in benton harbor they voted for a mayor. they voted for city commissioners. and so then the state can come in and appoint one man or one woman to unilaterally make decisions about collective bargaining agreements, make decisions about selling city assets. the people have no voice? their vote does not count in the city of pontiac? pastor, i just find this so hard to believe, that a governor has the power now to appoint somebody who has nothing to do with the city to come in for $180,000 a year, i might add, and start making all the decisions with the citizens having no say whatsoever. do i have that correct? you have that right. ed, you find it hard to believe, we thought that the enemy of democracy was in egypt. it turns out that the enemy of democracy is in michigan. michigan is the new mississippi, where you have a governor who puts emergency dictators over cities and school districts and unilaterally makes our voices and our vote null and void.
students drop out of school. earlier today i had a conversation about the city and about rahm emanuel s chances in the race for mayor with andy shaw, now executive director of the better government association and our cnn political analyst roland martin. so rahm emanuel calls this his dream job. i wanted you both in so we could discuss the state of the city. we ll get to the candidacy of rahm emanuel in a minute. you have a city unemployment shy of 20%. half the african-americans and 40% of latinos drop out of school before finishing. roland martin, can any new mayor fix these problems? first of all, that is a difficult task that any mayor in chicago can have. also understand richard m. daley has been nay your for a couple of decades. his numbers are so low it s unbelievable. they re also angered that he sold off a lot of city assets. so you re dealing with a huge debt as well. i also think you have people in
harrisburg, the mayor, linda thompson says we are going to sell city assets. hey, linda, what do you have to sell that s worth millions? i mean, do you have expensive cannon there? i mentioned earlier the pew report. $1 trillion gap between what the states promise to pay and what they set aside. now, what i didn t point out is that the report only covered fiscal 2008. what happened to the last part of 2000 oh, i remember. do you remember when everybody s pension, when your 401(k) was cut in half. and the second half of 2008? what i just showed you doesn t include that yet. back in a minute.
taxes and voters approved it. did you anticipate these kinds of cuts? well, i hate to disagree with you on your program but i m here to present the other point of view. the city doesn t have a problem of insufficient revenue but a problem of excessive spending and government mismanagement. three examples i would like to give you of that. the first is city assets that it owns, most of which it can sell. page nine of the annual financial report from the city that shows the city has net assets, net of $358 million and the city general government has $48 million of that. so, that s one example there. the city owns a hospital, which it could sell with net assets of $306 million. as i said in my lead-in to you, the city is selling its property. it is now shouldering they haven t sold anything
certainly not driving into a flooded underpass, for example, and lose a life. because this is an event that we could all see coming and we ve known that the potential impact, we have prepositioned city assets. we have barricades ready to go up at the intersections where traditionally we have problems. we also have fire assets prepositioned and we have, of course, all of our first responders on notice that they may have to deploy. like the county, we have already gone through and elevated level within the houston emergency center. we re going to ramp it up another notch at 5:00 o clock. we ll be on alert at the houston emergency center all evening to