KWAME vs. DUGGAN: The Double Standard


Since Kwame Kilpatrick getting out of prison has been such a hot topic lately, let’s review the differences between him and the current sitting mayor, Mike Duggan, who was elected in a bid to supposedly clean up the corrupt image of Detroit government that Kwame tarnished. And maybe someone can explain to me why only one of them has been to jail for misusing their office to enrich themselves or their cronies. I'm definitely not a Kwame lover, but can we please get SOME of the same intense scrutiny that was leveled against him put on Mike Duggan? Interesting how quick the media and everybody was to pounce on Kwame's scandals, but with Mayor Duggan all I hear is crickets from the local peanut gallery. Kwame was on the hook for $8.4 Million; Duggan's overtaxation scandal is worth at least $650 Million, and his other scandals are worth hundreds of thousands, to millions more. Duggan's time as the head of the DMC was also rife with impropriety. 


However, it is worth mentioning in 2021 now that Kwame is out, that Duggan and Kwame both came out of the McNamara political machine that dominated Wayne County politics for many years, and which was itself for a long time under federal investigation. They have been political buddies going way back, and this has been made plain by their friendly behavior since Kwame's release. 

Duggan, Kwame, & Ed McNamara

This post is by no means meant to glorify Kwame; if you thought Kwame was a black savior, you better look again. Anyway, here is a collection of quotes and paraphrases from various news articles that I've put together to compile and explain Duggan's sundry scandals. I know I am probably missing some, but this is just a general list for the purpose of comparing him to Kwame.


THE $600 MILLION OVERTAXATION
Sure, Duggan wasn’t in office in 2010 when the taxation assessment “error” first began, but he was in office when it was "discovered," and knowingly continued it, so I’d say it’s a very good bet that this “error” was an intentional move to help clear out "the slums" of the city in preparation for the regentrification now underway. How do we know? Because it was found that poor areas were overtaxed more than the affluent areas of the city, so someone was consciously picking and choosing where to apply the "formula." And when he was loudly challenged to remedy this issue by a veritable army of activists and residents, Duggan's administration was silent. He breathed a sigh of relief when the Covid19 crisis buried the overtaxation scandal in the news coverage. The fact that there has been no real effort to put a plan in motion to compensate for the over-assessments of properties makes it essentially a theft—figured at about $3,700 per household—not to mention there hasn't really been a clear answer as to where the money went, other than "it's already been spent." 


LACKLUSTER COVID RESPONSE
Speaking of Duggan’s Covid response, he was also pressured to get water turned back on to the tens of thousands in the city whose water had been shut off, causing a humanitarian / health crisis, yet he dragged his feet. There are still households in the city that do not have running water.
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/duggan-city-entirely-confident-abbott-covid-19-tests
On Covid tests used for city employees, it was recently found that the Abbott brand of test being used was only accurate 50% of the time, but Duggan arrogantly doubled down, saying he was “entirely confident” that it was fine, despite the FDA issuing a warning against trusting it. Duggan has also been reluctant to allow free access to testing as other cities have done, so that poor and elderly—the most vulnerable to Covid—can be tested. 


'MAKE YOUR DATE' SCANDAL 
A Free Press investigation showed the city redirected $358,000 in federal grants for reducing infant mortality into a nonprofit (purportedly established to reduce preterm birth) called “Make Your Date,” and ordered a city-led fundraising effort for the program. Duggan then handpicked Sonia Hassan to head the nonprofit—a woman who has been identified as his mistress. (“But what about Kwame’s affair??”) The Make Your Date nonprofit launched in 2014, but it was never operational because Wayne State University took over the work that it was established to do. Make Your Date raised more than $1.5 million since its inception, according to Wayne State. But where did the money actually go? Essentially the mayor diverted our money meant for reducing infant mortality to his mistress's puppet nonprofit—at a time when Detroit is among the cities with the highest infant mortality rate in the nation.
Three Duggan staffers were ordered by his chief of staff to delete emails regarding the Make Your Date scandal. One of the files recovered by the Free Press proved that Duggan himself "ordered fundraising efforts on behalf of the program"...It was also discovered that Duggan and his administration continued to conduct city business on private email accounts. Duggan routinely used his private email account when dealing with the city's controversial demolition program, which had come under federal investigation. 
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, and the local media could have done their jobs and actually held Duggan's feet to the fire and made this one stick to him, but they did not. It is a crime under state law to destroy public documents...Nessel's office did not prosecute Duggan or anyone under him. Inspector General Ellen Ha recommended "appropriate discipline" for three Duggan staffers for their roles in deleting the emails, however they only received "public records training." One of them was Ryan Friedrichs—who happens to be Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's husband. By the way, Dana Nessel worked in the Wayne County Prosecutor's office from 1994-2005. Before that she interned there (during the case of the Woodward Strangler, which was going on in 1991-1992). Mike Duggan was Deputy Wayne County Executive from 1987 to 2000, and Wayne County Prosecutor from 2001 to 2003, so basically he was her boss. Duggan endorsed her run for AG in 2018. I think that's all we need to know about why Dana always lets Duggan off the hook.


