants charged for their actions during the Flint Water Crisis include former Emergency Manager Darnell Early and former City of Flint Public Works Director Howard Croft, and former state-appointed Flint Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose, who, prosecutors  allege, knew the Flint water treatment plant was not ready to produce clean and safe water, but did nothing to stop it. The trial involves multiple charges, including willful neglect of duty and misconduct in office. (Mr.  Ambrose was the state appointed Emergency Manager from January until April of 2015; he also held the title of Finance Director under former state appointed emergency managers Mike Brown and Darnell Early. To date, four others have entered into a plea agreement in their cases.)

Bequeathing a Legacy of healthcare and retirees benefit costs: When Mr. Ambrose left in 2015 and turned things over the to the Receivership Transition Advisory Board, he stated that Flint’s other OPEB costs had been reduced from $850 million to $240 million, adding that a new hybrid pension plan put in place by state appointed emergency managers had reduced Flint’s long-term liability; however, he warned, on-going legacy costs are still one of the most pressing issues for Flint’s fiscal future: “Remember, the reality we’re facing: we have a $561 million liability to (Municipal Employees’ Retirement System), and the fund is only at $220 million; we also have an obligation to our 1,800 retirees to make sure that we’re paying our MERS obligation.” (A three percent raise for Flint police officers approved earlier this year added to those liabilities, with those increases attributable to two different contracts, which were imposed on officers by former state-appointed Emergency Managers Michael Brown and Darnell Earley in 2012 and 2014, respectively.)

The RTAB asked CFO Huey Newsome in January how the city would pay the additional $264,000 annually in wages and benefits along with a projected $3.4 million in additional retirement costs over the life of the contract—a question he was unable to specify an answer to at the time: “To tell you exactly where those‒where those dollars will come from right at this point in time, I can’t say…I think the ‘so what’ of this is that, you know, the incremental impact from this pay raise is not going to be that large when you think about the three and a half million. The city still needs to figure out where that three and a half million is coming from.” Moreover, he added, because police negotiated the raise, it also could be an issue with other unions wanting a similar increase during their future negotiations, adding that the city is making increased payments to MERS to avoid balloon payments in the future. For example, Mr. Newsome said, Flint will pay an additional $21.5 million this year, adding that all the city’s funds currently have a positive balance. However, Flint’s budget projections show the water fund will have a $2.1 million deficit in FY2018-19, a deficit projected to increase to $3.3 million by FY2022-23; Flint’s fiscal projections eventually put the water fund balance in the red by 2022-23; however, CFO Newsome warned: “The water fund is probably the most tepid one, because it is expected to be below the reserve balance by the end of the year,” noting the city can only account for 60% of the water that goes through its system, adding that the city has an 80% collection rate on its water bills, which is about $28 million this fiscal year, telling the Mayor and Council: “One of our top priorities is better metering.”

The city’s most-recent budget for 2018-19 calls for a combined revenue increase of $1.09 million more than previous budget projections because of increased assessed property values, more income taxes coming in, and additional state revenue sharing. Nevertheless, one Board member, notwithstanding projections for increased revenue, is apprehensive that Flint’s “tax base is likely going to continue to shrink, and the city currently has limited resources to reverse this trend,” or, as CFO Newsome put it: “Right now, revenue is not there: The income tax is relatively flat. The property tax is flat. That’s reality.” The city’s current proposed FY2019 budget calls for an increase of $120,000 from property taxes, $339,000 increase in income tax revenue, and an additional $631,000 in revenue from the state of Michigan. 

 

Municipal Fiscal Distress & State Oversight.

June 18, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider a new study assessing the potential role of property tax assessments in Detroit’s historic chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy; then we observe, without gambling on the odds, the slow, but steady progress back to self-governance in Atlantic City, and weaning off of state fiscal oversight; before, finally noting the parallel efforts to exit state oversight in Flint, Michigan—where the proximate cause of the city’s fiscal and physical collapse occurred under a quasi-state takeover.

