{"id":774,"date":"2011-04-20T11:30:49","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T15:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=774"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:58:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:58:05","slug":"michigans-financial-swat-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/04\/20\/michigans-financial-swat-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Michigan\u2019s Financial SWAT Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"color: #505050\"><em>Marshall Thompson<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #505050\">While most people were watching the protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining rights for public employees, Michigan passed a very disturbing law that eluded much national media attention. The law creates emergency financial\u00a0<a style=\"font-style: inherit;color: #3f6dcf\" href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110426082056\/http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2011-04-18\/muni-bankruptcy-threat-makes-michigan-train-financial-emergency-swat-teams.html\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cSWAT teams\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that have power to pre-emptively take over municipal governments to protect them from possible bankruptcy.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #505050\">Laws that create emergency managers to help bankrupted or nearly-bankrupted municipalities are not new in the United States. One might even think of Rob Lowe, the cheerful\u00a0<a style=\"font-style: inherit;color: #3f6dcf\" href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110426082056\/http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chris_Traeger\" target=\"_blank\">municipal auditor<\/a>\u00a0on NBC\u2019s Parks and Rec. The Michigan law goes even further, however, and allows\u00a0<a style=\"font-style: inherit;color: #3f6dcf\" href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110426082056\/http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2011-04-18\/muni-bankruptcy-threat-makes-michigan-train-financial-emergency-swat-teams.html\" target=\"_blank\">hastily trained<\/a>\u00a0emergency managers take over whole municipal governments if the manager deems that the governments are financially stressed.<br \/>\n<span id=\"more-4886\" style=\"font-style: inherit\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #505050\"><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #505050\">On April 14, the emergency manager for Berrien County issued an order\u00a0<a style=\"font-style: inherit;color: #3f6dcf\" href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110426082056\/http:\/\/www.revolutionaryviews.com\/chris\/Eclectablog\/JoeHarrisOrders.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">(.PDF link)<\/a>\u00a0that took the power away from all municipal governments in the whole county. To be fair, the emergency manager did allow his new underlings the power to do three things: 1) Call a meeting to order 2) Approve the minutes 3) Adjourn the meeting.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #505050\">Personally, I don\u2019t understand why Joseph Harris, the emergency manager behind the order, is letting them adjourn meetings. What municipal government would ever want to waste money by starting a meeting if it was legally ordered never to adjourn? But I guess I\u2019m just more power hungry than Mr. Harris. Thank goodness for his personal restraint in these trying times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marshall Thompson While most people were watching the protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining rights for public employees, Michigan passed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-cu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}