![]() ![]() "They want what’s best for Highland Park, but they’re not willing to pay Highland Park’s way.”ĭemocratic Gov. “They don’t want to float the city anymore, floating their debt while the city figures this out," Lupher said. Once the judgment is paid those communities will be reimbursed, the authority said.Īnd those communities have “no sympathy” for Highland Park, said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. The water authority says other communities in the system have incurred charges due to Highland Park's nonpayment. ![]() Highland Park has not made any payments for sewer services since April 2021 and has paid less than 1% of its water service charges since 2012, according to the water authority. The ongoing mediation is expected to lead to a plan for how the debt will be paid. A court granted the water department a $19 million judgment in 2015 against Highland Park. In 2014, the state determined Highland Park was in a financial emergency and appointed a manager. The debt owed to the Great Lakes Water Authority stretches back to at least the 1990s when the water system was run by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. ![]() McDonald declined to comment due to ongoing court-ordered mediation over the water debt with the Great Lakes Water Authority. Another $3.5 million would come from state revenue, according to the proposed budget. Income and property taxes, respectively, would account for $4.7 million and $2.6 million in revenue. Estimated revenues for the coming fiscal year are expected to be about $12.6 million, according to Mayor Glenda McDonald's proposed 2023-24 budget. Highland Park has said that property taxes in the 2022 fiscal year were about $9.6 million. “Any time you’re a small, inner ring suburb that can’t grow in land you have to bring in a tax base. “There’s very little left there in terms of a tax base that built this city,” Horner said. 21 at a club in Detroit when they disappeared. In a rat-infested, vacant apartment building in early February, authorities found the bodies of three aspiring rappers. Neighborhood malaise and neglect are overpowering in some parts of the city. The median household income is about $25,000 and about 40% of the population lives in poverty, according to the U.S. About 85% of Highland Park's residents are Black. Like Detroit and other large urban cities, white residents began fleeing Highland Park in the 1950s for the suburbs. The automaker would keep a tractor plant in Highland Park and Chrysler, now Stellantis, had its headquarters in the city. Horner credits Ford with turning the city into an important and successful suburb run by his political friends.įord would move its auto production operations to nearby Dearborn in the 1920s. It was really the place to live,” said Jeff Horner, urban studies professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. “Highland Park was really a shining city on a hill. Immigrants and other workers eager to earn $5 per day flocked to the area.Ī building boom followed that included thousands of homes along tree-canopied streets. The first moving assembly line started a few years later at the plant. In 1907, Henry Ford bought 160 acres of land for what would be his Highland Park Ford Plant. The auto companies are long gone, leaving strip malls and retail shops to bolster the city's dwindling business tax base. The city is just under 3 square miles (7.8 square kilometers) and is a shell of its auto baron past, when manufacturing boomed and money flowed. Homes - elegant and spacious - rivaled some of those built in Detroit. It serves as an example of blue collar cities that lost their way amid changes to manufacturing and are now shells of their past, plagued by neighborhood malaise, neglect and deep poverty. The community nearly surrounded by Detroit is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it cannot pay its bills to the utility providing drinking water and sewage services to a city that was once a thriving auto manufacturing town. “It’s not a bad place to live,” Houston said. (AP) - Kevin Houston scanned the Michigan street where his fixer-upper and older homes bridge gaps between the vacant, overgrown lots and abandoned, ramshackle houses, boarded-up businesses and potholed streets of Highland Park. ![]()
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