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When Joe Harris was auditor general of Detroit, he conducted half a dozen studies that showed how the city could save money, including $15 million in its transportation department.
All the studies were ignored.
As emergency manager of Benton Harbor, he doesn't have that problem.
He searches for ways to cut costs, comes up with cheaper alternatives and implements them. He is the mayor, City Commission and city manager rolled into one.
He has sliced staff, rebid garbage collection, outsourced services and negotiated contracts. He drastically shrank the Fire Department and gave its duties to the policeWhen Harris arrived in Benton Harbor last year, he was shocked by what he found.
He knew the finances were perilous. But the fiscal management was atrocious.
The city used pension funds to pay salaries, he said. It paid $80,000 a year in overdraft fees. It spent $1.3 million more than it earned in the prior year.
When staffers objected to the unchecked spending, they were fired, leading to 10 city managers in 11 years.
Add that dysfunction to a city where nearly half of the 10,000 residents live in poverty and a quarter are unemployed and you had a municipal nightmare.
"He's done an excellent job, especially in light of the conditions he had to work under," said Mayor-elect James Hightower, one of the few commissioners who supports the emergency manager.
Harris began by visiting each city department to see what could be cut.
At public works, he learned it had nine heavy equipment operators but only five pieces of heavy equipment. Goodbye, four heavy equipment operators.
He discovered the city hadn't used the lowest bidder for garbage collection. He rebid the contract. Cha-ching! $100,000 saved.
He sought new proposals for property and casualty insurance. Cha-ching! Another $100,000 saved.
By the time Harris was done, he had pruned nearly a quarter of city staff, from 103 workers to 75.
And he cut yearly expenses by almost 20 percent, from $8 million to $6.5 millionThe biggest nuts for Harris to crack were police and fire.
The two departments, along with public works, accounted for 81 percent of the city budget.
The Fire Department, in particular, made the penny-pinching accountant shudder.
The city was spending $1.2 million for 10 firefighters to respond to 40 fires a year. Harris estimated that 95 percent of their pay went to waiting around for fires.
He hired the Washington-based International City/County Management Association to review police and fire with an eye toward cutting expenses.
"I'm the first person to tell you I'm not an expert on any of this," he said. "I have to get experts to get me recommendations so I can make the right decision."
He seized on one of the association's most drastic suggestions — combining the departments into a single agency whose members could respond to both crime and fires.
Most small municipalities are leery of making such a move. Police and fire unions oppose it and hold a lot of sway in local elections.
But Harris wasn't running for anything.
"I didn't have to be concerned about being elected in the next election," he said. "We just took the politics out of the decision-making process."
What's more, his powers grew exponentially in April.
New state legislation allowed emergency managers to nullify contracts, change collective-bargaining agreements and even dissolve locally elected councils.
When police and fire negotiated new contracts in July, they had little choice but to accede to Harris' demands.
The new Public Safety Department has three firefighters and 17 police officers who are being trained to fight fires. In the past, the city had 10 firefighters and 23 police officers.
The weakened unions also agreed, for the first time, to allow the use of part-timers — a dozen to fight fires and another dozen to spell the police.
The moves will allow the city to save $900,000 a year in firefighting costs, from $1.2 million to $300,000, said Harris.