MOTOR CITY MATCH SCANDAL 
There are also questions about Motor City Match, a program designed to help entrepreneurs in low-income areas of the city. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the program through its Community Development Block Grant, is now reviewing whether it has been openly violating the rules regarding funding disbursement. “The records provided to this office did not sufficiently evidence that the CDBG funds used for the Motor City Match program met a national objective and eligible activity,” a May 1 letter from HUD to city officials stated. Even though the administration tried to downplay the review as expected for public relations purposes, it still leaves many unanswered questions about the Duggan administration’s way of conducting the business of the city. It is worth knowing that this latest review by HUD came to light mere months after the completion of another federal investigation into the city’s demolition program.


THE DEMOLITION SCANDALS
The investigations into the Duggan administration for misuse of demolition money and feeding contracts to his buddies in the demolition business (not to mention using contaminated fill dirt) is one of the best known of his scandals. Two people have been convicted by the Feds for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes and rigging bids to demolish homes in the city, the first criminal charges filed in the long-running investigation of Mayor Mike Duggan's program. “The audit also questioned the true costs of demolition, finding that over $200 million dollars spent on demolition funds have been spent on pre-demolition activities such as property surveys and personnel.” Since Duggan took office in 2014, the city has demolished more than 18,000 blighted homes, exhausting more than $250 million in federal Hardest Hit Funds. But much of those funds were supposed to be used to help Detroiters hit by the mortgage crisis stay in their homes—not for demolition.


RIGGED, RACIST CONTRACTING PROCESS
Numerous black-owned contracting companies have complained that unlike previous administrations where there was equitable distribution of contracting dollars for city projects, “during this recovery under Mayor Mike Duggan, the first white mayor in 40 years, found themselves subjected to new rules that virtually shut them out of these same previous opportunities.” This complaint has been voiced particularly in regard to the rebuilding of the “Avenue of Fashion” project, the makeover of Mexicantown, and general construction in downtown and midtown. I can personally attest that I’ve been surprised at how many all-white construction contractors I’ve seen on these worksites, and I’ve even had a black demolition contractor tell me that it’s practically impossible to get contracts now with the way the Detroit Land Bank Authority is doing things, that it is not profitable for a small contractor to apply. Clearly it was set up to be Adamo's ballgame. A grand jury is investigating the DLBA’s contracting process for a housing demolition program it oversees, while critics have complained about the size of the agency’s staff and lack of minority contractors. There are constant citizen complaints (and a few lawsuits) against the DLBA for failing to follow its own policies, or for unfairly applying its policies.


THE LAND BANK SPECULATION / GENTRIFICATION SCHEME
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/real-estate-hot-detroit-its-top-owner-city-isn-t-selling
The Land Bank is the city’s biggest land speculator, with a reported 30,000 vacant homes in 2018, yet it listed only 3% of its massive inventory for sale. This flies in the face of the premise that the DLBA was founded to bring an end to the land speculators crippling Detroit's neighborhoods...apparently it was just designed to bring the game in-house. There has been “a seismic housing shift in Detroit that began with the subprime mortgage crisis, which triggered a wave of mortgage and tax foreclosures that decimated neighborhoods. All told, more than 1 in 3 Detroit homes have gone into foreclosure in the past 15 years. In the process, Detroit has gone from having one of the nation’s best rates for black homeownership to being a majority-renter city. Miles away from Midtown and its $800,000 lofts, banks issued fewer than 1,000 mortgages in Detroit last year. All of which has fueled a persistent narrative of “Two Detroits” – one prosperous and another poor and neglected – that some say perpetuates distrust of the land bank.

