CHICAGO — Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said Monday that a consent agreement to stabilize Detroit’s financial position could be in place by the end of the week.
Snyder said state and city officials have been in intense negotiations for days in an effort to reach agreement on a final consent decree by then.
“My goal is not to run the city of Detroit,” the governor said at a press conference from his Detroit office. “I met with a number of people from the city today and what I’d say is that discussion continues. It’s fairly far along.”
The proposed consent decree is now based on the city’s deficit elimination plan, as opposed to the document the state unveiled two weeks ago.
Snyder said local officials preferred to work with the deficit elimination plan, and that it could be modified to apply to Public Act 4, the state’s emergency management law.
It’s likely that a final agreement would enhance the deficit plan by giving the Detroit mayor at least some of the powers of an emergency manager.
Snyder made his remarks a few hours before a raucous public meeting of the state team reviewing Detroit’s finances.
It was to be the team’s final meeting, but Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon, who is on the team, said the state officially had 10 more days to reach a final decision, and scheduled a Thursday afternoon meeting to consider what he hoped would be a final consent agreement.
“We are hoping that over this 10-day window that we can finish our discussion with the city and come to an agreement,” Dillon said over the shouts of protestors in the audience.
Like Snyder, Dillon said the state and the city were “just a few paragraphs” from a final document.
“The governor assured me today he does not want an emergency [manager], neither do I, neither does the city,” Dillon said.
He added that the meetings with the city have been “great, very productive.”
Mayor Dave Bing has not been at most of those meetings after being hospitalized late Thursday. As of Monday, the mayor remained in the hospital after emergency surgery Saturday for a perforated intestine. Kirk Lewis, Bing’s chief of staff and deputy mayor, is running Detroit in Bing’s absence.
Also Monday, an activist filed an emergency appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court to stop Snyder and the team from entering into a consent decree.
The lawsuit came after the state Court of Appeals on Friday, in response to a state request, lifted an Ingham County circuit court decision that barred the city and the state from entering into a final consent decree until later this week.
The appeals court also ordered Ingham County circuit court Judge William Collette to “take no further action” in a lawsuit that claims the review team has violated the state’s open-meetings act.
In a separate order, the appeals court ordered the reinstatement of the state-appointed emergency manager of Flint, who was removed from office last week by a ruling from another Ingham County circuit court judge who was also responding to an open-meeting act lawsuit.
