C.S. Mott Foundation CEO Understands the Plight of Michigan’s Cities
The C.S. Mott Foundation gets it.
There was a really nice Q&A article in Crain’s Detroit Business recently with Charles Stewart Mott Foundation President and CEO Ridgway White related to the financial plight of Michigan cities.
The article by Chad Livengood focused on the City of Flint, where the Mott Foundation is based, but the conversation expanded to the struggles of all Michigan cities. Ridgway White and his Foundation have been a strong supporter of the work being done through our SaveMICity.org initiative and this Jan. 26, 2020, article is further proof.
It is extremely encouraging to see such a prominent person and organization as Ridway and the Mott Foundation to raise the same concerns the SaveMICity effort covers.
Here is a key excerpt from the article that is directly in line with our SaveMICity messaging:
Ridgway White: Recession-proofing municipalities is something that’s on our mind because the city of Flint is still struggling from the Flint water crisis and the dwindling tax base. Essentially, you’ve got 90 communities in the state of Michigan that are struggling to meet basic services. And that’s in an economy that’s good right now. How do you think about preserving the good things about Headlee and Prop A while simultaneously recession-proofing Headlee and Prop A? And so my thought process is you should treat municipal tax rolls similar to a business. So during the recession, property taxes need to go down — they need to be reduced because people have less money. But they should be able to rebound at a constant of CPI or inflation. So if you took a straight-line tact, you’d run at that. So it could be down for the five or whatever years that it needs to be. But it can bounce back up. It doesn’t take 20 years to rebound. Because that’s the thing, right now we’re still getting less revenue from tax base in most cities in Michigan than we were pre-recession. If you’re a business, businesses, especially automobiles, have had the best seven years in their history since the recession. Or 10 years. But the municipalities haven’t. They haven’t been able to catch up. So how do you allow it to bounce but not tax people out of their homes? So if a property hasn’t changed hands during a recession, it should bounce back to where it was pre-recession. That’s my soapbox on that.
We stand on the same soapbox. Thank you Ridgway for explaining it so well!
View the full article here: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/conversation/mott-foundation-ceo-ridgway-white-nervous-about-flint
This is a great article. We definitely encourage you to check it out.