Recipe for success: Fund Michigan cities

This one should be a no-brainer.

Four years on, it's hard to argue that Gov. Rick Snyder's retooled emergency manager law, Snyder's second revision of Michigan's long-standing law, is working.

The crux of the problem lies in the limited impact accounting can have on the myriad factors that affect quality of life or efficient service delivery within a city.

Sure, an emergency manager (in theory) can balance a city or school district's books. But no amount of budget slashing or service cuts can make a city somewhere people want to live, or a school district the kind of place that offers quality education. In fact, it's often the reverse: When residents leave, the tax base slims, meaning cities or school districts stretch to provide the requisite level of service with significantly less money. Cuts exacerbate the population decline, which depletes revenue more, which means more service cuts. And so on and so on and so on.

► Related: Senate Dems upend government funding over Flint

Nowhere is this object lesson in sharper contrast than Flint, where the city — under a success of emergency managers — started pumping drinking water from the Flint River in 2014, pending the start-up of a new regional water system, a cost-saving switch prompted by the city's ongoing budget woes. Almost immediately, botched water treatment caused bacterial contamination that altered the color, taste and odor of the city's drinking water, and 18 months later, the state would acknowledge that improper treatment of had caused lead to leach from aging service lines, contaminating the city's drinking supply, and exposing nearly 9,000 children under age 6 to the neurotoxin, which can cause behavioral and developmental problems.

Why play games with something as important as drinking water? When the mandate is to cut, cut, cut, everything is on the table.

But it shouldn't be.

A task force appointed by Snyder to review the Flint water crisis recommended a slate of changes to the state's emergency manager law, like a mechanism for local appeal of emergency manager decisions, outside review, and other controls that Flint residents, alarmed by the smell, taste and color of their drinking water, could have employed to halt Flint's water disaster before it reached crisis proportions.

Snyder says he's waiting for the completion of a legislative report into the task force's recommendation.

Why?

Snyder took office in 2011 knowing the bill was about to come due for a wave of municipal crises that threatened to cascade across the state.

There was the City of Detroit, where systemic budget troubles had been building for decades; Pontiac, Flint and Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Ecorse and Highland Park, where emergency managers were already waging uphill battles with incremental results, or whose substantial financial challenges put them firmly in emergency management's crosshairs. And Detroit Public Schools, under state control for most of the last decade, with no fix in sight.

Inexplicably, in this climate, Snyder chose to cut state revenue sharing, continuing a trend of bolstering the state's fiscal health at the expense of its cities to the tune of about $6 billion in cuts to cities over a decade.

Snyder and then-Treasurer Andy Dillon believed that the state's long-standing emergency manager act was insufficient to truly remedy cities' and school districts' fiscal woes. An emergency manager, Snyder and Dillon believed, should have clear authority over operations, not just finances, and have greater power to impact labor agreements. Through two revisions (the first emergency manager law passed in Snyder's tenure was repealed by voters; its replacement carries a budget appropriation and is thus repeal-proof), Snyder crafted a law that granted his emergency managers the authority to make the broad fixes he believed necessary.

There's no question that a temporary usurpation of local elected control, as happens during a emergency manager's appointment, is a serious matter. But Snyder seemed to understand that ensuring the health and well-being of Michigan residents — by ensuring that Michigan cities and school districts could provide the services necessary to create those conditions — was properly a governor's job. It still is.

In the meantime, there's promising news out of Lansing: Michigan State University professor Eric Scorsone, long a champion of funding cities properly and sustainably, has been appointed state deputy treasurer for finance. Scorsone has been a strong advocate for municipal governments and school districts, and we hope, deeply, that his appointment indicates that Snyder has come around to a point of view we've advanced for years: Fund cities properly, and whether or not to appoint an emergency manager may become a question that never needs answering.