Difficulty in Finding City Managers Tied to Broken Finance System

An excellent article about the difficulties some Michigan communities are having in finding their next city manager or village administrator was recently featured in the Detroit Free Press.

The article, titled “There’s a shortage of city hall job seekers in Michigan: Here’s Why”, did an amazing job at looking at the bigger picture to the issue – that Michigan’s broken municipal finance system is partly to blame for the struggle in getting people to help lead our communities.

The Michigan Municipal League’s Anthony Minghine, a municipal finance expert and frequent SaveMICity speaker, is quoted extensively in the piece. Here’s an excerpt:

Michigan’s tax system builds fiscal headaches into most every city hall as well as village and township government. That makes metro Detroit unpopular to municipal job seekers from other states.

The pain comes from the Headlee Amendment and Proposal A, property tax limitation measures which together choke local governments’ revenue stream; and from what Minghine calls state government’s “great heist,” the permanent shift to the state’s budget by Lansing lawmakers of all yearly sales tax revenue, which was earmarked by Michigan voters decades ago supposedly for use by local governments.

Together, Michigan’s perverse tax system puts a stranglehold on budgets in scores of city, village and township halls, all while the rest of the economy booms, Minghine said.

“We’ve gone from being a top-third state in salaries and benefits to a bottom-third for government jobs. I have a slide and presentation I give on that,” he said.

Also quoted in the article is the League’s Lead Executive Search Recruiter Kathie Grinzinger.

Here’s her part: Many Michigan communities held public-sector wages and salaries down from 2008 until recently, “so we’re still pretty far behind” other states, said Kathie Grinzinger, the retired city manager of Mt. Pleasant, now the lead executive recruiter for the Michigan Municipal League.

This is the second article in recent weeks where we were able to tie the SaveMICity messaging to a particular topic a reporter was calling us about. Minghine also was quoted extensively in a recent mlive.com story about how Michigan real estate values are rebounding, but our communities continue to struggle financially. View our blog about that article here.

The fact that our SaveMICity messaging is included into two vastly differently articles illustrates the seriousness of the broken municipal finance system problem. In the simplest of words, this issue impacts everything our communities do.