Unpacking the Highland Park Water Saga: An Introduction

There has been a lot of press over the past year about the water-related crisis in Highland Park. In November our city lost the latest round of lawsuits over disputed charges billed to our municipal account by the Great Lakes Water Authority.

Highland Park People’s Voice is committed to delivering, unabridged, the complex story surrounding Highland Park’s access to safe and affordable water. Our ongoing investigation digs into archives and public records. We are interviewing key people who are working, or who have worked in the past, to sort out Highland Park’s water affordability situation. Starting in January 2023 we are committed to reporting live from any courtroom or governing body weighing in on water, sewer or runoff agreements related to water bills in Highland Park.

We also will be reporting on any courts, reporters, editors or government officials alleging that a water-related judgment against the city of Highland Park constitutes cause for the suspension, replacement or dissolution of Highland Park’s institutions of democratic local representation.

In reviewing a couple hundred archival records and over a dozen court rulings for this series, what has emerged so far is that Highland Park’s water crisis is NOT the familiar sound bite we have come to expect about a deadbeat city refusing to pay its bills. It is also not a story about local incompetence or ill-intentioned individuals holding city office. It is especially not a story about a bunch of pitiable “left behind” people who have fallen into bad luck and hard times in the manner of headlines that include phrases like “there’s nothing left,” and “decades of decline.” I’m looking at you, WXYZ.

There are two threads of monumental consequence emerging from our historical review of Highland Park’s water situation. The first is the familiar story of a local community, economically dependent on the manufacturing sector, whose financial capacities were decimated in a single blow due to the “invisible hand” of globalization and the mobility of corporate capital. This is also, in a nutshell, the story of Detroit, Flint, Lansing, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Baltimore and the entire State of Ohio.

But in Highland Park especially, and maybe in other places too, the story we tell ourselves that begins and ends with “thirty years ago they took the jobs away and with them went the tax base,” is far from a sufficient explanation. The more devastating thread bubbles up in patterns emerging about seventy-five articles into a survey of everything ever written on the topic. It is the story of a State, a former governor, a legislature and regional influencers, whose empathy for the communities experiencing said economic decimation fell and continues to fall unequally across familiar lines drawn in red ink on old maps.

In the coming months, each week the Highland Park People’s Voice will examine a different aspect of the Highland Park’s water crisis. Some of the topics planned for coverage include:

• the boil alerts and water shut-offs in the first decade of the 21st century,

• the unscalable nature and fixed costs of operating Highland Park’s legacy water plant equipment,

• the appointment, and subsequent undermining by the state, of Highland Park’s first emergency financial manager,

• the controversial sewer contract with Detroit Water and Sewer Department,

• the state mandated shut-down of Highland Park’s water plant,

• the original 2012 cost to fix the water plant vs. estimates of the cost today,

• how state legislation keeps poorer cities such as Highland Park dependent on state revenue sharing and the historically diminishing percentage of revenue that Michigan shares,

• the runoff agreements that have been ignored by the state and county-owned roads and lots in Highland Park,

• the bankruptcy of Detroit and the takeover of Detroit Water and Sewer Department by the three-county Great Lakes Water Authority,

• the court who has refused to hear Highland Park’s complaints about being stiffed for decades by the state of Michigan and Wayne County on water runoff reimbursement agreements for roads and properties they own,

• the superfluous costs of the city enduring ten years as a “temporary” municipal customer of DWSD and GLWA,

• the rapidly increasing value of Highland Park’s water rights in the context of a global trend toward the privatization of water.

Around Highland Park there is a lot of speculation about one nagging question. It is a question well worth asking. Who benefits from the heaping of aspersions upon Highland Park for its unusually difficult financial circumstances? Who wins after three decades of blame when the entire state of Michigan falls into agreement that Highland Park is unworthy of recognition as a separate and distinct self-governing entity? Who would finally, after all these years, invest in those last empty lots along the Woodward corridor? At the ‘nothing left of Highland Park’ estate sale, who would come, clutching pen and checkbook, to bid on Highland Park’s water rights?