The new minimal cities.

• Author: Anderson, Michelle Wilde
• Position: Municipal bankruptcy and residents' interests - Introduction through I. Cities in Distress A. In Fact, p. 1118-1151 - Author abstract

ARTICLE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. CITIES IN DISTRESS A. In Fact B. In Law II. SHRINKING GOVERNMENT A. Cutting B. Selling C. (De) regulating III. THE NEW MINIMAL CITIES A. A Local Nightwatchman State B. Doctrinal Boundaries of Residents' Interests C. Minimum Standards for Urban Life CONCLUSION: SHRINKING GOVERNANCE RESPONSIBLY APPENDIX: CITIES IN BANKRUPTCY AND RECEIVERSHIPS INTRODUCTION

Unable to meet obligations to creditors while also keeping government services in operation, the City of Detroit entered a state receivership on March 14, 2013 and filed for bankruptcy on July 18. That makes Detroit the twenty-eighth city to declare municipal bankruptcy or to enter a receivership for fiscal crisis since late 2008, a window of time that has seen five of the six largest municipal bankruptcies in American history. (1) In a long-term transformation of local finance that has accelerated in the recent recession, these cities and others are engaging in slash-and-burn budgeting to address falling revenues, rising expenses, and mounting debt. In San Bernardino, the third California city to declare bankruptcy in the recent recession, (2) the City Attorney followed another round of deep cuts to the police department with solemn advice to residents: "Lock your doors and load your guns." (3) Such an announcement would be unsurprising to the residents of Cleveland and East Cleveland in Ohio, Flint and Inkster in Michigan, and other cities beset by rising crime and police layoffs, where 911 can rarely dispatch an officer for a call reporting a nonviolent crime, such as car theft, drug dealing, or prostitution. Camden, New Jersey had over 2,100 incidents of homicide, forcible rape, robbery, or aggravated assault in 2011--an average of roughly one violent crime every four hours in a city of approximately 77,000 people, only slightly larger than suburban Palo Alto, California. (4) Yet in January 2011, Camden cut its police force in half and eliminated its homicide and narcotics units. (5)

Where police departments are understaffed, other public services are unstaffed. Cities in California, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere have terminated thirty to fifty percent of their employees. Following Vallejo, California's bankruptcy, the city's 2011-2012 budget explained that in addition to cutting forty-five percent of all public safety staff, "[a]ll funding for youth, library, arts, elderly, needy, education, and recreation programs, projects and positions previously provided by the General Fund were completely eliminated." (6) Decisions to scale government back in this way are distinct from contracting out for services; these cities are not purchasing private substitutes for public services. This is privatization in its purest form--government service shedding, on the unfunded hope that private or charitable alternatives will arise. Yet such cuts amplify the longstanding trend of outsourcing service provision to other public agencies (like counties) and private contractors, because the city government itself has fewer responsibilities, less authority, and a smaller staff.

Cities undertaking austerity measures also shed their property--public assets like parks, pools, and government office buildings. In Benton Harbor, Michigan, a city commission and a state receiver transferred possession of twenty-two acres of the city's pristine lakeshore and dunes to a private golf course in exchange for critically needed annual income, even though the scattered, inland replacement parcels given to the city as substitute open space required industrial decontamination and the installation of exposure barriers prior to public use. (7) In Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker sold sixteen city buildings in active public use, including the city's historic police and fire headquarters and Newark Symphony Hall, in a deal that plugged most of an $80 million deficit in the 2010 budget but will ultimately cost the city $125 million to lease back the buildings over the next twenty years. (8)

Local government is shrinking in these and other struggling cities. Years, if not decades, of budget cuts and asset sales have left little beyond a stripped-down version of core service functions like irregular police and fire protection, rudimentaiy sanitation, and water supply. School districts continue to manage education (albeit with budget woes of their own), but the city government itself is no longer pursuing a vision beyond public safety in true emergencies. How low can these cuts go? While laws provide an entitlement to a public education, and we have long struggled to interpret what constitutes a legally adequate education, there is little to nothing to indicate what other services the local public sector must provide. Beyond education, is there some minimum level of public services and public space needed to achieve neighborhood safety and habitability?

