CHICAGO — Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, said he plans to send Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder a resignation letter within the next week or two.
Orr made the comment Tuesday during a business roundtable meeting in Oakland County. He said he hopes Detroit will be allowed to formally exit bankruptcy by Christmas, and when asked when he would resign, Orr said, "hopefully in the next week or two."
The Detroit City Council and Mayor Mike Duggan took back authority to run most of the city in September, when Orr's 18-month tenure officially ended. The manager's current position is restricted to overseeing the city's emergence from Chapter 9.
"It's time to bring it to a close," Orr said during the annual business meeting, according to local reports. "Bankruptcy is a slip-and-fall process; you slip and fall into it. From Day One we had to think, 'how are we going to get out of here?'"
The former bankruptcy attorney also defended the fees charged by Jones Day, his former law firm which represented Detroit in the high-profile Chapter 9.
"If I didn't have Jones Day I might have had to hire six to eight additional firms," Orr said. "Structured finance, municipal finance, health care, labor, litigation, restructuring — all of those were subjects in this bankruptcy that I would've had to have expertise."
A debate over the fees charged by the law firms and consultants remains one of the last issues in the case. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes has ordered parties to hash out the fee debate in mediation. Rhodes has not yet set a formal exit date.