Foreclosing or Creating a City’s Fiscal Recovery? One in 10 Detroit tax foreclosures between 2011 and 2015 were caused by the city’s admittedly inflated property assessments, a study by two Chicago professors has concluded. Over-assessments causing foreclosure were concentrated in the city’s lowest valued homes, those selling for less than $8,000, and resulted in thousands of Detroit homeowners losing their properties, according to the study: “Taxed Out: Illegal property tax assessments and the epidemic of tax foreclosures in Detroit,” which was written by  Bernadette Atuahene and Christopher Berry. Chicago-Kent Law School Professor Atuahene noted: “The very population that most needs the city to get the assessments right, the poorest of the poor, are being most detrimentally affected by the city getting it wrong: “There is a narrative of blaming the poor that focuses on individual responsibility instead of structural injustice. We are trying to change the focus to this structural injustice.” (Professor Atuahene is also a member of the Coalition to End Unconstitutional Tax Foreclosures.) Their study came as the Wayne County Treasurer has foreclosed on about 100,000 Detroit properties for unpaid property taxes for the period from 2011 through 2015, about a quarter of all parcels, as the Motor City suffered the after-effects of population decline, the housing market crash, and the Great Recession.

Professors Atuahene and Berry acknowledged many factors can trigger tax foreclosure, estimating that the number of foreclosures was triggered by over-assessments, in part by calculating the foreclosure rate if all properties were properly assessed. The study also controlled for properties various purchase prices, neighborhoods and sale dates.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has, as we have noted, acknowledged such over assessments; yet he has made clear accuracy has improved with double-digit reductions over the last four years—and completed the first comprehensive such assessment two years ago for the first time in more than half a century. The city’s Deputy Chief Financial Officer, Alvin Horhn, last week stated he had not reviewed the study; however, he noted that “most of their assumptions rely on data that does not meet the standards of the State Tax Commission and would not be applicable under Michigan law,” a position challenged by Professor Atuahene, who had previously stated the data does comply with the law, noting: “We believe the citywide reappraisal has been an important part of the major reduction in the number of foreclosures occurring in the city, which continue a steady decline and will provide a solid foundation for future growth: The number of foreclosures of owner occupied homes, specifically, has gone down by nearly 90% over the past few years.”

The city’s authority to foreclose, something which became a vital tool to address both property tax revenues and crime in the wake of the city’s chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, was enabled under former Gov. John Engler 29 years ago under a statewide rewrite of Michigan’s property tax code: changes made in an effort to render it faster and easier to return delinquent properties to productive use. On a related issue, the Motor City is currently facing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan—a suit which maintains the city’s poverty tax exemption, which erases property taxes for low-income owners, violated homeowner’s due process rights because of its convoluted application process, arguing that the practice violates the federal Fair Housing Act by disproportionately foreclosing on black homeowners. However, the Michigan Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling by Wayne County Judge Robert Colombo, dismissing Wayne County from the lawsuit, ruling the suit should have been brought in front of the Michigan Tax Tribunal. 

Pole, Pole. In Bush Gbaepo Grebo Konweaken, Liberia, a key Gbaepo expression was “pole, pole” (pronounced poleh, poleh), which roughly translated into ‘slowly, but surely’—or haste makes waste. It might be an apt expression for Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam as the boardwalk city has resumed control back from the state to forge its own fiscal destiny—presumably with less gambling on its fiscal future. In his new $225 million budget, the Mayor has proposed to keep property taxes flat for the second consecutive year, and is continuing, according to the state’s Department of Community Affairs, charged with the municipality’s fiscal oversight and providing transitional assistance, to note that the Mayor and Council President Marty Small’s announcement demonstrated that “an understanding of the issues that Atlantic City faces, and an emerging ability to find ways to solve them without resorting to property tax increases: This is a solid budget, and the city staff who worked diligently to draft it should be proud of their efforts.”

