Slate.com interviews Democrat Mayor of Pontiac, Leon Jukowski, about what it's like to work under an Emergency Financial Manager...

Under this system, the City Council isn’t paid. Jukowski is paid as a consultant—$30,000 a year for a job that used to pay six figures—answering to Emergency Manager Louis Schimmel. He was a fellow at the Mackinac Center, Michigan’s free-market think tank; the mayor is a Democrat. Jukowski is fine with this. “I ran,” he says, “because I just got sick and tired of watching the city go sideways.”If you don’t feel like sugar-coating it, the emergency manager—Pontiac is one of three Michigan cities currently run by one—is an admission that democracy occasionally doesn’t work. Michigan introduced an emergency “financial” manager law in 1990, as a way to straitjacket cities that were failing. Schimmel made his reputation running turnarounds in the small, benighted cities limning Detroit. He succeeded, largely, but he was frustrated by limits.


Obviously, Pontiac is not Detroit. But it does indicate an salient point: sometimes, democracy doesn't work...

It’s all so predictable, says Jukowski. “You’re not going to have the political class coming up and saying, ‘Oh thank you for removing my authority over our police department,’ ” he says. “ ‘Thank you for making it impossible for me to place my relatives in positions in city hall.’ There’s this dichotomy of a political class saying, ‘You know, this is horrible, this is a travesty, this is the worst thing that could ever happen, they’re violating our right to vote, etc.’ But the man on the street is saying, ‘You know what? I’ve got better police service than I had six months ago. The toilet still flushes, and when I turn my shower on the water still comes on. And they’re fixing the problem downtown.’
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...y_failed_.html

I think it's gonna happen. And I think it's gonna hurt. But we've been trying to slowly pull off the band-aid for years. Decades? Let's just pull off the band-aid so we can get started on re-building.

Yes, I think that the low-income residents are going to get screwed in the process. But I don't think it really matters whether you have a Mayor or an EFM. I think they are going to get screwed either way.