A former neighborhood development leader, Tom Goddeeris has worked with the land bank for years but said the process to determine which properties go up for sale is a mystery even to community partners who have a good relationship with land bank officials and trust their motives. https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/22384/2019_recap_detroit_land_bank_discount_for_city_employees_harms_some_neighborhoods
Many people including myself have speculated that the DLBA is being used as an instrument of regentrification by monied white interests, a means of surreptitiously controlling an entire housing market through the Duggan political machine. Seen together with the subprime mortgage housing crisis, the $600 million overtaxation scandal, the shady demolition program, and the fact that the foreclosed houses are almost always purchased by non-minority people from outside the city, the DLBA looks like a shell game or holding company designed to facilitate well-connected power brokers being able to turn Detroit from black to white, from homeowner to renter…in essence, to make it more profitable.


CORPORATE WELFARE
And then there is the whole thing with the Pizzarena and the preferential treatment of the Ilitch family. While the Duggan administration was not involved in the Pizzarena negotiations, here are the other ways this administation has enabled the Ilitch empire: In 2017, the Ilitches managed to snag an entire block of property (14 parcels) from the Detroit Downtown Development Authority for just $104,900. The DDA does not accumulate land by tax default like the City or County. The DDA must have the land transferred to the authority, where they are then able to skip the Land Bank, skip the Side Lot program, skip any competitive bid and pass the land over to the Ilitches at a very low price. This is just one of many examples where city owned property was sold to the Ilitches without competing bids and outside the normal process for liquidating city owned properties. In 2017, the city issued dozens of blight violations on one single Victorian home sitting on a parcel the Ilitches wanted for the pizzarena, while dozens of Ilitch properties continue to go unticketed for much more flagrant blight violations. In 2016, the city approved Ilitch-owned parking lots that did not meeting city zoning that requires landscaped islands for larger parking lots. This has allowed the Ilitches to collect $1M in additional parking revenue, while runoff water is redirected to public streets. The Duggan administration may not see holding the Ilitches to their promises as a top priority, but they have certainly made giving the Ilitches favors a priority.


RADIOACTIVE SHORELINE COLLAPSE DEBACLE
Let's not forget the Revere Copper / Detroit Bulk Storage disaster, where the shoreline collapsed, contaminating the Detroit River, because of excessive stored materials without a permit. This was revealed during the community response meeting after the incident, as well as the fact that there were some conflicts of interest during the city's sale process, since Detroit Bulk Storage is tied to Mayor Mike Duggan. The conditions of the land sale were supposed to have mandated site cleanup and seawall repairs, but none of this ever happened, and there was a scheme to place the cost onto DWSD rate payers (Detroit Water & Sewerage Dept. was the previous owner of the property). Where is ML Elrick with all those pointy questions and intense investigative journalism now? If this was Kwame rather than Duggan, we might be hearing how he was responsible for contaminating the Detroit River and endangering drinking water because he used his power as mayor to direct a land sale to a company tied to him, then waived all permitting and safety requirements to the site, how he schemed to defray the cost onto peoples' water bills, and ultimately caused radioactive contamination getting in our water supply. But there doesnt seem to be the same will by the media to dig into anything Duggan does. Another thing that has been left out of the Revere collapse story is the fact that there are three massive DWSD sewer lines under the property that drain into the river right where the collapse occurred, and I have not heard anything as to their restoration after the collapse. Is this part of the reason that District 6 and 7 are experiencing such acute flooding conditions in summer 2021?


SHADY LAND 'SWAP' DEALS
Then there's the Riverside Park Conversion Project, where the Duggan administration acted on behalf of another billionaire land speculator's interests, and to use public resources to clean up contaminated private property. I went to the meeting about this in April 2017...it seemed suspiciously like the city officials were acting as Matty Maroun's snake oil salesmen to convince us residents that it was a good deal. Rashida Tlaib called it out as a scam, saying: “Bridge Company is trying to take away our park, changing the access to the park in exchange for contaminated land. We deserve better. City of Detroit needs to back off this so called "land swap" deal until all the necessary public health assessments have been completed. The bottom line is that they can't get this deal to go thru without community support (or there will be no DNR approval). Sadly, I think a lot of people (even those at the meeting) don't realize that this wasn't a question over whether we want a city park here--we already have one--and it doesnt necessarily need to be expanded to help Matty unload a contaminated parcel in exchange for another one he wants more. A parcel that Kwame wanted him to pay $10 million for!” And there you have it.

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