# Emergency Manager An **emergency manager** (EM) is an unelected official appointed by a state government to take over a financially distressed local government or school district, with sweeping authority to override — or entirely displace — locally elected officials. Michigan's regime, codified in the **Local Financial Stability and Choice Act (Public Act 436 of 2012)**, is the best-known and most contested example. PA 436 was passed by the Republican legislature and signed by Governor [[Rick Snyder]] just weeks after Michigan voters had repealed its predecessor (PA 4) by referendum in November 2012 — and was written with an appropriation attached specifically to make it referendum-proof. Under it, an appointed manager could cancel contracts, sell assets, privatize services, and make unilateral fiscal decisions with no requirement of approval from the city council or mayor. ## KB significance: austerity vs. local democracy The emergency-manager model is a flagship instance of **austerity governance** — the subordination of democratic self-rule to a fiscal-discipline imperative. It was championed by free-market institutions including the [[Mackinac Center for Public Policy]] as a mechanism for forcing distressed (and disproportionately Black) cities to cut costs. The [[Flint Water Crisis]] is the catastrophic case study: the cost-saving decision to switch Flint's water source to the corrosive Flint River was made by EM [[Darnell Earley]], answerable to the governor rather than to Flint voters. By 2013–2014, roughly half of Michigan's Black population lived in a city or school district run by an emergency manager — a pattern central to the [[Environmental Racism]] critique of the disaster. ## The record Michigan's first emergency-financial-manager law dates to 1990; PA 4 (2011) expanded the managers' powers to break contracts and dissolve councils, voters repealed it 52–48 in November 2012, and PA 436 was signed six weeks later with an appropriation attached so that it could not be put to a referendum. Under the two statutes Flint, Detroit, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Highland Park, Ecorse, Allen Park, Hamtramck and the Detroit, Highland Park and Muskegon Heights school districts were placed under managers — a list that by 2013 covered roughly half the state's Black residents and almost none of its white ones. The [[Detroit Bankruptcy]] (2013–14), the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, was filed by Detroit's manager Kevyn Orr, not by any elected official of the city. The [[Flint Water Crisis]] followed from the April 2014 decision, made under Earley and ratified by the state, to draw from the Flint River without corrosion control. The accountability record is the second half of the case. The criminal prosecutions of state officials, including [[Rick Snyder]], collapsed in 2022–23 on the Michigan Supreme Court's ruling that the one-judge grand jury used to charge them was improper; the civil settlement ($626 million, 2021) was paid by the state's taxpayers. The manager who made the decision was never tried. What the vault takes from the episode is the general form: an austerity instrument that suspends local democracy in the name of solvency, applied by a state government to cities that did not vote for it, producing a catastrophe for which no one who held the power was answerable. Compare the [[Sagebrush Rebellion]]'s inverse claim — local control against the state — and the [[Environmental Racism]] literature for the distribution of who was governed this way. - The democracy-and-race critique vs. the fiscal-rescue defense - Comparable state regimes outside Michigan