TOM BARROW FOR MAYOR
PLATFORM

The New Vision for Detroit

Tom Barrow is running for Mayor of Detroit because our city and schools are in crisis, and he brings a unique set of qualifications to the position at a time when Detroit and its school system require a leader with his credentials and background. Barrow was educated at Wayne State University where he received a bachelor’s degree in accounting, and a master's degree in business administration with a concentration in finance. Tom, an accountant and expert in fiscal policy is a former CPA.

The crisis confronting Detroit and its schools is financial in nature and must be solved by Detroiters themselves. Born and raised and still living on the city's east side, Barrow sees clearly that our past leadership quantitatively failed to recognize the events and circumstances which have brought the city to the brink of financial disaster.

A review of the city’s 2007 (the latest available) KPMG Certified Audit, a document readily understood by a municipal finance expert like Barrow, reveals the city deficit is over $600 million and rising, due in large part to managers who have displayed an utter disregard for maintaining and controlling spending.

While city administrators want to place the blame on city workers, it is clear that it is not the workers, but reckless overspending by those in charge that created the problem. As Mayor, Barrow will bring zero-based budgeting to the city and its department heads, along with discipline and accountability. In addition, a Barrow administration will be inclusive and form numerous partnerships with private industry and budding entrepreneurs to help rebuild and restore our great city.

Cobo Center

Tom Barrow strongly rejects HB 4998 and SB 587, recently passed in the Michigan Legislature. The bills, which create a compromise authority to govern Cobo Center, will create further hardship for Detroit by unfairly taking away one of the city's most valuable assets. Barrow believes the legislation is also a violation under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States because a city’s home rule charter cannot be overruled by the state legislature. Only the people can change the charter. Detroit City Charter Sec. 4-112, titled Control of Property, states: "Except as otherwise provided by this Charter, the City may not sell or in any way dispose of any property without approval by resolution of the City Council."

He believes ownership of Cobo has been and should remain in the hands of Detroiters, not a hybrid tri-county authority, and he plans to challenge the bills’ constitutionality upon election as Mayor.

Barrow believes the City of Detroit should appoint a majority of board members to any Cobo Center authority board – rather than the currently proposed two of eight seats – since it is our facility paid for by our Detroit tax dollars. Such minority representation effectively and unfairly makes Detroiters mere observers of Cobo Center's future operations.

Clearly the North American International Auto Show must remain at Cobo Center but Detroiters should not have to relinquish ownership of the facility when the city now has the hotel room inventory needed to aggressively pursue and land other large meetings and conventions. Neither Novi (which has been proposed as an alternative site for the North American International Auto Show) nor any other cities in southeast Michigan can offer the hotel accommodations, entertainment and other support such events require.

Furthermore, using tax dollars to enhance a currently operational private venture is unfair and unjust. Cobo Center is Detroit’s facility, one of the city’s crown jewels. Barrow stands squarely with the people of Detroit and urges our colleagues in Lansing and in the tri-county area to keep ownership of Cobo where it belongs – in the hands of Detroiters.

Crime

FBI crime statistics released this summer show Detroit’s homicide rate is roughly twice as high today as it was more than 30 years ago – with a staggering 35.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2008, compared to 18 murders per 100,000 in 1967. This is simply unacceptable.

Safety and peace of mind are our citizens’ most basic needs in order to enjoy the best quality of life here in Detroit. A Barrow administration will return that to city residents. Beefing up the ranks of Detroit’s finest will be Barrow’s number-one priority. He plans to increase Detroit Police ranks by some 300 police officers (and in excess of that number if the U.S. Department of Justice approves Detroit’s request for public safety funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), while providing them with state-of-the-art police information and communication technology to improve response time and service delivery.

A review of the 2007 KPMG Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the City of Detroit shows $66 million in departmental overruns, indicating massive waste and/or theft. Barrow will move quickly to stop this misuse of resources and use some of that money to hire more police officers.

