Michigan's New Emergency Management Law Target of Federal Lawsuit

CHICAGO -- Detroit activists filed a federal lawsuit challenging Michigan’s new emergency management law Thursday, the same day that the law expanding state powers over distressed local governments took effect.

Opponents, including local labor and municipal leaders and Rev. Al Sharpton, held a press conference Thursday morning announcing the lawsuit and marching to the federal courthouse in downtown Detroit and later City Hall.

“There will be a threat to everyone in this nation if the emergency management in Detroit stands,” Sharpton was quoted as saying in local press reports. “This is a local issue, but it is a national struggle.”

The lawsuit is the first in what is expected to be several legal challenges to the state’s new law, Public Act 436, and the state takeover of Detroit.

A veteran Detroit activist filed a lawsuit two weeks ago, when Gov. Rick Snyder first announced his selection of bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr as Detroit’s EM, which argues the move violates the Open Meetings Act because the interviews were done behind closed doors.

The federal lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of the U.S. District Court by 25 plaintiffs that include local labor leaders, activists, and municipal officials from Flint and Benton Harbor. It lists Gov. Rick Snyder and treasurer Andy Dillon as defendants.
The complaint argues the state’s emergency management law violates federal civil rights and voting rights under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and seeks a declaration that the law is unconstitutional as well as an injunction preventing emergency managers from exercising any of their new powers.

The filing says the law “effectively establishes a new form of government within the state of Michigan ... that allows Michigan cities and other forms of municipal corporations to be ruled by one unelected official, who is vested with broad legislative power and whose orders, appointments, expenditures and other decisions are not reviewable by local voters.”

The lawsuit argues that the state’s emergency management law is unique among the states.

“Despite a long national history of municipal financial crises following national and global economic depressions and recessions, no other state in the nation has engaged in similar experiments in undemocratic governance as a solution to economic downturns,” the complaint says.

The complaint notes that only two Michigan cities since 1937 have defaulted on bond payments or been placed under a court-imposed receivership due to insolvency -- Muskegan Township defaulted on revenue bond payments in the early 1960s and Ecorse, which was placed in receivership in 1986.

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