Michigan Senate Works to Thwart Effort to Suspend Financial Martial Law

A group called Michigan Forward is working to gather nearly 200,000 signatures between now and March to get a measure on the ballot to repeal Michigan's new strict emergency financial manager (EFM) law.

The current law, passed in March, 2011, lets the governor appoint emergency managers who are then given unilateral power over financially-troubled municipalities and school districts. The state-appointed EFMs can dismiss duly elected local officials, break municipal contracts and sell off the town's public utilities. If activists succeed in gathering the required number of signatures, the new EFM law could be suspended while the matter waits to be decided at the ballot box in November.

Michigan Forward reportedly already has 155,000 valid signatures, and needs 161,304 to get the law suspended. But the Republican-led legislature is working to thwart the effort to suspend the law. The State Senate passed SB 865, an interim law which would allow emergency managers to stay in place even if  petition gatherers succeed in getting enough valid signatures to suspend the current law.

Four Michigan cities have already been taken over by emergency managers: Flint, Pontiac, Ecorse, and Benton Harbor. Detroit may be the next city to get an EFM, and Detroit pension funds have sued to overturn the law. If Detroit falls under the rule of an EFM, approximately 49% of Michigan African Americans will have lost their representative government as a result of the new law. The NAACP has passed a national resolution condemning the law, seeing the Emergency Manager law as part of a national voter restriction agenda, which includes Voter ID laws in many states.

“In Michigan you have the Emergency Manager legislation that decimates democracy because it makes voting have no effect,“ said Reverend D. Alexander Bullock of Rainbow PUSH Michigan. “If I vote for a mayor or a school board member or city council member and then a czar can come in and remove them, then what is the point of casting my vote?" While Michigan Forward works to repeal the law at the ballot box, Michigan citizens have also filed a lawsuit against the governor alleging that the new EFM law violates the state constitution by eliminating citizens' rights to petition their local government.