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Detroit’s top lawyer resigns over ‘ghetto’ remarks
BY ZACHARY GORCHOW AND DAVID ASHENFELTER
Free Press Staff Writers
The City of Detroit’s top lawyer resigned Thursday, a day after she allegedly said the city’s predominantly black 36th District Court was “acting like a ghetto court.”
Deputy Mayor Saul Green accepted her resignation Thursday, the same day that 36th District Court Chief Judge Marylin Atkins sent a letter to Kathleen Leavey and other city officials protesting her alleged remarks.
Leavey said in an interview this morning that her remarks were taken out of context.
Leavey, who is white, said she got into a heated discussion Wednesday with a court administrator about the court’s handling of a lawsuit against the court in which it asked the city to pay the judgment of $400,000 against it without warning.
“I told her people regard this as a ghetto court because of the way they treat people,” Leavey said.
Leavey said she was referring to long lines and slow service at the court – not it’s predominately African-American group of judges and rejected Atkins’ labeling of her as a racist. The administrator contacted Atkins, who contacted Deputy Mayor Saul Green, Leavey said.
“In her mind it was racist, and the mayor and deputy mayor also felt it was racist and felt I had to resign,” she said.
Atkins said today her letter speaks for itself.
A letter she wrote to Leavey said the remarks came during a Jan. 14 meeting between Leavey, Chief Assistant Corporation Counsel Dennis Mazurek and members of the court staff. They met to discuss funding for the court.
Atkins said in the letter that Leavey told court staffers that “when the court stopped ‘acting like a ghetto court,’ the city would be more inclined to pay for our operations” – a claim Leavey denied.
The letter said Mazurek called the court a “part-time” operation because judges are unavailable in the afternoons and that the court is uncooperative with the city.
Atkins said in the letter that she was “absolutely offended by your characterization of this court as ‘ghetto.’ How dare you! Not only are your words insulting and racist to this court and the entire city, but they are highly unprofessional coming from the highest ranking attorney for the City of Detroit.
“This entire court has worked too hard under my leadership for the past nine years to be denigrated by you or anyone else. Our court enjoys a positive reputation in the city and we have the hardest-working, most dedicated judges and employees that you can find in any other court in the State of Michigan. Just because you cannot dictate your wishes to us is no basis for you to ignore your legal responsibility as our funding unit or stoop to racially charged insults.
“I am not asking for an apology because I know it would not be sincere,” Atkins continued. The letter was addressed to Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr., Green, judges and magistrates of the court, City Council President Monica Conyers and Council President Pro Tem JoAnn Watson.
Leavey said she will return to her former post as an attorney for the Law Department, a move allowed by union rules that let appointees, if they lose their mayoral appointment, revert to their previous civil servant position, if they had one.
Cockrel spokesman Daniel Cherrin said Leavey was asked to resign because her comments were “inappropriate.”
“It’s an unfortunate development in Kathy’s long and productive career as a city employee,” he said. “The mayor was disappointed by her comments, which were unacceptable and do not reflect the values and policies of the City of Detroit or his administration.”
Leavey, former head of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, was put in charge of the Law Department following the departure of John Johnson in the text-messaging scandal involving former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Contact DAVID ASHENFELTER at dashenfelter@freepress.com.
Contact ZACHARY GORCHOW at zgorchow@freepress.com.
Staff writer Joe Swickard contributed to this report.
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By Michelle Fleury
Business reporter, BBC News, Detroit auto show |
The heads of the major car firms asked for a bail-out from Congress
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More than 100 General Motors (GM) employees, dealers and retirees cheered and waved signs that said “Here to Stay” as the car maker showed off its latest offerings at the start of the 2009 Detroit auto show.
Even though it was carefully stage managed, the message was simple: GM plans to pull through its current troubles.
