Subsidizing yet another union with Stimulus money

Bumped
UPDATE (Apr 10) - See bottom of article. Fires are thought to be  for "perverted political purpose."

First Obama bailed out the UAW but not to preserve jobs.  If the idea was to preserve jobs, why would their first act be to close 3,000 dealerships?   The outlet for their products.  They bought out GM and Chrysler  primarily to avoid bankruptcy that could be used to invalidate all those generous pension benefits. Now,  they are bailing out the firefighter's union in Flint, Michigan.

Original Post APRIL 8 - Flint, Mi, is being given a $6.8 million federal stimulus grant so that the struggling city can recall recently laid-off firefighters.  The grant, administered by Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, was made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

There's a small catch:

To keep the grant, paid for with federal stimulus dollars, the city must maintain its current staffing level of 66 firefighters above and beyond the 39 firefighters paid for by the grant.

CHRONIC PROBLEMS
The city has lost half of its tax base over the past decade, most notably in the past five years. The city is struggling with a projected $8-million deficit. The projected deficit for next year is $10 million. The mayor is asking police and fire unions for double digit concessions and the unions are refusing to cooperate. Currently, police and firefighters make up 60% of the City budget.

The city may ask the state to allow them to borrow $13 million to help relieve the city’s past and current deficits. It would be in the form of a stabilization bond. (The legislature voted in February to raise Detroit's cap limit for issuing stabilization bonds from $125 million to $250 million.)

Flint has been chronically mismanaged. In 2002 Flint had accrued a $35 million debt. Unable to pay this and balance its budget, the state of Michigan placed the city into receivership late that year, with a financial manager effectively replacing the acting mayor. It took two years before local control was resumed.

In 2002, over 12 percent of Flint homes were vacant, the highest vacancy rate in Michigan. The city’s unemployment rate was 14.3 percent. Things have gotten worse since.

UNEMPLOYMENT
By May 2009, the unemployment rate was an astounding 27.3 percent for the city. (And THAT was up three percentage points from the month before.) In February 2010, it was 26.4 percent.



FORECLOSURES and ABANDONED HOMES 
There are some 10,000 vacant homes in Flint, most in private hands. Another 5,000 have been seized and placed in a county land bank. An estimated 10 percent of all parcels in the city of Flint under the control of the county agency. More may be added as another 6,000 properties were listed in January with taxes and penalties due from 2007 -- up 46 percent compared to the same time one year earlier. Arson is increasingly a problem.

Stimulus money isn't forthcoming for police jobs that have been lost. Layoffs of police would give Flint the police force they could afford, as the Flint Journal stated. Grand schemes abound in Michigan, many of them driven by utopian dreams: "The city wants to specialise in health and education services."

The Flint Journal complained in an editorial April 10, 2010, that Federal stimulus money appears to prop up mainly government work.

In the main, then, the available evidence indicates that economic stimulus money so far sent to Michigan has propped up a lot of nice-paying government jobs. ... But the day will come — maybe not this year, but surely next — when the federal well will run dry.

They must have been thinking of grants like this. Or the $9.5 million grant for green jobs to an embezzler who was on parole.

A better solution was suggested by theblogprof: fire the entire employee base and hire back those willing to work.

UPDATE (Apr 10) -
From Classical Values: "THE STATEMENT HAS BEEN MADE." He links to two stories. The first is city officials suspect arsonists with a political bent. The fires began about 30 minutes after the city announced layoffs of 23 firefighters. The second is the mayor who says the fires have been set in routine pattern out to achieve a "perverted political purpose." Classic Values says, "it resembles classic mob-style extortion".

From Theblogprof: "City burns as Flint, MI lays off firefighters to close budget hole, but keeps union benefits!".