DETROIT – It’s been 10 years since the city of Detroit pulled the rip-cord and filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history.
On Monday, March 25, the city hit a major milestone in its comeback.
Let’s say you have a credit card and a crummy credit score and you can get credit with something like a 27% interest rate. It’s not good and that’s where the City of Detroit was a decade ago.
Let’s now say you could get things turned around and get a credit card at 17% interest instead. It’s a much better deal and that’s where the city of Detroit is now.
The City of Detroit used to be swimming in red ink, but in March 2024, Mayor Mike Duggan announced a Moody’s Bond Rating upgrade of not one, but two levels higher.
Duggan handed out bottles of black ink to staffers to take a victory lap over some bad history.
“It’s pretty remarkable the city has higher credit ratings than a lot of other cities in the country, cities we were looking up at for a long time,” Duggan said.
Plunkett Cooney bankruptcy lead Doug Bernstein served as Local 4′s bankruptcy effort during those years. He said he didn’t believe the city could achieve what Duggan said within his lifetime. Bernstein said the city should celebrate, just not for long.
“The worst thing you could do is take the position that the job’s been accomplished and we can go on to other things and not pay as close attention as the city’s been doing for the past several years,” Bernstein said.
Duggan said there’s no going back to the bad old days when Detroit overextended itself with debt to the point where they had to use creative means to get more. Instead, the mayor said fiscal responsibility has to remain at the forefront.