Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan visited the LBJ School on November 13, 2019, as part of the Dean’s Distinguished Leaders Series. In this episode, Mayor Duggan talks about efforts to revitalize the city of Detroit in an equitable way.
Guests
Mike DugganDetroit Mayor
Hosts
Angela EvansDean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin
This is policy on purpose. A podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public
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Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. We take you behind the scenes of policy
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with the people who helped shape it. For more, visit LBJ. Don’t you, Texas?
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Hello, everyone, this is Angela Evans. I’m the dean of the LBJ School. And this is another one of our series
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of policy on purpose. And I’m so, so pleased today to have the mayor of Detroit,
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Mike Duggan, here with me today. And I have a special place in my heart in Detroit because I have a son
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who’s there, went to school there and stayed there. And I’m very pleased to have the mayor for several
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reasons. One is the mayor has stepped in to public service at a time when
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his city was in extremis. But at the same time, when we look at Detroit,
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I think for many of us, Detroit is a symbol of what can happen in America,
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both in terms of good things and in terms of how we can chill out. We have some challenges. So,
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Mayor Duggan, thank you very much for coming and joining us today. Well, it’s great to be in Austin and thank you
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for inviting me. During a week when in Michigan as nine inches of snow. So it’s good to be in Texas. And
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also it’s in Texas. And we have our freeze, which is very unusual in November. So thank you very
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much. So what I want to talk to you about is really this podcast is talking to people
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about why would you go into public service and why step into the arena.
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And in your situation, you’re a white mayor in a predominantly black city,
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a city that was in these in the 60s and 70s, had riots. And, you know,
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it was a city that had, with the industrial revolution joined. So was in a city that’s in a
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lot of transition. So tell me, what moved you into doing
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that? Why did you step into public service? Well, I was born in Detroit and my
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family’s been there for three or four generations. And I remember
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Detroit when it was a vibrant community, but also in my own family. My father
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was a judge on the federal bench for 30 years. My mother was
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a public administrator and one of the suburbs. So I kind of grew up in a public
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sector ethic. And in during my career, I’ve gone back and forth between the private
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and public sector, probably pretty evenly. But then when you think about, you know,
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the interesting thing, when people asked you to run for mayor
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and wanted you to run for mayor and you had to be a write in candidate at that time
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because of administrative glitches, you had
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very good people around you who you liked and you worked with and who were opponents in a political
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sense. And now they’re your allies. And talk to me talk to us a little bit about the decision
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to say, OK, I’m ready to move at this point into the into this arena and
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take over the mayorship when we’re in, you know, extremist in terms of, you know, your your economic
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extremis in terms of the city coming out of bankruptcy. Talk to us
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about that. I guess what I really want people understand what moved you to do this. My life
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was when my classmates at University Michigan Law School were all going to
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Chicago or New York or L.A. I said I’m only applying to jobs in Detroit and people in Detroit.
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Why would you do that? But I want to be part of the city, bringing the city back. And over the last 30
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years, I’ve had several careers all in the city, Detroit, as a private attorney,
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as a government executive who oversaw the stadium authority that built the Comerica
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Park and Ford Field, our football and baseball stadium. I ran the regional bus system. I
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was in the private sector for nine years running the Detroit Medical Center, our area’s major hospital system.
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And so but everything I had done was in the city and it was mission driven
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to help bring the city back. And ultimately, six years
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ago took the final step, which is to say, why don’t I go ahead and try to
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run for mayor? I’ve been complaining about the people who were there long enough. Let’s see if if I could do
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any better. And the community supported me. So do you think all that the work that you did
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in all those different positions? You know, we talked a little bit last night about the Detroit Medical
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Center and how that hospitals see so many different patients. Do you think
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that exposure help people really understand who you are and what
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you could do for the city? Talk to us a little bit about how you made those connections with people. Well, it was racial. The
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racial divisions in this country are very deep and go back 400 years.
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And for African-American voters to support a Caucasian candidate,
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that doesn’t happen because you give a speech, you tell people what they want to hear. That comes from
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trust over a number years is why Joe Biden is doing so well at the national level right
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now, because there’s a high degree of trust has been built up over the years. And
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the ultimate question was, is that trust deep enough?
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You’ve known me on a number of public roles in the city for 30 years, certainly running
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a hospital system that sees 300000 people a year in our emergency room in a city
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of 17000 people. Everybody in Detroit and. Very definite opinion of how I was doing run of the hospitals.