This is a humanitarian question, but it is also a doctrinal challenge. A system of state and federal laws governs cities that cannot pay their bills, and decisionmakers in this system (including mayors, governors, federal bankruptcy judges, and creditors) must determine whether a city's finances require outside intervention, such as a state receivership or federal bankruptcy protection, and if so, how to budget for the city going forward. Decisionmakers must evaluate, in essence, whether a city could cut still more deeply into spending on current residents to pay off creditors, or whether it is creditors, rather than residents, who have to bear the next round of cuts.

Standards for local public services must necessarily inform this balancing of interests between creditors and current residents. Creditors such as bondholders, retired public employees, contractors, and tort plaintiffs have contracts and legal judgments that quantify a city's obligations to them. Residents, by contrast, have no such legal instruments with which to monetize their share of a city's revenues. They have no concrete legal entitlements to police and fire protection, no regulations governing emergency response times, no enforceable right to water and water infrastructure, and no mandate for sanitary services like solid waste or wastewater disposal. Municipal bankruptcy and receivership laws articulate a duty to protect "basic public safety" and minimum services "consistent with public health and safety," but these laws lack guidance as to what those broad concepts mean as a practical matter. How long should a caller to 911 wait for a fire truck or an ambulance? Is there some point when a city's violent crime rate tells us that the city needs more police officers, if not gang prevention efforts, afterschool programs for juveniles, and victim support programs? Is there a specific density at which neighborhoods are "entitled" to access a public water system? Where to set the floor under public service cuts is a critical legal issue in public insolvencies, but we are asking decisionmakers to reason through it alone, and we have failed to pay attention to their answers.

In this fog of opaque, discretionary reasoning, a curious political reality is nonetheless visible. In the context of municipal insolvency, everyone (liberal, conservative, and libertarian alike) assumes that residents have some claim to share in a city's present and future revenues. When it comes to public fiscal crisis, everyone seems to agree that it is in the best interests of both creditors and society for a city to continue to provide for the "basic health and safety" of its residents-if not because they are simply people, then simply because they are the city's taxpayers, the ones who can make creditors whole over the long run without a bailout. Everyone seems to agree, that is, with no public deliberation (let alone agreement) as to what those minimum levels of public services should be. This Article frames and advises that early stage deliberation.

My goal is not to assert that residents' interests are the only ones urgently at stake in a bankruptcy. "Creditors" is a monolithic word that stands in for thousands of individuals as well as institutions. Among them are retirees who worked for decades in insolvent cities plagued by poverty, crime, and, in some cases, demoralizing working conditions. From the point of view of individual retirees, most pension commitments are not extravagant: the average annual police pension in Detroit, for example, is $30,000 a year, and general city workers (like librarians or sanitation workers) receive about $18,000 a year. (9) If these payments fall through, there may be nothing except poverty programs to fall back on, because many of these retirees, including most former fire and law enforcement employees, are excluded by law from Social Security. (10) The 10.8 million people (amounting to 64% of full-time civilian public employees nationwide) who work full-time for a local government are stricken with dread as they watch these insolvencies. (11) What they see of the fate of public pensions, which are a form of deferred compensation, will affect the competitiveness of public sector jobs and thus the quality of local public services.

The word "creditor" also stands for investors who lent these cities money in good faith, believing loans to municipalities to be one of the most stable, predictable assets available in American financial markets. When a city defaults on its obligations to bondholders, it creates risk in municipal bond markets that may drive up borrowing costs for other cities in the future. Like it or not, the national economy is exposed to these risks. The American municipal bond market includes one million outstanding municipal bonds with a total aggregate principal of more than $3.7 trillion. (12) A cascade of municipalities (beyond the twenty-eight cities to date) that paid less than the contracted price for debt would reverberate in the national economy. Individual investors' exposure...