The Detroit Free Press has a new article about Detroit’s recovery through bankruptcy. The piece discusses the benefits of the bankruptcy filing – which were the intended purpose.
The bankruptcy lawyers who advised on bankruptcy anticipated such positive results.
Ordinarily individuals filing bankruptcy expect horrific results. However, most times that is not the case. The results individual bankruptcies yield are intended to be far better than the affects felt if no bankruptcy was filed. Those in need of debt relief should contact an experienced bankruptcy lawyer to discuss how bankruptcy can benefit them.
A year into his tenure as emergency manager of the largest American city to go bust, Kevyn Orr says he�s still confident that a post-bankruptcy Detroit will rebound from some of its gloomiest times.
But any progress report on that year � and Detroit�s historic Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing � has to be sprinkled with qualifiers and asterisks. Even as the anniversary of his March 25, 2013, appointment by Gov. Rick Snyder approaches, some of the benefits of bankruptcy that Orr pledged would come are beginning to bear fruit only now, many in unseen ways.
Much of what might be called the bright side of emerging from bankruptcy � with the city�s debts slashed, Orr proposes spending $1.5 billion over the next decade to remove blight and boost public services including police and fire protection � is contingent on the trial that begins in June on his plans for reorganizing the city.
But already, Detroit is no longer �borrowing from the pension funds and calling that revenue when it�s actually debt at 8%,� Orr said in a recent interview in his 11th-floor office, in a suite next to Mayor Mike Duggan�s office.
�Contrary to some of the predictions when we started out that this (bankruptcy) was going to wreck the city, au contraire, we have lenders that are willing to do business with the city even now on competitive rates and terms,� Orr said. �That is helpful for the city. We are paying our bills on time for the first time in a long time.
�The average resident, they don�t really see that. They think about, �Are the lights on? Is the garbage being picked up? Will the ambulance come, will police come? Are potholes being fixed?� �
On those questions and many others central to Detroit�s recovery, �the jury is still out,� Orr concedes.
�I have no doubt in my heart of hearts Detroit will get better,� Orr said, noting that there�s already progress in two crucial areas: ramping up efforts to remove blight and get the city�s streetlights back on.
He said Detroit�s blight task force is preparing to release an unprecedented assessment of every residential property in the city, including the estimated 78,000 blighted homes for which the city�s plan of adjustment calls for spending $500 million over 10 years to tear down or rehabilitate.
The city�s public lighting authority, meanwhile, has adopted a more aggressive $160-million plan to fix the city�s broken streetlights, relamping all city neighborhoods by the end of 2015, with major thoroughfares completed within another 18 months after that.
�Those things are surely going to happen � they already are,� Orr said, but other long-term changes will take years to work out.
Room for improvementOrr offered a measured critique of his year in Detroit, suggesting he could have done things differently in his first two months here, from more quickly accepting reports about the city�s financial condition that Mayor Dave Bing�s administration and the state had done, to underestimating what he said is a broad majority of Detroiters ready for change despite protests that accompanied his first days on the job.
Coming into the job, Orr said he�d read extensively about the city�s history, its financial condition and even academic books on how Detroit got to where it is.
Detroit Free Press: http://www.freep.com/article/20140323/OPINION05/303230134/Detroit-emergency-manager-Kevyn-Orr-bankruptcy