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And so the public decided that they felt
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confident what I’d done in my other roles and elected me and reelected me. Well, again,
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we want to give actual conversation we had last evening. And that was
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one of the things that you did when you were campaigning was invite me. I’ll come talk to
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you. I’ll come to your living room. I’ll come wherever you are and talk to one of the things we try to talk to the students
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about is like you have to get to the people. You have to talk to the people that you think you’re helping.
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And if you if you don’t, you’re not going to get that connection with them. You’re not going to hear what they have to say.
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They’re not going to see that you make an effort to go where they are, where they then expect them to come where you are.
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Would you talk a little bit about the thing that you did during your campaign as mayor? Yeah. Detroit
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is probably America’s biggest small town in that families in Detroit.
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They’re two, three, four generations. So you have cities like Austin where people are moving in cities like Denver,
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where people move in. In Detroit, by and large, people stay. Generation after generation.
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And so when I started my campaign, I said to the public, if you invite me to your house, I’ll come.
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And every night I would go to somebodies living room or backyard or basement
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and sit was six or eight or 10 of their neighbors and strangers would just call up and say, come
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on out. And I’d come out at six o’clock and they’d put out some water and some cookies. And we
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talked till seven thirty eight o’clock in. And then usually somebody there said,
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how about you come to my house. I have a different group of friends. And as the campaign went along, it went from six
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or eight people in a room to 15 or 20 people in a room till the last month. We had to do everything in restaurants
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and churches because the crowds had gotten so big. And I did 250
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house parties. And there’s no doubt that the connections that were made
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in those rooms went. When you look at all the racial distrust in this country,
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when you sit down with people in their living room, you break bread and you talk, you see
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each other as people and not through the kind of stereotypes and
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the historic distrust that is built up. And I’ve heard a lot of very powerful stories
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from African-Americans about mistreatment at many points in their lives at the hands of Caucasians
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and the skepticism they had about supporting me for mayor in. And as
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we talk to each other, you get to understand each other’s heart. And when the results came in, they were very
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strong when you had those meetings. I went, you have two questions here. What
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were some consistent themes that you heard over that time and in those meetings
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and that what surprised you the most about those meetings?
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Well, you had two levels of consistent themes. One was the basic questions.
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My garbage hasn’t picked up. My street lights are out. The ambulances don’t show up. The
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busses don’t run. I get abandoned houses on my block. And they wanted to hear
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not general rhetoric. They wanted to hear very specific plans. What are you going to do about exact right.
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And so that was one piece. And the second question was, people want
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to know, what’s your motive? I mean, I had a really good job in a hospital system.
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Why would you give that up to run for mayor? And they just want to look in my eyes and in here
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and make a decision for themselves that my motive was to make the city better.
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And ultimately, I think the great majority public became convinced of that. But those
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two things happened and every experience was different and some
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one would have a huge bolus spaghetti. We all sit around a big table and another there’d
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be 30 people jammed in a basement a little are full of chairs, and they
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would be talking about the drug house down the street. And all they wanted to know was how was I going to shut it down when the last
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mayor couldn’t? And so they were very different experiences. But you want to
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get to know neighborhoods in the city. You sit in the living rooms and I still do it once a week in a different neighborhood.
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And so what is the living room? Every week I sit down because it’s the only way to stay in touch. Yes.
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Keeps you bonded with the constituencies. What when you get into situations where you really didn’t
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have the answers, like specific answers, were they willing to accept the fact that you’re going to try?
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Cause sometimes that we talk about is you have somebody who’s campaigning said, I am going to do this. And, you know,
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well, that’s the motivation. But you have to deal with city councils. You have to deal with
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a lot of other things that you solo as a person cannot make. You can’t it don’t have a magic
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wand to say that’s going to happen. So how did you answer those kinds of questions? I
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would say I learned something new and every one of these. And so I would find out the forestry
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department didn’t trim trees in certain situations. The water department
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didn’t clean storm drains in certain situations. It was amazing. All the. Policies
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in the city, some of which had a logic to it, many of which didn’t. And I would say when someone asked me that,
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you know what? I don’t know the answer that. But I’m going to study it now. By the next night, I had
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learned the answer. And so once you got past 20 or 30, there were still
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things I was learning. But I think people were impressed with how much I had learned. And it was because,
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you know, I was I was listening to very specific concerns. And you had talked
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one of the things that when I’ve been reading about you, a lot of these concerns, your infrastructure concerns, you know, you had
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so many, you know, street lights were out of you know, ambulances weren’t showing up on the nine one
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one, you know, for an hour or so on people the busses like you were saying. So,
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you know, the bus service was not only not good, but there is broken bus. So many of these problems were infrastructure
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problems, which, you know, these are concrete problems. Let’s see what we can do about that. The other thing was jobs.
