[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12200-12201]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           DETROIT BANKRUPTCY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Kildee) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KILDEE. Mr. Speaker, last week, the city of Detroit, Michigan, 
became the largest municipality in our Nation's history to file for 
bankruptcy. Without a doubt, the situation in Detroit is extreme. Their 
problems in part have been driven by local mismanagement. But it would 
be an oversimplification, and I think a dangerous oversimplification, 
for folks to continue to lay the entire responsibility for Detroit's 
situation on the failure of management.
  Since last week, Detroit has been on the front page of America's 
newspapers and has become the recent, I guess, poster child of 
municipal decline and insolvency. But for the few cities like Detroit 
that have actually filed bankruptcy, there are many other legacy cities 
in this country that continue to struggle day in and day out to provide 
basic services for their residents.
  Many municipalities are facing not just fiscal insolvency but service 
level challenges, perhaps not on the same scale as Detroit, but that 
does not mean that they are immune to the problems that Detroit is 
facing. My own hometown of Flint, Michigan, is on that same path and is 
struggling every day to provide basic services in an increasing period 
of fiscal stress.
  Detroit's bankruptcy should be a call to action to have a much bigger 
conversation in this country about how we support and fund our cities 
and our great metropolitan areas. Cities are where our creativity takes 
place and where much of our wealth has been generated in the past, and 
that can and should be the future for America's cities. Let me be 
clear: bankruptcy for Detroit will not be a solution to its problems or 
for any other city.
  While it is arguable that this bankruptcy may be necessary, it will 
not be sufficient to solve the problem. It may bring order to an 
otherwise chaotic situation, but it will not solve the problem itself, 
and it will have real consequences for people in Detroit and 
southeastern Michigan and the entire State.
  You can simply dissolve a corporation through bankruptcy, but you 
can't dissolve a city, which is a place where hundreds of thousands of 
people, in this case, live and raise their families.
  Lots of factors have contributed to the decline of a whole subset of 
America's cities--population laws, trade policy that moves jobs out of 
those communities overseas or out of those cities into the metropolitan 
areas through land use practices, a municipal finance system that fails 
to recognize the realities of the 21st century. This is a big issue, 
and it is one that calls for a much larger national conversation about 
how we support our cities.
  First, Mr. Speaker, we have to make sure to do no harm to these 
places that are struggling. The Republican budget that will come to 
this floor within the next few weeks proposes deep cuts to programs 
like the Community Development Block Grant program and the

[[Page 12201]]

HOME program--a 40 percent cut for programs that are intended to help 
communities reposition themselves in this challenged economy. Yet, at a 
time when cities are facing distress, like the city of Detroit, my 
hometown of Flint, and many others, when the Federal Government could 
provide some help that would be in our national interest, we see cuts 
proposed to these really important programs.
  So whether at the State or Federal level, we all have a role to play. 
It is time that all levels of government start thinking about the long-
term sustainability of our cities not because it is good for those 
places, but because it is in our national interest. Detroit's 
bankruptcy should be a day of reckoning for all of us, not just for the 
residents of the Motor City, but for everybody.
  Rethinking the way we support our cities and our metropolitan areas 
is not an easy conversation for us to have. It will be tough. It will 
cause us to challenge conventional thinking and challenge our own views 
of the importance of cities.
  These may be tough conversations, but they are absolutely necessary 
that we have to take on as a Nation. We cannot sit idly by and pretend 
that Detroit won't matter and that it won't affect us and wait for the 
next Detroit to happen. It is important for our Nation, it is important 
for our people, it is important for our competitiveness, it is 
important for our economy, it is important that we be a competitive 
place. And the only way we do that is with vital and rich growing 
communities, and we have to get places like Detroit and Flint and 
Saginaw and Pontiac and other places that are important to this economy 
back on that trajectory.

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