Tales Of The New Crown: Will Detroit Get Another Emergency Manager?

All Duggan has to do is to release the Children's Trust.

Or..... he could advocate another Emergency Manager Bankruptcy.

Or..... he could launch TARP 3.0.

Or........

#maytheheavensfall

Duggan: Detroit will run $100M deficit due to COVID-19 outbreak

Detroit — Mayor Mike Duggan expects the city will run a $100 million deficit this fiscal year amid the COVID-19 crisis and said "there will be painful cuts," but shelling out dollars to protect residents tops Detroit's priority list.

"We're going to spend what we need to, to take care of our residents," Duggan said during a Tuesday afternoon media briefing. "Then, as a community, we're going to have to deal with the fact that we have a major budget deficit."

The city, he noted, spent $400,000 to secure some of the first 15-minute tests and machines to detect the virus in the country. It's a move that's helped get 450 public safety workers back out on the front lines, he said.

Detroit is among the hardest-hit areas in the country. Its confirmed cases of COVID-19 reached 5,501 on Tuesday, and the city's death toll climbed to 221. Detroit Health Department figures reflected 469 more confirmed cases over Monday and the deaths went up by 25.

The mayor spoke Monday of the hit the city's taken from the closure of casinos. It's cost Detroit about $600,000 per day in revenue.

MGM Grand Detroit, MotorCity and Greektown posted sharp drops in revenue in March and for the first quarter of 2020. For the month of March, aggregate revenue plummeted 59.1% from March 2019, to $57.4 million. The casinos have been closed since March 16 to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Duggan's projection comes after a December report from Moody's Investor Services that deemed Detroit among the weakest of the country's 25 largest cities in its preparedness to weather a financial downturn. It cited concerns over pension contributions, fixed costs, revenue volatility and capital needs.

The city regained local control of its finances two years ago when it emerged from the strict oversight of the Financial Review Commission put in place as a condition of its historic bankruptcy.

Last month, before the pandemic hit, the mayor detailed a $1.1 billion general fund spending plan as part of a proposed $2.4 billion budget for 2020-21.

On March 24, Detroit Chief Financial Officer Dave Massaron told Detroit's City Council that the city already had suffered substantial revenue income tax and gaming revenue losses.

The city, at that time, he said, had already spent at least $11 million on response-related activities connected to the pandemic. Those dollars, however, were drawn from existing capital funding, not the next year's fund balance, and the city expected to be reimbursed for about 75% of the expenditures.

The CFO has recommended that council adopt a budget based on February revenue estimates and that it should undergo an entirely new budget process in May or June to make operational changes as Detroit enters the next fiscal year.

Meanwhile, Duggan presented a chart Tuesday that showed the slowing rate at which deaths have doubled during the outbreak, citing figures from late March through now, showing, at one point, the deaths doubled within two days. Numbers since doubled over three days and then doubled in four days.

"Now, what we're seeing is the rate of doubling is slowing to every five or six days," he said. "This is what we are trying to accomplish and what we are doing is starting to work. This is the first glimmer of light we've seen from the data since this pandemic started."

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