On a recent evening in June, a dozen activists crammed inside the kitchen of Emma Fogle’s home in Highland Park, a small hamlet surrounded by the city of Detroit.
Their city is under siege, they say, faced with the predicament of being cut off from a municipal water supply. The group convened the meeting over deep-dish pizza and soda to hammer out a three-day march to call attention to the issue, set to take place this weekend. In a city whose finances have been controlled by the state of Michigan on and off since the turn of the century, the group had a general consensus on who’s to blame.
“The state does not want us to have water,” says Fogle, a 74-year-old retired Ford worker.
Since last year, the tribulations of neighboring Detroit’s water shutoff program have drawn significant attention worldwide, as tens of thousands of residents faced the threat of the city turning off their tap for owing as little as $150 in overdue water bills.
But Highland Park has endured a water war of its own with daunting, if not more severe, consequences. Thrust into financial insecurity after decades of disinvestment, the city has a problem that residents say they simply cannot afford: Years of dysfunctional service – inconsistent billing, faulty meters, a constantly changing staff – have resulted in some receiving water bills as high as $11,000. (The median income in the city is $19,311.)
Between roughly 2,700 residential and commercial accounts, 129 were assessed water bills of over $10,000, according to Cathy Square, Highland Park city administrator.
“There’s some odd cases where the bills are high,” she says.
Now, residents are being told they have to pay even more for water access – the main item on the agenda for the meeting inside Fogle’s home.
This week, Highland Park’s city council approved rate increases that more than doubled residential bills, a move officials say brings the city back in line with rates it maintained two years ago. For the average household in the city, the quarterly bill will jump from $171 to $376, a 119% increase.
It’s one of several processes in motion to lurch Highland Park forward into the 21st century, officials say. Still, residents say, the cost will keep a necessary resource out of reach for many.
“This is the first time anyone has faced anything like this before,” says Marian Kramer, 71, a local activist who serves as the co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union.
Meanwhile, pending litigation stemming from a dispute over wholesale payments from Detroit’s water system could result in a $26m judgment against the city – a drastic sum that would probably be resolved through residents’ tax rolls.
The prospect of a judgment could be disastrous. Fogle explains that nearly 80% of the city’s residents live in senior homes, meaning the remaining 2,000 property owners would probably bear the brunt through their property tax rolls. In a community full of residents living off fixed incomes, the possibility of Fogle losing her home to foreclosure seems more of a reality.
In fact, Highland Park is facing a series of potential outcomes so extreme they could pose an existential threat to the city. Detroit has threatened to order its largest shutoff yet: to all of Highland Park. And officials have floated the possibility of dissolving Highland Park altogether and folding it into Detroit.
‘It becomes a global problem’
The history of Highland Park, whose population is about 10,440 and 93% black, mirrors neighboring Detroit. The three-square-mile city was constructed to comfortably house about 55,000 people. In the early 20th century, assembly lines hummed with activity and the city steadily expanded until the 1950s, when the population began to rapidly decline, as auto factories shuttered while white residents fled for the suburbs.
By the 1980s the city bore a resemblance to its present-day situation: teetering on insolvency.
In 2001, Highland Park’s financial crisis grew so severe that the then Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, buckled and appointed an “emergency financial manager” to handle the city’s finances. The managers are assigned significant power, giving the elected city council and mayor less of a say in day-to-day matters.
It was during this time that Highland Park residents were first introduced to a water crisis. As rates increased, many were presented with significant water bills; half of the city’s residents had their water shut off, when some residents found they owed thousands of dollars and more, according to a documentary that focused on the possible privatization of the city’s water department, The Water Front.
In the 2007 film, Kramer framed the issue in similar terms to how she does today.
“The fight in Highland Park is also the fight in Detroit … and all the places when it comes to a question of water,” she said. “It becomes a global problem.”
Despite the resistance, the situation hasn’t improved.
Over the next decade, two more emergency managers shuffled through, and the city’s books remained in disarray. Residents say they witnessed everything in the interim: at one point, faulty equipment left the city without access to water for three days. In late 2012, the city’s water department was in such poor shape, the state ordered several maintenance repairs. In response, Highland Park’s mayor – with restored power – made the decision to close Highland Park’s treatment facility and purchase water wholesale from Detroit’s water system while repairs were made.
The repairs were never completed, however, and Highland Park remained on Detroit’s water system. If problems existed within the water department before, residents say the issues were only exacerbated from that point forward.
