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353 “A ‘No’ Vote Will Say Detroiters Want to Save What’s Left” appeared in the Other Voices section of the Detroit Free Press on April 23, 1991, the day voters ultimately rejected Proposal A, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public land to be rezoned for commercial development. Boggs’s piece, which opposed Proposal A, ran alongside a piece in favor of the proposal. The two opposing views appeared under the banner “A Proposal to Build On?” with this introductory statement: “Detroit voters go to the polls today to vote on whether to give the City of Detroit the authority to tear down Ford Auditorium and rezone public space along the riverfront for private development. Today we present two views of Proposal A, by David Baker Lewis, a Detroit Attorney who specializes in municipal bonds, and by James Boggs, a retired Chrysler worker, author, and community activist.” A “No” Vote Will Say Detroiters Want to Save What’s Left A “no” vote on Proposal A will be a turning point for the city of Detroit. It will let the world know that the people of Detroit are determined not to give away Ford Auditorium , Belle Isle, or Hart Plaza to commercial developers. For too long, our city has been the victim of the giveaway mentality of the mayor and his economic development advisors. Dangling the promise of jobs before Detroiters , they promote mega-projects that have been shown to eliminate jobs and enrich developers and contractors. These developers and contractors have no interest in our city’s past or future. They are interested only in how much money they can make by tearing down old buildings and constructing new ones. So they make generous contributions to the mayor’s coffers , and he uses our tax money to construct new office buildings, even though Detroit has forty-six vacant office buildings downtown. The result is further blight and a shrinking tax base as companies move from older buildings to newer ones, creating more vacancies and more vacant buildings. Voting no on Proposal A will make clear that Detroiters can no longer be fooled by the mayor’s propaganda (paid for by friendly contractors) that his economic development schemes will create thousands of new jobs. Poletown, the People Mover, Chrysler Jefferson—each has been touted as key to Detroit’s economic development. But each has ended up costing us more and leaving us with fewer jobs. Each has made a few developers rich while saddling the rest of us with tax abatements, higher taxes, bond issues payable until the year 2040, and the increasing devastation and depopulation of our city, leaving ever fewer people to bear the burden. To pay for these “development” schemes that have actually undeveloped Detroit, we have borrowed from the next three generations. And now on the eve of the election, the mayor has once again come up with a scheme that he hopes will defeat the grass roots movement to save Ford Auditorium: a new hotel on the Ford Auditorium site. Once again, he uses the promise of jobs to try to pull the wool over our eyes. And, once again, he says nothing about how a new Ward.indb 353 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part IV 354 hotel will affect the already dangerously low occupancy rates of the Pontchartrain, the Omni, and the St. Regis hotels, threatening them with the same fate as the boarded-up Statler and the Book Cadillac. Detroiters who still believe in the mayor’s empty promises should look around them to see how the same kind of benign neglect of Ford Auditorium is at work in our neighborhoods. Just as the number of vacant buildings keeps growing downtown, so the number of vacant lots keeps growing in our neighborhoods. The mayor likes to boast that “I own more property than any mayor in the country.” Well, the time has come to make clear to him that it is the citizens of Detroit, and not the mayor, who own this city. Ford Auditorium, like Hart Plaza and Belle Isle, is not the property of any administration or elected official. No elected body has the right to sell them to or dispose of them for private or commercial use. They are public property, the property of Detroit ’s citizens. For much too long, the mayor has been “yeasaying” the developers and “naysaying” the people of Detroit. Voting no on Proposal A says “yes” to the people of Detroit and...

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