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So when you think about employing people, which gives them a sense of well-being
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and and the fact that they mean something. Those seem to be the two things that you focused quite a bit at
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on, at least in your first years as mayor. There is no question if you’re in a city
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where every vacant building is covered with graffiti, where the streetlights aren’t working
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and the police and fire aren’t showing up, you’re not bringing your business to that city, which just compounded an unemployment
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rate that was over 20 percent in 2014 when I started. So I had to do two things at once. One is I
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had to show credibility that we could fix the services. But at the same time
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had to actively recruit companies. Now, the interesting thing is the city Detroit’s gotten from a
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million, eight to seven and a thousand people over 50 years. But the city government itself owns
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a third of all the land. My predecessor saw that as a liability and said we need to shrink
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the city. People didn’t like that. I said, this is an opportunity
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for us to grow the city. And I started pitching companies on. I can get this land ready to go now.
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We have a workforce that’s available to work right now. And we turned
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it took a better vantage is out of landing companies. So you were like a matchmaker. Say good. Okay, we’ve got
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the infrastructure. We’ve got the land. We’ve got we’ve got resources. We’ve got physical
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resources. We have human resources. You come. So the first one we got was a company
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called Flex and Gate that makes parts for Ford Trucks is owned by Shotgunned, who’s the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars
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major auto supplier. All of his plants were in the suburbs. He needed a 500
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person plant for a new Ford truck. And my friends at Ford said, go talk to Mike
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first. And his problem was the last time he opened a plant, the suburbs where they had two percent unemployment.
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You can’t fill 500 jobs. The quality of your workers is just not very good.
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And so I convinced him to build in the city. He had 16000 people show
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up to apply and the quality that he was able to hire in a short period time. He started telling
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all the other auto manufacturers, you’re looking at this all wrong. There is a group
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in Detroit that’s willing to be trained and work hard. There’s a great work ethic here. And businesses
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at Bana’s along people go to work. And it really started a trend where a lot of suppliers
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have come back and now we’ve landed, you know, the first auto assembly plant
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in the country in 10 years, it north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Fiat Chrysler plant
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is built in Grand Cherokees with 5000 jobs is being built right now. And so but it was
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a you had to prove yourself. Take the next step off. Prove yourself. Take the next step. But right now, we have
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a lot of momentum. You have people who trusted you and you have success. So, you know, he’s say he did
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it and it was successful here. Here’s a model. See if this works for you, which is another, you know,
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having no strategic partners in business. The other thing that I thought was really interesting about what
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you were doing is the partnership. We talked to our students about you’re in public service. You’re just
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not in the public sector. You’re looking at the business sector. You’re looking at the nonprofit sector and
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how to talk to us a little bit about how you use those different sectors to help you think about
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your aspirational goals for Detroit. Well, we’ve had enormous help. We’ve had foundations
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like the Kresge and the Kellogg Foundation that have invested a great deal in our
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initiatives, was in trying to land the National Composite Metals
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Center, which would be a hundred of jobs, to design the lightweight
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cars material, the future and foundations put in a million dollars to renovate the building
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so that we could land it over a number of other cities. And so I’ve had great partnerships
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there. And we now have several major corporations, banks, auto suppliers,
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Blue Cross, who are putting five million dollars each in individual neighborhoods.
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And what they’re doing is because we’re trying to spread the growth, which is right now booming in our downtown midtown area
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into the storefronts of the neighborhoods. And they’ll put up two hundred thousand dollars
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to get a new restaurant over the hump and get it started. They’ll put up a thousand dollars. To renovate a vacant
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building for new apartments and when the main corporations are doing this,
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not coming in and saying what what we’re gonna do. But with the neighbors designing the redevelopment
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plans and saying to a TCN bank, hey, we’d
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like you to put money into rebuilding this apartment building and the bank respond to the neighbors concerns.
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Now you get the kind of partnerships you’re looking for. When you’re looking for a team
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of people who can help you think through these things or know one Ugandan in Vienna
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where you have an opportunity that you think is really an important one. How do you choose those people? And
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then how do you manage and lead that group of people as you’re working
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through these ideas? Well, I get a blend of the most talented people in Michigan are the most talented people across
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the country, and the interest in Detroit has helped us recruit nationally. But give you an example.
