A Neoliberal Response to an Urban Crisis: Emergency Management in Flint, MI

The fiscal crisis faced by municipalities is the product of a range of structural and political factors that leave communities unable to meet their obligations. To deal with this crisis, the State of Michigan turned to a program of Emergency Managers who were given the power to overrule locally elected officials, abrogate existing contracts and arrangements, sell public property, and in short do whatever they wished to address the problem. Emergency Managers imposed austerity-based neoliberal policies with little regard for underlying structural forces that left communities impoverished, and which in the end protected bond holders. As the case of Flint, Michigan, demonstrates, these actions did little to alter the long-term prospects of cities, and inflicted real harm on Flint’s residents when the EM embarked on a ‘money saving’ plan to terminate an agreement to use safe Detroit water. In the interim, Flint began drawing drinking water from the Flint River, resulting in high levels of lead in their water, producing a health crisis. At the end of the day, cities where Emergency Managers were in charge were left in unsustainable positions, burdened by new long-term debt, with every likelihood they would find themselves in another fiscal crisis in the coming decades