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 Whether after that shrinkage there is enough room for three US-based [carmakers], we’ll have to see  GM boss Rick Wagoner
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Like its rival Chrysler, GM got a helping hand from the US taxpayer in the form of a loan.
And its chief executive Rick Wagoner says the money is being used to “keep the business running during this difficult time”.
The loan is enough to keep GM going until Barack Obama is into the first few months of his presidency.
Mr Wagoner would not comment on whether the struggling automaker would go back to Congress to ask for more money on top of the $13.4bn (£9bn) it has already been pledged.
Instead he was cautious, saying only that “at this point the funding that we’ve got is going to be adequate”.
Collapsing demand
GM says that its sales have fallen sharply and inventories are high
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It is struggling amid an economic meltdown that has curbed consumers appetites for new vehicles.
That made 2008 the worst year for new car and truck sales since 1992.
And Mr Wagoner is not upbeat for his firm’s short-term prospects.
“Eventually we’ll get some recovery, but for now we have to plan for low industry volumes and for cutting out our costs and capacity to be able to manage against that,” he says.
To try to shift the focus away from its survival plan and back to its carmaking – GM unveiled several new models, including an electric Cadillac concept car that uses the same technology as the Chevrolet Volt.
During the presentation, Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, told the audience that he once accidentally ran out of power 12 miles from his house and had to call on a friend to come and pick him up.
GM is hoping its strength around the world, and its actions at home, will give it enough power to get through this crisis.
Union fears
Further job losses are causing despair for the industry’s workers
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Just outside, members of the United Auto Workers union and their supporters held a small rally.
Among those braving the cold was Jim Reed.
He lost his job as a skilled tradesmen at Chrysler three years ago and with the recession deepening, he worries things could get worse.
“If the economy is bad there’s nobody going to buy a car because there’s nobody working, and it’s one vicious circle,” he said.
There is also anger at the extra concessions union members are being asked to make.
In exchange for receiving a government loan, GM and Chrysler must re-negotiate their union contracts by 17 February.
But even if they can reach agreement, that may not be enough to guarantee the future of Detroit’s big automakers.
Last hopes
Back inside the show, among the gleaming pieces of metal that represent the industry’s hopes for the future, motor analyst David Cole warned this could be the last show in which all of the “Big Three” take part.
“There is a possibility that a company like Chrysler will be absorbed or broken up, but we just don’t know,” he said.
Unlike General Motors and Ford, Chrysler doesn’t have an international base to fall back on.
And with sales falling in the US, there simply is not the need for so many cars to be made.
To adjust to this new reality will require a major overhaul of the industry, believes GM boss Rick Wagoner.
“Whether after that shrinkage there is enough room for three US-based [carmakers], we’ll have to see,” he said.
Ford, GM can crow about Detroit auto show
BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Show far, show good.
Sorry for the silliness, but after the catastrophic tailspin of 2008, just reaching the midpoint of January 2009 without another major shock to the Detroit automotive scene feels like a giddy victory.
As the black-tie crowd shivers its way into Cobo Center tonight for the Detroit auto show’s Charity Preview, it’s clear that the 2009 show looks like a two-thumbs-up hit for Ford and General Motors, with even a few kind words from the critics for a concept shown by much-maligned Chrysler.
Yes, yes, there were low expectations for the Detroit Three and the Detroit show — with Nissan, Mitsubishi and others AWOL — and there’s a lot of treacherous terrain ahead. But let’s take a day or two to appreciate what went well this week.
The show goes on
First, Detroit’s not dead yet. Just as every morning we wake up is a good morning, it’s an accomplishment of sorts that the cars and trucks, the models, the thousands of journalists, converged upon Cobo on schedule this week, just as they do every January. At least we have a show, which may be more than you can say for Tokyo, where the big biennial motor show this October may be canceled.
Second, Ford and GM, two of Detroit’s walking-dead dinosaurs as described by southern senators in rescue loan hearings in Washington, D.C., have looked almost sprightly this week.