As a recognized expert in public fiscal policy, Barrow will correct the department budget by using strong business practices and zero-based budgeting to identify and eliminate waste while introducing new technologies – web-casting in conjunction with 36th District Court appearances; instant messaging between squad cars and precinct stations; direct database postings, and a variety of other tools to save time and put police officers back on the street. Specific tools and approaches include:

Deploying well-regarded technology like CompStat, now used successfully in New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Philadelphia to track problem areas and focus police and community resources. This will be an important tool to increase police response and enhance citizen participation in fighting crime, letting us know daily exactly when and where crimes occur.
Use of in-car connectivity, instant messaging and digital report writing between the squad car and the lock-up at the district or precinct will keep officers on the street and make arresting a criminal a nearly paperless experience.
Reducing the amount of time officers spend in court via set-up of video-conferencing between the courts and local police stations, thus keeping officers in the neighborhoods, not downtown in the courthouse. This will also minimize the need for overtime.
Installation of low-cost servers and Web cameras, as well as free public Wi-Fi access at local businesses at key intersections, to better monitor activity in high-crime areas.
Provide authorized, organized neighborhood groups with a dedicated telephone number/instant messaging contact to call at the local precinct. This will enable rapid response from a "safe car" fleet of officers, who will be routinely patrolling their neighborhoods.

Detroit needs to re-engineer the entire city patrol structure to make it responsive to the needs of our current population, and the savings will enable us to grow our police ranks. Detroit now has less than half the number of police officers on patrol than the city did during the 1990s, and “job one” clearly is to get more officers on the street right away.

Detroiters deserve rapid response when they call police. With the cost savings from just a tiny portion of the departmental overruns, Barrow will lease 150 new, state-of-the-art squad cars at a cost of about $1.5 million per year and create 150 new “one man-safe run” cars for use throughout the city. Safe cars, staffed by new hires, will respond to routine, non-threatening situations requiring an officer’s presence, effectively quintupling the speed of response time.

Schools

Detroit Public Schools’ graduation rate of 27 percent is shameful and condemns a child to a life of poverty, crime, imprisonment or death. Quality schools are an important first step in creating opportunities for our children, retaining people in the city, and improving our quality of life in Detroit.

Tom Barrow has long held that it is important to create a city-controlled Department of Education and make the Mayor accountable for public education in Detroit. Barrow supports legislation introduced recently in the Michigan House of Representatives by state Rep. Lamar Lemmons, Sr., that would enable the Detroit mayor to take over responsibility for the Detroit Public Schools. The measure sponsored by Rep. Lemmons, if approved, would allow Detroit voters to decide in November whether to make the school district a departmental agency of the City of Detroit.

Barrow strongly believes the Detroit Public School system can outperform charter schools based on competition by paying teachers a competitive wage and holding them accountable for student performance. A Barrow administration plans to accomplish this goal by adopting the best of charter schools’ successful practices, empowering parents and involving them in governing their local schools.

Barrow will aggressively work with Washington to get Detroit its share of federal stimulus funds, administered by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to help turn around troubled school districts across the nation. Urban school districts in New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago have recently returned control of their systems to city government with great success.

Merging DPS into city government also can create tremendous synergy and reduce costs, with the resulting cost savings put into books, technology and education. Most importantly, the mayor of Detroit will now be fully accountable and fiscally responsible for our schools. A Barrow administration will relentlessly work to identify efficiencies and reduce bloated administration in areas such as purchasing, security and building maintenance.

Safe Neighborhoods

As a parent, small-business owner and lifelong resident of the city, Barrow knows from first-hand experience that a safe neighborhood is paramount to living, working and raising a family in Detroit. As mayor, he plans to establish "Family Safe Zones" throughout Detroit's many key neighborhoods. Family Safe Zones are protected neighborhood zones with a heightened police presence.

Barrow promises to grow the ranks of the city’s police force by more than 300 police officers, add 150 new one-man squad cars to patrol neighborhoods, and implement new information and communication technologies. This will speed up police response time and make Detroiters not only feel safer but actually be safer in coming years.

The protected Family Safe Zones created by a Barrow administration will be a completely new approach – in fact, it will be the first such program in the entire United States – and will go a long way to dispel the day-to-day anxiety and safety fears of our citizens and provide them with enhanced security and peace of mind to enjoy our great quality of life here in Detroit.

