Krystal Crittendon Demonstrates Courage of Her Conviction

photo: Detroit Free Press

Update 29-JUN-12: Crittendon silent on whether she will drop legal challenge; $28 million in jeopardy (Detroit Free Press)

Update 22-JUN-12:  Detroit attorney Krystal Crittendon expected to survive City Council vote today on her firing (Detroit Free Press): Mayor Bing asked the City Council to fire her. The council will vote later.. A two-thirds vote is required to pass Bing's request. At the moment, it appears unlikely to pass, according to Charles Pugh, Council President.

Keep in mind, Bing initially supported Crittendon's lawsuit, apparently until it complicated his life too much, and then he cravenly turned his back on her. Keep in mind, too: Crittendon opposed the new provision in the revised city Charter that allows corporation counsel to independently pursue lawsuits. According to the Free Press, "Crittendon argued against the changes, foreseeing that the extraordinary powers could force actions that put the mayor's trust of the city's top lawyer at risk."

Update 13-JUN-12: Ingham County Circuit Judge William Collette dismissed Crittendon's lawsuit. Cheers for Krystal Crittendon for sticking with it until the bitter end, where she faced the feckless Mayor, all lawyer-ed up with private counsel, in court.

Here is the letter she wrote to her staff before Collette dismissed her lawsuit: http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4189435517.PDF

Crittendon should stand her ground. Krystal Crittendon, corporation counsel for the City of Detroit filed a lawsuit that asserts the Consent Agreement with the state, agreed to by Mayor Bing and five members of the City Council, is unenforceable because the agreement was made with an entity in default: the State of Michigan. Crittendon contends that the state is in arrears on its sales tax revenue sharing obligation to the city -- an obligation agreed to by former Governor John Engler and former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer back in 1997. According to Crittendon, the city, per city charter restrictions, has no authority to enter into further agreements with the state while the state remains in default on these obligations, which amount to $224 million by Crittendon's account.

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Mayor Bing and Governor Snyder devised the consent agreement as an alternative to Snyder's invocation of Public Act 4, the Emergency Manager Law, which would give a manager appointed by Snyder governing control of the city including the option of dissolving collective bargaining agreements with municipal unions. City Council, the Mayor, municipal employees, and city residents voiced passionate opposition to Public Act 4. The consent agreement, by avoiding the imposition of Public Act 4 on the largest black-governed city in the U.S., would prevent the symbolic worst-case scenario of displacing black elected officials with a state-appointed disciplinarian. Governor Snyder, state treasurer Thomas Saxton, and the state legislature contend that the pending fiscal insolvency brought about by poor city management necessitate the consent agreement -- or the imposition of an emergency manager -- to put the city back in fiscal order. But the optics, not to mention the ethics, of a crowd of highly paid white technocrats displacing an elected black city government would surely be undesirable. And possibly provocative, especially at a time when urban economies around the nation suffer from anemic employment rates and sagging general prosperity. Even Michigan's hyper-conservative legislature appears to recognize the hazard of awakening the beast they eagerly starve.

In contrast to the Governor's view that malfeasance is the cause of what ails Detroit, many local officials and residents contend that Detroit's fiscal disorder stems from failure by the state to live up to commitments made to the city. Further, the other half of that 1997 sales tax revenue sharing agreement (Public Act 500) between Engler and Archer required the city to cut income taxes by 0.1% per year for ten years and to eliminate city business taxes. If the city lived up to its half of the deal, the state promised the city about $340 million per year -- an amount that would diminish only when state sales tax revenue diminished, and only proportionally. If sales tax revenue falls 1%, revenue sharing will fall 1%. But in 2002, Governor Engler imposed a 3.5% revenue sharing cut, thus violating the contract with the city. Three years later, the city suspended incremental income tax cuts as the revenue sharing law permits [good analysis here], and held the rate at 2.5%. Since then, the state fell short on revenue sharing payments. Crittendon's office calculates the state now owes the city $224 million in back payments (plus various smaller fees imposed by the city on the state for services).

So, says Crittendon and others, (and others), if the state met its obligations (or released the city from its reduced income tax obligations, combined with the new corporate tax rate, back at 2%), fiscal chaos would not have descended on the city. Some of these critics suggest that takeover efforts devised and sanctioned by Republican governors (Engler & Snyder), and the Republican-led state legislature, mean to "Starve the Beast" and impose crisis on the city via "Shock Doctrine" principles. With the city enfolded in crisis, conditions then justify takeover by white, corporate marionettes seeking to create corridors of economic vitality walled off from vastly more extensive tracts of black (and other minority) poverty.

If one extrapolates current motives from past behavior, the evidence may support such fears. Behavior such as irrational mass violence against blacks in the 1863 & 1943 Riots, callous obliteration of once prosperous black neighborhoods by freeway construction in the early 1960's, followed by white flight and flight of most economic activity.

Among those obliterated black neighborhoods were Paradise Valley; and Black Bottom, along Hastings Street, a street that no longer exists except for a stub just south of Grand Blvd, south of Hamtramck. Notably, many of the businesses that once provided Black Bottom its economic vibrancy, moved to 12th Street (Rosa Parks Blvd), but looting destroyed most transplanted business during the 1967 riots (and what looters missed, rapid economic decline that paralleled decline of the auto industry finished off).

Black residents came to Detroit to escape the national injustice of southern slavery, worked hard to create relatively prosperous lives, did so, and yet white establishment confounds them at every turn. The Emergency Manager law and the consent agreement are two more examples of venal, conservative forces aligning against relatively powerless minorities. Crittendon is right to call Governor Snyder and treasurer Saxton's bluff. Detroit inhabits more stable ground than those who would undertake a coup d'etat of city government appreciate. Detroit holds the position of righteousness in opposition to morally and ethically corrupt politicians and business interests who reside in the dark corners of ancient privilege. Detroit can, and should, shame the state into doing the right thing. And after the state does the right thing, the nation might too, and address the issues of regressive taxation and the wealth inequality regressive taxation leads to. Only then will impoverished cities like Detroit find their way back to the vibrant and resilient economic prosperity they once were recognized for.