The Emergency Manager law from A to Z
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With the filing of a state lawsuit to challenge the state’s Emergency Manager law, formally known as the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act, we thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at how this controversial law came to be.
On Jan. 1 of this year, Rick Snyder was sworn in as governor along with the newly elected state legislature and the Republicans had full control of all three branches of the state government. Passing a law giving unprecedented new powers over cities and public school systems to state-appointed Emergency Managers was clearly a top priority. It was passed, in fact, as Public Act 4 — the 4th bill signed into law by Gov. Snyder.
Before the legislature had even voted on it, Gov. Snyder was already on the defensive about the enormous powers granted to Emergency Managers in the bill. He told one reporter that the expansive language of the bill may not reflect the way those powers are actually implemented and he promised “a good dialogue with organized labor about what’s going on and how we can do this constructively.”
That message seems not to have reached the state’s unions, who organized a massive