Big plans, little cash: Some Detroit candidates have ambitious goals for a sinking budget

Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit. (Creative Commons photo by femaletrumpet02 via Flickr)

DETROIT — With 167 candidates vying for a seat on city council, many are finding it hard to stand out from the crowd. Now that the city’s finances are running dry, candidates are often asked how they’ll manage a budget with a $300 million deficit while working to improve city services.

Some of those candidates are coming up with answers that make their proposals a bit more memorable. While one candidate wants to build a gigantic theme park on vacant city lots, another wants to power the Cobo Convention Center, home of the North American International Auto Show, on wind and solar energy.

One of the candidates with a big idea for Detroit is Annivory Calvert. Calvert wants to turn the Cobo Convention Center, locally known as Cobo Hall, into what she calls “the house that Obama built” and make it the green technology showplace of the nation.

In doing so Calvert estimates she’ll create more then 150,000 jobs in the city. “The Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association estimates that for every 100 million that you spend on transportation there’s 4,750 jobs,” she told Michigan Messenger.

Calvet plans on tapping $4.7 billion in stimulus funds to pay for her project, which also includes a plan for intrastate public transit. “The idea that you can live in Detroit and work in Grand Rapids, the idea that we would change the way we live in our state — that’s too exciting to me,” Calvert said in an interview.

But at a time when city, county and state officials can’t agree on how to fund basic and necessary expansions for Cobo Hall, Calvert’s plan may seem unrealistic.

When asked how she would approach her plan amid divided leadership she shrugged it off.

“That’s not an issue to me. I can work with anybody,” she said. Plus the money she plans on using isn’t coming from a regional authority like the proposed Cobo expansion funds, but from the White House, Calvert asserts. “If the president says ‘we really like it and we’ll fund the whole thing with stimulus money’ who would be opposed to that?” she asked.

How likely is it that President Obama will OK such massive stimulus spending in Detroit? If you ask Calvert, the chances are good. “After you do work at home and you say look here Mr. President we have this collaboration of people we need the stimulus money to fund this project … how could he say no?” She asked. “This is the sterling silver marker for the Obama Administration.”

Calvert isn’t the only city council candidate with big plans for Detroit during trying times. D. Etta Wilcoxon, who ran for mayor in this spring’s special election, wants to make Detroit a thrill seekers destination and a reinvent the motor city.

She plans on doing so by building a “colossal” theme park to cover much of the city’s vacant land. She plans on making her “Detroit Theme Park” a 24 hour attraction open 365 days a year to create the feeling of a nonstop festival. She also plans to build theaters.

“I intend to meet with Magic Johnson who has said that he has done the research on urban movie theaters and found them profitable so that he can bring two theaters to our Theme Park,” she wrote on her website.

Wilcoxon, as a councilwoman, also plans on brokering a deal with the Big Three to retool so that they can produce battery powered cars in the City of Detroit and ship them on the “underutilized” Detroit River to other countries including India, China, and Japan, where she says there is a demand for such vehicles.

On top of these projects, Wilcoxon wants to build car charging stations, lithium ION battery factories, and plants that produce windmill parts all on Detroit’s “barren” land according to her website.

How does she plan to fund these massive projects amid department closures and layoffs due to a gaping deficit? By borrowing $5 billion from the City of Detroit Retirement System, she says.

With that money Wilcoxon plans on paying off the city’s $300 million deficit in addition to funding her major projects.

Another city council hopeful who wants to utilize Detroit’s vacant land is Jai Lee Dearing. The fourth generation business owner wants Detroit to go into a new kind of business: the grave yard industry. He said while suburban areas are running out of space to bury their dead, Detroit, a city facing major depopulation, has room for graves. At a voter forum last month Dearing voiced his plans. “We have the open land,” Dearing told voters. “When someone dies it would generate city revenue.”

Dearing also said he wants to invite energy companies to build nuclear power plants in the city to create jobs and revenue in the wake of a failing auto industry. “We have to get creative on how to re-build Detroit,” he told voters.

Unfortunately, while these ideas are popular with voters, in times of economic uncertainty there’s little that separates them from pipe dreams.