Detroit Government To Abandon More Than 20% of City

In an attempt to deal with the massive amount of people leaving the city, and meet the budget, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has proposed cutting off all but seven neighborhoods from city services. People not in the select seven face living without garbage pickup, police patrols, road repair and street lights. From the article: "Karla Henderson, a city planning official leading the mayor's campaign, said in an interview Thursday that her staff had deemed just seven to nine sections of Detroit worthy of receiving the city's full resources. She declined to identify the areas, but said the final plan could include a greater number." Looks like RoboCop Detroit is getting closer to reality.

Comments

Alright then...

[Locke2005]

so those areas not receiving city services no longer have to pay city taxes? Yeah, that's what I thought... I'm sorry, but if you are taxing all districts at the same rate but only providing services to certain "select" districts, you ARE going to see massive lawsuits. It's called "discrimination", and public bodies aren't allowed to do it.

Re:Alright then...

[RockDoctor]

so those areas not receiving city services no longer have to pay city taxes? Yeah, that's what I thought... I'm sorry, but if you are taxing all districts at the same rate but only providing services to certain "select" districts, you ARE going to see massive lawsuits. It's called "discrimination", and public bodies aren't allowed to do it.

Sounds perfectly reasonable. "No taxation without representation" and all that terrorist/freedom-fighter guff.

So, if Detroit says "You, you and you [suburbs] ; we're no longer collecting taxes. Swim for yourselves!", then everything is going to be fine.

And people in the named suburbs are then going to have to work out how to run a modern city from scratch.

This is going to be fun to watch.

From a sufficient distance.