Under Mayor Frank Gilliam’s proposed $225 million budget, property taxes would remain flat for a second straight year, there would be some budget cuts, as well as savings realized from municipal bond sales to finance pension and healthcare obligations from 2015. The Mayor also was seeking support for capital improvements, additional library funding, and one-time $500 stipends for full-time municipal employees with salaries below $40,000. The ongoing fiscal recovery is also benefitting from state aid: the state Department of Community Affairs reported the state is providing $3.9 million in transitional aid, a drop from the $13 million awarded to the City of Trenton in 2017 and $26.2 million from 2016. Last year Atlantic City adopted a $222 million budget, which lowered taxes for the first time in more than a decade. The Department’s spokesperson, Lisa Ryan, noted: “Yesterday’s announcement by Mayor Gilliam and Council President [Marty] Small demonstrates city officials are showing an understanding of the issues that Atlantic City faces and an emerging ability to find ways to solve them without resorting to property tax increases: This is a solid budget, and the city staff who worked diligently to draft it should be proud of their efforts.”

Gov. Phil Murphy scaled back New Jersey’s intervention efforts in April with the removal of Jeffrey Chiesa’s role as state designee for Atlantic City. Mr. Chiesa, a former U.S. Senator and New Jersey Attorney General, was appointed to the role by former Gov. Chris Christie after the state takeover took effect.

Not in Like Flint. The Flint City Council was unable last week to override Mayor Karen Weaver’s veto of its amendments to her proposed budget: the Council’s counter proposal had included eight amendments to the Mayor’s $56 million proposed budget for 2018-2019—all of which Mayor Weaver vetoed in the wake of CFO Hughey Newsome’s concerns. The situation is similar to Atlantic City’s, in that this was Flint’s first budget to be considered and adopted in the wake of exiting state oversight. Mayor Weaver advised her colleagues: “This is a crucial time for the City of Flint: this is the first budget we are responsible for since regaining control…I am proud of the budget that I submitted, and I have full faith in the City’s Chief Financial Officer. Just as I have the right to veto the budget, the City Council has the right to override that veto. It is my hope that they would strongly consider my reasons for vetoing and that the Council and I can work together to create a budget that can sustain the City for years to come.” Her veto means the budget will be before the Council for a final vote in order to have it in place for the new fiscal year beginning on the first of next month.

Among the Council proposals the Mayor rejected was employee benefits, including a proposed pay raise for the City Clerk of $20,000, the creation of a new deputy clerk position, a new parliamentarian position, and full health benefits for part-time employees. Or, as CFO Newsome noted: “The risk these added costs could pose on the city’s budget is not in the best interest of the city nor the citizens of Flint,”  as he expressed disappointment over the time wasted on arguing over what amounted to $55,000 in the Mayor’s budget, especially when the city was currently tackling bigger fiscal challenges, such as its $271 million unfunded pension liability and keeping the city’s water fund out of red ink, noting: “These are things that we are looking at, and during all of these [budget] proceedings so little attention was paid to that.”

That is to note that while sliding into chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, or, as in Atlantic City, state oversight, can be easy; the process of extricating one’s city is great: there is added debt. Indeed, Flint remains in a precarious fiscal position, confronted by serious fiscal challenges in the wake of its exit from state financial receivership the month before last. Key among those challenges are: employee retirement funding and the aging, corroded pipes (with a projected price tag of $600 million) which led to the city’s drinking water crisis and state takeover.

On the public pension front, in the wake of state enactment of public pension reforms at the end of 2017 which mandate that municipalities report underfunded retirement benefits, Flint reported a pension system funded at only 37% and zero percent funding of other post-employment retirement benefits, which, according to the state Treasury report, Flint does not prefund.

The proposed budget assumes FY2019 general fund revenues of approximately $55.8 million, of which $4.7 million is expected to come from property taxes. This would be an increase of about $120,000; Flint’s critical water fund will have a $4 million surplus at the end of FY2018; however, CFO Newsome warned the fund will fall into the red within the next five years if it fails to bring in more money.