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When I first came in, our computer system was completely nonfunctional. You couldn’t open emails
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because we were 10 generations behind on the Microsoft system.
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And President Obama brought in the national I.T. directors from eight major cities. The most
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impressive wall was a woman by the name of Bethany Block from Louisville, Kentucky. And she seemed
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like a mission driven person. So the week after she left, I phoned her and I said, I’d like to hire
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you. She said, Sorry, I don’t come north. I call. I finally said, Where are you going to be Friday night
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if I drive down? Where you go to dinner with me. And I drove down to Louisville, Kentucky.
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She and her partner came to dinner and four hours later she signed up
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and they’ve moved. And she has now rebuild our I.T. system, which has given us a huge
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competitive advantage. And so there’s been some of that. There’s also been probably the most prominent
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private attorney dealmaker in Detroit was a fellow by the name of Tom, the one he left his private
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practice and ran our economic development group and landed Fiat Chrysler. And so it’s been a blend
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of the best talent in the city and the best talent from around the
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the country. We went went to the media and took one of those prominent TV journalists
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who came in and ultimately became our chief of staff. Alexis Wiley. So it’s
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it’s been a really interesting mix of people from a lot of very diverse backgrounds.
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But they’re coming because of. You mean they’re coming because of you. So they
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see in you someone who’s got a vision, who’s got a passion, who’s got a vested interest, who’s
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been there for a long time. It’s the way you’ve been working because people just don’t do that unless
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they feel like they’re working for somebody where they can have a meaningful impact. So
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part of this is, you know, we were talking about leadership and leadership. The way words were defining
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it is a force builder, somebody who builds a force beyond themselves. And when they leave,
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there’s still somebody there. So that’s about your leadership and your leadership style?
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Well, I had people who work with me when I rebuilt the bus system. I people who work with me when I built the stadiums.
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I have people who work with me at the hospital system. And I won’t say it’s easy to work
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for me because I’m intensely metrics driven. And every week there’s numbers up on the board. How
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many preventive maintenance is that? You get completed on the busses? How many storm drains did you
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get cleaned out? How many vacant houses do you get knocked down? But people who want
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to make a difference and are results driven love to be part of the administration.
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People who want to give speeches and go to meetings, they leave pretty quickly. But people who
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want to change the world tend to want to be around each other and we’ve attracted a lot of them. I think
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this is another great story about people in terms of working in public service, because we talk
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about people, lots of choices. You can go to business, you can make a difference in business. You can make a lot of money.
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You. You’ve worked across these different sectors, but the core of public service is making
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a difference for people. And before we, you know, end up and this podcast
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and I really appreciate you’re taking time to do this. If you were to talk to students, people
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who are, you know, in their mid 20s thinking about now I’m stepping into this arena
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and this arena’s public service, what kind of advice, what kind of
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message would you give them? Yeah, I would just say to everybody, follow your heart.
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And so I was two years out of law school. I’d had a lot of public success
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in litigation and a private firm. And the head of Wayne County Law Department
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came to me and said, I want you to head up our litigation division. I was 25 years old.
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I had to take a 50 percent pay cut to do it. But I was at a point in my
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life where it was me and a Labrador and I could afford to do it. And that turned out to be one of the best
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things of my career, because that opportunity exposed me to many other things. Now, if I
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had been at a point where I had two kids in college, it had been a different conversation.
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But you need to follow your heart. But when I did that, my friends were
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basically at one point University of Michigan alumni group said I had the lowest
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salary of anybody in my graduating class three years at of school. They were Berra’s about
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it. A year later, I was the deputy county executive supervising 5000 people and they wanted
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me to come back and talk to law school. So. So you got to not listen to the Antle around GCR this
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year on her desk. Right. And we’ve heard that over and over again by people. It’s like, listen to your heart and you think take risks.
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You’re. Doing something and you’re just trying you’re trying different things. So I
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you’re just. It’s so wonderful to have you here. I’m so pleased that you took this time for the podcast.
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And I’m so pleased you’ll get a chance to meet our students. And thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having me do things.
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This is policy on purpose. A podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University
21:04
of Texas at Austin. We take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape
21:09
it. To learn more, visit LBJ, you, Texas daddy to you and follow
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us on Twitter or Facebook at the LBJ School. Thank you for
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listening.
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