Get Rid of Ombudsman's Office?

[Novine]

"If the city is unable or unwilling to remove carcasses to the degree that it's not unusual, that means that many citizens are affected. If that's the case, these citizens have the responsibility to participate in government to improve the state of affairs rather than complain.

If those citizens are not participating in the government to eliminate the cause of the trouble, then the actions of the government are acceptable by default."

BS. This is the claptrap you get from overpaid, underworked apparatchiks at city hall. People in city government need to do their jobs and it shouldn't require people showing up with pitchforks to get it done. If the people getting paid by the city aren't motivated enough to do their jobs without political intervention, they need to hit the bricks and go find a new line of work.

[Chuck La Chez]

People in city government need to do their jobs and it shouldn't require people showing up with pitchforks to get it done.

It shouldn't, I guess, but it does in Detroit, apparently, to the extent that a special office is required for handling the pitch fork.

So what do you do when the ombudsman stops working? Make an ombudsman to the ombudsman? How many levels of government do you need before you decide that enough is enough and you have to do it yourself?

[EastsideAl]

In my experience the Ombudsman's office is one of the very few city departments that consistently responds to citizen concerns. And it has actually improved significantly under Durene Brown.

Many years ago when I worked at City Council [[I'm talking the 1980s here) we were often called upon to deal with concerns and complaints of citizens in various parts of the city. Contrary to what M. La Chez implies above, this sort of thing is at the very heart of what municipal governments do and should be doing. Especially when it comes to spotting trends and problem areas. City government is the ground level of government for most people, and the one that most affects their day to day quality of life, so responding to "petty" complaints [[many of which wouldn't be so "petty" if YOU had to live with them) and concerns about the delivery of public services is in part what we were all about. After all, the citizens are the ones paying for those services.

At that time the Ombudsman's office, which had been voted in by referendum in 1973 and was then held by Forrest Green, was not very effective. In part because it couldn't overcome resistance and foot-dragging from, and the overall dominance and fear of, the Young administration. So a lot of that kind of work of interceding with city departments fell to us on the Council staff. And hard, often incredibly frustrating, work it was. So I feel for the member's of Ms. Brown's reduced staff.

But Council members and their staffs were often also too politically beholden to, and politically afraid of, the powers-that-be to get to the heart of things and really get things moving. That's why an effective, independent, Ombudsman is important. I think a big part of the reason for Bing's move to get rid of this office has, in fact, been Ms. Brown's relative success in getting city departments to respond and holding their feet to the fire during his administration. I would bet that his department heads dislike the interference and what they see as "outside" meddling. To which I say, too damn bad.

If citizens aren't being effectively, or even minimally, served by city departments, and the complaints start flowing in as a result, then those departments aren't doing their jobs. It's plain to many of us who live here that, even within the restrictions placed on them by the minimal resources currently available to them, many city departments just do an abysmal job of responding to and serving citizens' needs. I would hope that many of us will fight to keep in the new Charter the Ombudsmans office that the citizens of this city voted twice to create and continue [[1973 and 1984).

On a historical note:

If we were having this exchange ten years ago, I'd talk about the racially motivated change to at-large council

Huh??

[Chuck La Chez]

Huh??

The city council change to at-large occurred just after African Americans began streaming into Detroit. The Great Migration began in 1910. The council, "coincidentally", switched to at-large in 1918, effectively, eliminating the possibility of segregated African Americans from having a voice on the council without having numerical dominance over the entire city.

Today, the isolated voices are those who do not have the resources to bring their issues to citywide attention but could get a hearing within their respective wards.

[EastsideAl]

The city council change to at-large occurred just after African Americans began streaming into Detroit. The Great Migration began in 1910. The council, "coincidentally", switched to at-large in 1918, effectively, eliminating the possibility of segregated African Americans from having a voice on the council without having numerical dominance over the entire city.

Today, the isolated voices are those who do not have the resources to bring their issues to citywide attention but could get a hearing within their respective wards.

The point of the move to a Council elected on an at-large [[and non-partisan) basis wasn't to head off black representation, but to reform city government by cutting out the corrupting influences of party organizations, local patronage mills, and so-called 'ward healers.' All of which were seen as having a pernicious influence on the local election process, city contracting procedures, city hiring, and the conduct of city government in general.

This, along with many other initiatives undertaken at the time, was considered a progressive reform and part of a national movement to progressively reform municipal government and make it more responsive and responsible to citizens, less beholden to wider political forces [[like parties), and overall less corrupt. Detroit was seen as a leader in this movement, particularly at that time under the reforming Mayor Pingree.

Now, by the 1960s and 70s one of the unintended consequences of electing the Council at large was to create an under-representation of African-Americans on the Common Council, below their percentage of the overall city population. A consequence that certain politicians of the time took advantage of. But since the African-American population of Detroit was only about 4% in 1918, creating such this situation was almost certainly not a motivating factor in the reforms that brought us the at-large Council.

Anyway, that's a historical side issue to the main argument regarding the Ombudsman's office, where I very much disagree with you - citizens and taxpayers should not have to micro-manage their government, but they should expect it to function.

[Chuck La Chez]

But since the African-American population of Detroit was only about 4% in 1918, creating such this situation was almost certainly not a motivating factor in the reforms that brought us the at-large Council.

That argument would require me to believe that Detroit leaders didn't notice that African Americans were relocating like crazy and the auto industry was on the move.

I have lived as a white man with all the outward appearance of a covert racist. I look the part, I, apparently, have the values and I have had them whispering their code from my first memories until just days ago. In a million years, you could never convince me that the council change-over wasn't racially motivated because I know white people. I have seen through the facade of righteousness they're so adept at creating.

All the arguments in the world cannot overcome the timing of that change.

Anyway, that's a historical side issue to the main argument regarding the Ombudsman's office, where I very much disagree with you - citizens and taxpayers should not have to micro-manage their government, but they should expect it to function.

I don't think it is a side issue. I think they're both examples of people in power trying to separate citizens from the process in order to keep their power secure.

[NorthEndere]

I'm black [[which doesn't matter beyond the fact that you seem to think that personal anecdotal history matters to this subject), and I think you're overstating things. The black population was small, had grown slowly, and continued to grow slowly until after the war when it really picked up. Hell, even by 1960, the black population was only 29%. Nobody back in 1918, black or white, would have seen blacks as any kind of electoral threat, definitely not enough to believe that the change-over was primarily or even majorly race-based.

If anything, if you're going to conjecture about changes because of changes in demographics, you'd be safer with the theory they changed it because of immigrants or the growing white migration from the South that composed a significant part of the population, who presented a far greater electoral challenge to native-born hegemony in Detroit. The city was still around 1/3 foreign born in 1920. Blacks didn't really start showing up on the native-born Detroiter's radars as a serious threat to their power until after the war, when not only didn't the black migration to the city stop, but their own started to flew the city.

Blacks were basically invisible to the city's power structure for the entire first half of the last century. They weren't even courted by any of the parties until Cavanaugh saw the change coming, and that wasn't until the 60's, let alone seen as an electoral threat that needed to be diluted way the hell back in the teens.