‘Last-resort option’
As Detroit captured headlines for the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, blanketed with international attention for shutting off water to residents, city officials quietly set their sights on Highland Park. Since transitioning to the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department (DWSD), city officials said, Highland Park never paid the city for its wholesale purchase of water. It is as a result of this battle between cities that Detroit water officials called on all of its customers to settle up their debts and be consistent on payments.
“Despite our good intentions, we must now pursue a last-resort option,” said one Detroit official on Highland Park at the time.
Residents were bombarded with four-to-five-figure water bills. The problem? The entire billing system had been out of whack for years. Residents have complained of receiving bills double, sometimes triple what they owed – if they even received a bill at all.
With a 1 July deadline now lapsed to address exacerbated bills, residents say anything seems within the realm of possibility. Last month, the city implemented an amnesty program, slashing 30% from water bills. But word didn’t get out, they say, and plenty remain on the hook for a significant bill.
Within the last year, an auditor was brought in to examine bills, residents say, and reconfigure what their actual water bill should be, based on daily average usage. While some residents’ bills went down after this adjustment, Glenda McDonald said her bill went up.
“I was never paying the right rate in the first place,” said McDonald, who is president of the Highland Park school district’s board of education.
Cathy Square, Highland Park city administrator, was hired at the start of the year. The problems come as no surprise to her. Asked what happened in the years before her arrival that sparked the series of issues, she offered a candid reply.
“If I could tell you that, I wouldn’t be here today,” Square told the Guardian. “I’m being blunt and honest.”
The city is also taking steps to address the technical flaws and bring itself into the modern era, she says. Last week, for example, the city approved a contract for a company to handle collections, billing and maintenance. A $2m grant from the state is expected to bring in state-of-the-art meters for the entire city by next year.
The situation is hard to “overgeneralize”, Square says, because residents’ scenarios vary wildly. But, she says, they have opportunities to come in and discuss their bills with officials.
While that’s cast as a positive development, inconsistent communication with the city’s administration has made it difficult to address outstanding bills, residents say, like the one resident Eban Morales maintains.
The 51-year-old is a single father who lives on a fixed income because of a physical disability. He says he was slapped earlier this year with a $4,500 bill. That came even after he says he paid $100 per month in good faith because the city wasn’t sending him a bill.
“I did that for eight months,” he says. But the good-faith gesture went nowhere: the money was never credited to his account like he expected.
“One time,” he says, “they put it on my property taxes and they still tried collecting it.”
That’s a chief concern among the residents at resident Fogle’s table. If water bills are attached to property tax bills, and the cost is insurmountable, that leaves open the possibility of foreclosure.
Fogle has considered the prospect of losing her home. She displayed a series of past water bills, all of which were supposed to be sent quarterly. That hasn’t been the case. Since 2011, she has received a total of four bills. They present a confounding set of circ*mstances. Two bills were for about $149, except one covered a three-month period, while the other spanned roughly a year and a half.
The remaining two bills were also puzzling. The most recent, covering April-December 2014, was for over $900; the other covered a one-year period, with a total of about $595.
The worst part, Fogle says, is her situation is “nothing compared to what other people got”. Her son, for example, netted a nearly $11,000 bill that covered a four-year period, she says.
Facing dissolution
The dysfunction only began once Mayor DeAndre Windom made the call to transition to Detroit’s water system, residents say.
Before then, says former Highland Park mayor Hubert Yopp, the process was seamless.
“Bills were flowing on time, they were being disseminated on time,” he told the Guardian. Windom could not be reached for comment, despite several attempts.
The lack of a cohesive system has since put the city in a major predicament.
As part of Detroit’s bankruptcy, state and local officials eagerly worked to establish a new, tri-county regional form of governance to oversee the city’s water utility. Though contentious, given the longstanding grudges between Detroit and the suburbs, county officials early on begrudgingly viewed it as a step in the right direction.
Intense behind-the-scenes negotiations were mediated by a federal judge who issued a gag order on any discussions about the regional authority. But, in late May, it was reported that Highland Park’s wholesale water debt to Detroit was a sticking point. The increasingly significant question of what Highland Park must pay DWSD culminated in a revelation that officials were floating the idea of dissolving Highland Park altogether.
Mayor Windom, meanwhile, dismissed the dissolution idea, telling the Detroit Free Press it was “ludicrous”.
But with the gag order still in place, residents have no way of knowing the likelihood of dissolution. And they see it as retribution for mistakes they had nothing to do with.
“They don’t have the compassion or consideration to understand the situation that we’re in,” says Morales.
“The majority of us are single mothers,” says Fogle. “And what has happened is they’re doing things that’s costing us more than we can pay.”
