Facing a credit rating mired in junk bond territory, a long-term debt of at least $15 billion and a current budget deficit expected to reach more than $386 million by the end of the fiscal year on June 30, Mayor Dave Bing announced on Tuesday that he would not be a candidate for reelection in financially-troubled Detroit.
The NBA Hall of Famer was elected mayor in a special election in May 2009 to complete the remaining months of disgraced ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s second term. Kilpatrick had resigned from office as part of a plea bargain agreement after being charged with perjury.
Inheriting a $300 million deficit and a reservoir of goodwill from the city’s beleaguered residents, the former Detroit Piston star was promptly re-elected to a full four-year term six months later, capturing an eye-opening 74 percent in the primary and a solid 56 percent in the general election.
Widely credited with bringing integrity back to City Hall, Bing’s tenure as mayor was a rocky one and was made even more difficult with Gov. Rick Snyder’s appointment of an Emergency Financial Manager earlier this year after a financial stability agreement with the state failed to turn things around.
The imposition of an emergency manager — some critics have called it an “austerity dictatorship”— essentially rendered the mayor and city council powerless in dealing with city’s mounting fiscal woes.
During his press conference yesterday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Bing ripped into state officials for not giving Detroit officials enough time to solve the financially strapped city’s problems on their own.
“Change takes time and hard work,” he told his supporters, adding that his administration had “prepared the runway” for Detroit’s eventual recovery.
Detractors of the impeccably-dressed, lightning quick and smooth-shooting former NBA player said that he waited too long into his administration to begin making the kinds of painful cuts in personnel and services necessary to ease Detroit’s immense fiscal problems.
Bing’s supporters, however, say that the mayor was fully aware of the impending financial disaster confronting the city, but he had a big heart and was worried about the impact of those decisions on ordinary citizens. He wasn’t a fan of austerity. He put off the inevitable as long as he could, they say.
The 69-year-old Bing refused to rule out the idea of mounting a future political comeback, strongly hinting that he might run for Wayne County Executive next year.
Bing’s departure from the mayoral contest leaves former Detroit Medical Center chief Mike Duggan and Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon as the two leading contenders in a crowded race that includes former Detroit Corporation Counsel Krystal Crittendon and four-time mayoral candidate Tom Barrow.
State Rep. Fred Durhal, Jr., former State Rep. Lisa Howze, community activists Herman Griffin and Jean Vortkamp, and D’Artagnan M. Collier, a member of the Socialist Equality Party who’s waging his second campaign for the city’s top spot, were also among the 22 candidates who filed nominating petitions by Tuesday’s deadline.
State Rep. John Olumba, who recently broke from the Democratic Party to form a one-man Independent Urban Democracy Caucus in the Michigan legislature to fight for poor and disenfranchised inner city residents, is also reportedly in the hunt to succeed Mayor Bing.
On Monday, longtime educator and activist John Telford, a 77-year-old former interim superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools — and arguably the most colorful candidate in the crowded field — also threw his hat in the ring.
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