Not in Like Flint, and Unschooled for Motor City Recovery

June 15, 2018

Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the seemingly unremitting efforts by the State of Michigan to force the City of Flint to sign a consent agreement; then we dip south to the Motor City, where, notwithstanding its exit from chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the city’s ital. efforts to encourage families to move back to the city from the suburbs depends upon turning around a school district which appears to be stumbling under its own quasi plan of debt adjustment from a state takeover.

Not in Like Flint. Flint Mayor Karen Weaver this week made clear she believes state officials cannot force her to sign a consent agreement seeking to make fixes to her city’s water system, challenging them to “bring it on” and take her to court. Her battle parallels a trial of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon, who is anticipating, next month, to find out whether or not he will face a jury trial on involuntary manslaughter and misconduct charges tied to the Flint water crisis. Genesee District Judge David Goggins has signed an order detailing how the remainder of Secretary Lyon’s preliminary examination will play out: he has been charged involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office, making him the highest-ranking state government official charged with crimes with regard to how he mishandled Flint water problems—making his the first of 15 criminal cases to advance to a preliminary exam. Ironically, the trial of the state leader is occurring even as, in parallel, the State of Michigan is threatening to withhold funds to Flint not just in an effort to try to force responsibility for ensuring the safety of its drinking water, but that state action could have devastating fiscal impacts, undercutting the city’s effort to preserve its assessed property values: between 2008 and 2016, Flint lost more than three-quarters of its taxable assessed property value. There is almost a David versus Goliath feeling: Flint household income has been declining, even as statewide income has been increasing: household income in the city, at just under $42,000 annually last year, is more than 20% below statewide income.

The issue, a federalism issue involving all three levels of government, involves findings from  last August’s state sanitary survey, which found the city’s water system had “significant deficiencies,” including with the water distribution, finances, “security,” and “operations and management.” The state further charges that the city has not fixed the problems within 120 days as mandated state law, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

Mayor Weaver, however, told The Detroit News the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is making “false accusations or lies” with regard to the city’s compliance with state and federal drinking water laws, among other allegations; rather she appears to perceive the proposed consent order to repair the problems as retaliation against her vigorous protest when Gov. Rick Snyder ordered, in April, the end of the state’s free bottled water deliveries to the city, noting: “We have been meeting our requirements every step of the way: There are some other things that need to be done by the end of this month, and some things aren’t required to be done until the end of the year. But every step of the way, we’ve done what we’re supposed to do.” The city currently purchases treated water from the Great Lakes Water Authority; however, Flint’s wastewater treatment plant performs additional treatment for acidity levels, corrosion control, and chlorine, according to the state.

In a letter at the beginning of this week, Michigan Assistant Attorney General Richard Kuhl threatened Flint with federal legal action if the municipality does not enter into and comply with a consent agreement addressing the city’s outstanding violations, writing that the state would prefer voluntary cooperation—having previously written that violations of the Michigan Safe Water Drinking Act mean the city needs to sign a consent decree in which state officials outline unfunded state mandates with which the city would have to comply, including the provision of a “permanent or contractual” manager to oversee control program activities.

At the beginning of this month, Michigan Drinking Water and Municipal Division Director Eric Oswald wrote that correcting the violations would help ensure Flint’s public water supply system prevents “contaminants from entering” the drinking water and prevent “imminent and substantial endangerment of public health.”

Flint is still recovering from a lead contamination water crisis first discovered in the late summer of 2015. The city’s water has tested below federal lead standards for nearly two years, but many residents still refuse to drink from the tap. In his June 4 letter, Director Oswald wrote that state officials had summarized in a March letter the “corrective actions that had been completed” and provided “dates to complete other corrective actions.” In his statement this week, the Director claimed: “The matter at hand is working together to address these deficiencies to help ensure that the city continues to have quality drinking water.”