Jobs and Economic Development

Re-circulating city contract dollars within the city is a key element to creating jobs for Detroiters. As Mayor, Tom Barrow will create Detroit jobs by not only attracting leading companies and diverse industries – such as technology and energy-based businesses – but by creating a clear linkage between the city’s army of vendors and the job training programs which train Detroiters for the next generation of jobs. Barrow also will require residence in Detroit before hiring and training city employees, providing additional incentives to encourage young Detroiters to return home to live and work after graduating from college.

Barrow’s approach to job creation in Detroit will focus on increasing the number of Detroit-based small businesses. To this end, a Barrow administration will establish special economic incentives at the local level to foster and sustain these small enterprises. As a small-business owner, Barrow knows from experience that successful small businesses need open access to financing and capital. Further, every business’s chance for success is greatly enhanced when it starts with a formal structure that includes an accountant, a lawyer, realistic financial projections and a viable business plan. Barrow will be a strong advocate for existing and startup companies in Detroit.

Balancing the City Budget

Barrow, an advocate of preserving Detroit’s assets for future generations of Detroiters, will solve the city’s budget problems not through layoffs and privatization of city services, but by making city department heads accountable and adopting the zero-based budgeting concept common in businesses.

With the city’s deficit more than double the amount claimed by the current administration – well over $600 million and nearing $1 billion, according to the 2007 KPMG Comprehensive Annual Financial Report – Barrow notes the audit disclosed city departments were nearly $65 million over their City Council-approved budgets. Barrow says the problem is not the employees, who are already accounted for in the budget, but rather the management’s compelling disregard for clear limits established by the budget coupled with their lack of accountability for multi-million dollar departmental overruns.

Barrow says addressing the deficit will require scrapping the city’s budgeting process and immediately implementing a zero-based budget. The new process will make department heads accountable and require them to justify their budgets before a five-member panel of Detroit government financial experts.

Barrow opposes privatizing city services or selling off valuable city assets, explaining that such an approach will not only take away these assets from the city of Detroit, but will, in fact, skyrocket the number of layoffs and diminish wages as private companies seek the lowest paid, least experienced workers to replace veteran civil servants.

A Barrow administration will emphasize a new, entrepreneurial approach for city department heads, appointing energetic, fresh leadership in each department and giving these leaders a sense of urgency and a clean slate to run their respective departments as if they were operating their own businesses. Barrow believes Detroit doesn’t need outsiders taking over, but simply needs a strong, business-minded approach to managing our resources and assets, with the appropriate accountability for results.

The key first step is an assessment and inventory of each of the city’s departments and agencies. Based on a realistic SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis of each department and agency, the respective leaders will be charged with implementing action plans using “best” business practices. Barrow says the city does not need to give away potential profit centers like Cobo Center, the Department of Public Lighting and the Water & Sewage Department to outsiders, but rather needs to operate these assets like what they are – profit-generating businesses.
Barrow is well qualified to examine the city’s books with an expert eye and implement other short- and long-term changes to reduce the deficit and balance the budget, including:

Fire city CFO Norm White and ask his predecessor, Joseph Harris, CPA, to return
Schedule a handout of city paychecks, requiring city employees to pick up their checks in person to eliminate “no show” workers
Suspend third-party city contracts except those affecting emergency and essential city services (police, fire, EMS and garbage pickup)
Stop all overtime and freeze all hiring
Close and consolidate outlying city offices and move them back into the Coleman A. Young Municipal Building and the old Veterans Memorial Building
Reduce appointee compensation by 14 percent in lieu of mass layoffs and, with the exception of essential services, begin a rotating four–day work week.
Begin accepting online personal and corporate checks, credit cards and debit cards, making it effortless to pay the city
Begin online permitting, licensing and customer inquiries
To encourage transparency in government, implement a Mayor’s Hot Line for employees, residents and businesses to report corruption and bad management, as well as using the Mayor’s website to provide current news and highlights, and a blog for input and comments.
Contact surrounding universities and schools seeking accounting, finance and economic student volunteers to start the painful restoration and reconstruction of our chaotic accounting records
Enter into public private/partnerships to adopt city parks and improve certain public facilities

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TOM BARROW FOR MAYOR PLATFORM