Ford took North American Truck of the Year honors with the 2009 F-150 and came within a whisker of winning the top car prize with the Flex. It might have won, too, except some judges don’t consider the family hauler to be a car.
Picky, picky.
The 2010 Ford Taurus looks to be exactly what recent impostors were not. Curvy on the outside and packed with edgy new technology and interior features, the 2010 edition looks like a worthy successor to the nameplate that saved Ford’s bacon in the 1980s.
Even Chrysler is praised
GM, though saddled with a heavier debt load than Ford and with $13.4 billion in new bridge loans from the U.S. Treasury, still managed to impress with new products, from the tiny new Chevrolet Spark micro-car aimed at U.S. shores in 2011 to the Cadillac Converj electric luxury coupe concept.
So lyrical were GM design chief Ed Welburn’s words describing the contours of the Converj that U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee critic of Detroit’s automakers, proclaimed Welburn “a poet” during the senator’s tour of Cobo Tuesday.
Chrysler LLC has abandoned the old mountain-and-waterfall Jeep display that had anchored the midsection of previous shows. And there were no outlandish antics, such as cattle drives and crashing vehicles through glass, which marked Chrysler media events at past shows.
Still, despite a consensus among the media pundits that Chrysler won’t survive the year in anything resembling its current corporate form, the carmaker won some praise for the 200C electric concept. Automotive Web site Jalopnik called the 200C “shockingly attractive.”
We’ll have to be happy with that, for now.
Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.
Barack Obama’s Cadillac Presidential Limousine revealed
With U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration just days away, General Motors has revealed the custom armored Cadillac limousine America’s new leader will soon ride in on a regular basis. The car first attracted a great deal of media attention when our spy photographers snapped images of a prototype undergoing testing and now we’ve learned additional details about the future president’s limousine.
Details on the GM-developed and Cadillac-styled limousine are understandably sparse given the main rider’s status, but the automaker has released some details and our spies have speculated the rest.
First photographed testing on public roads in July 2008, our spies noted this behemoth might actually be more of a truck
than a limo. With so much armor being added, it appears GM may have needed a medium-duty truck chassis like the Topkick platform. Earlier, spies observed the limo testing along with two regular Topkick trucks and the wheels and tires on the limo appeared to be the same size as the Topkick. The tires on the limo are Goodyear Regional RHS tires, though we couldn’t tell if they are 22.5 inch or 19.5 inch wheels.
As far as powertain, all we can say for sure is that a very large motor was under the hood of the car early on in its development. The exhaust note coming from the back of the limo was quite similar to the medium-duty Topkick trucks, though previous speculation about a diesel motor turned out to be untrue.
Style-wise, we can see bits and pieces from a few different Cadillac models. Xenon headlights from the Escalade adorn the front while the rear seems to have some CTS and STS parts. We can also see holders on the top of the front fenders where two small American flags would traditionally go. The doors on this limo are absolutely astounding. We’d guess they are at least 8 inches thick.
GM ensures us that the basic vehicle isn’t much different than the one that ferries current President George W. Bush around. It’s roughly the same size, externally, as the current DTS-styled limo. The vehicle’s armor is reportedly 5 inches thick and it has tall run flat tires, thick bulletproof glass, and an entirely sealed-off interior to prevent a chemical attack from permeating the cabin. Those chrome wheels are functional, too, designed to withstand the heavy weight and to hold up well to potential attacks.
Curb weight certainly exceeds 10,000 pounds thanks to all the armoring. Inside, the Cadillac-badged limo won’t lack luxury; previous limousines have featured hand-stitched leather trim throughout.
To say that it’s the most armed passenger vehicle on the planet is probably an understatement. Don’t look for a Leftlane review of this Cadillac any time soon!
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Tags: auto show, cadillac, detroit, economy, ford, ghetto court, gm, it's so cold in the d, justice, marilyn adkins, presidential limo, tbaby
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