Mayor Weaver is still considering what legal options might be available to protect her citizens—and the assessed property values of residences and business properties in the city—as well as the fiscal and physical implications of the end of free bottled water shipments—noting she is still pondering over the option of returning to federal court to the judge overseeing the replacement of Flint’s lead service lines, because the state has indicated that the funds may be withheld. Mayor Weaver noted, with regard to the seeming state retaliation: “I just believe this is absolutely retaliation, and then they want to blame us for what they did,” she said, referring to the water crisis that Snyder’s task force was caused by state-appointed emergency managers and negligent DEQ officials.

In her June 11 response epistle and proposed unfunded state mandate as “unnecessary and unwarranted,” adding she was “troubled by the timing of this proposed enforcement action, in the wake of the cessation of state funding for bottled water in Flint.” She further noted that “During two years of collaborative remediation efforts, an ACO has not been necessary,” calling it a “deliberate and willful misuse of the DEQ’s authority for political purposes and not as a good faith effort to address the issues faced by the City of Flint.” Mayor Weaver said she hoped to bring more contractors to Flint to begin the next phase of pipe replacement, but state officials, she said, want everything to be hydro-vacuumed to save money that would return to the state: “Now, after the state and MDEQ have been publicly castigated for their abrupt and unilateral termination of bottled water funding, MDEQ proposes an ACO that raises no issues not previously agreed upon…I thus see this ACO as a deliberate and willful misuse of the DEQ’s authority for political purposes and not a good faith effort to address the issues faced by the city of Flint.”

That would undercut her ongoing efforts to invest in new plumbing for Flint’s citizens: “We’re really trying to, and what I’ve been trying to do all along, is work together and put differences aside for getting what’s best for the people.”

What Will it Take to Earn a Passing Grade? Detroit’s public school district has 200 teaching vacancies, and with the new school year not so far off, a campaign is underway to try to draw kids back to its public schools. That effort, however, confronts an awkward challenge: only half the teachers and support staff and fewer than 40% of central office staff would recommend the Detroit Public School District according to survey data Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti released this week during a Board of Education meeting—a meeting that provided a temperature reading with regard to how the system’s students, their parents, and school staff perceive the school system. For instance, in response to the question, “How likely are you to recommend Detroit Public Schools Community District to a friend or family member or as a place to work. 40% responded they would not recommend the school district: only 38% replied they would be extremely likely to recommend the city’s schools. Even amongst teachers and support staff, the enthusiasm was missing: 50% were detractors—with the percentage near two-thirds by staff at the central office: overall, a majority in the system replied they would not recommend the system—or, as Superintendent Vitti put it: “That so many staff members were detractors is a problem…There’s nothing that hurts our brand…more than our actual employees. If our own employees are not favorable toward the organization, then how can we ever recruit new parents to schools or new employees to the district?”

The survey, conducted earlier this year, asked for feedback from more than 52,000 students, parents and guardians, teachers, support staff, instructional leaders, and central office staff. The results hardly seemed passing—and make clear that efforts to incentivize families with children in Detroit’s suburbs to move into the city face an uphill struggle. Or, as Superintendent Vitti noted: “If we’re truly going to be transformative, our employees are going to have to take ownership.”

The surveys addressed issues such as school climate, engagement, bullying, rigorous expectations and school safety. But Superintendent Vitti said the data surrounding promoting the district is “the most relevant data point we’re going to be looking at tonight.”

Here are other survey result highlights:

• Just 42% of students in grades 3-5, 46% in grades 6-8 and 50% of students in grades 9-12 had positive feelings about school safety—an indication that a large number of students do not feel safe in district schools.
• 69% of students in grades 3-5, 63% in grades 6-8, and 55% in grades 9-12 had positive feelings about rigorous expectations.
• 56% of students in grades 3-5, 45% of students in grades 6-8, and 40% of students in grades 9-12 had positive feelings about school climate.
• A larger percentage of parents and guardians, 72%, felt positively about school safety; however, just 26% felt positively about the engagement of families in the district.