The Detroit Bankruptcy
The City of Detroit’s bankruptcy was driven by a severe decline in revenues (and, importantly, not an increase in obligations to fund pensions). Depopulation and long-term unemployment caused Detroit’s property and income tax revenues to plummet. The state of Michigan exacerbated the problems by slashing revenue it shared with the city. The city’s overall expenses have declined over the last five years, although its financial expenses have increased. In addition, Wall Street sold risky financial instruments to the city, which now threaten the resolution of this crisis. To return Detroit to long-term fiscal health, the city must increase revenue and extract itself from the financial transactions that threaten to drain its budget even further.
The Shortfall
Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, asserts that the city is bankrupt because it has $18 billion in long-term debt. However, that figure is irrelevant to analysis of Detroit’s insolvency and bankruptcy filing, highly inflated and, in large part, simply inaccurate. In reality, the city needs to address its cash flow shortfall, which the emergency manager pegs at only $198 million, although that number too may be inflated because it is based on extraordinarily aggressive assumptions of the contributions the city needs to make to its pension funds.
Cash flow crisis.
In a corporate bankruptcy, the judge takes stock of a company’s total assets and liabilities because the company can be liquidated and all its assets sold to pay down its debts. However, municipal bankruptcies are inherently different because they do not contemplate the liquidation of a city. Municipal bankruptcies are about cash flow—a city’s ability to match revenue against expenses so that it can pay its bills. Under Chapter 9 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, a municipality is eligible to file bankruptcy when it is unable to pay its debts as they come due.
This means that Detroit is bankrupt not because of its outstanding debt, but because it is no longer bringing in enough revenue to cover its immediate expenses. According to the city’s bankruptcy filing, the emergency manager projects a $198 million annual cash flow shortfall for fiscal year (FY) 2014 (though, as explained below, the portion of this amount that is related to pension fund contributions is an estimate that requires deeper analysis). To get out of bankruptcy, the city needs to address this annual shortfall—whether it is $198 million or a smaller number—not its total outstanding long-term debt.
Total outstanding debt.
Not only is the $18 billion outstanding debt figure irrelevant to Detroit’s bankruptcy, it is also misleading and inflated. There are several reasons, including the following examples:
- The emergency manager includes $5.8 billion of the Water and Sewerage Department’s debt as a liability of the city, even though the Water and Sewerage Department serves more than 3 million people all across southeastern Michigan, an area far larger than just the city of Detroit, which has just 714,000 residents. This debt is not a liability of the city’s general fund; and, even if it were, only a fraction of it would allocable to the city.
- The emergency manager’s assertion that the city’s pension funds have a $3.5 billion shortfall is an estimate, very different from the certain liability of a financial debt, based on calculations that use extreme assumptions that depart from most cities’ and states’ general practice.
To pinpoint the causes of Detroit’s bankruptcy, it is necessary to identify the reasons for the city’s cash flow shortfall, which are best understood through an analysis of the city’s revenue and expenses.
Revenue
Detroit has been in a state of decline for several decades. The city’s population has fallen from a high mark of nearly 2 million residents in 1950 to just 714,000 in 2010. This long-term decline has also taken a toll on the city’s revenue base, causing both property and income tax revenues to shrink as homeowners and jobs have left the city. Altogether, Detroit’s revenues have decreased by more than 20 percent since FY 2008, declining by $257.7 million.
Tax revenue.
Because of the Great Recession, this gradual decline in revenue became a massive leak. Detroit was hit particularly hard by both the foreclosure and unemployment crises. The number of employed Detroit residents fell by 53 percent from 2000 through 2012, but half of that decline occurred in a single year, 2008, as the recession took hold.
During the recession, property values declined substantially, eating into the city’s property tax base. The recession has cut deeply into key property and income tax revenue and fee revenue from utilities owned and operated by the city.
State revenue sharing.
The state of Michigan has exacerbated Detroit’s revenue crisis by slashing $67 million in state revenue sharing with the city. About $24 million dollars of these cuts were due to revenues shared pursuant to the Michigan State Constitution, allocated among cities and towns based on population. Detroit’s allocation was reduced because of population loss in the 2010 census. However, the remaining $42.8 million (64 percent of the total state cuts) were due to statutory revenue sharing and were at the discretion of the state Legislature. By cutting revenue sharing with the city, the state effectively reduced its own budget challenges on the backs of the taxpayers of Detroit (and other cities). These cuts account for nearly a third of the city’s revenue losses between FY 2011 and FY 2013, coming on the heels of the revenue losses from the Great Recession and tipping the city into the cash flow crisis that it is now experiencing. Furthermore, the Legislature placed strict limits on the city’s ability to raise revenue itself to offset these losses.
Corporate subsidies.
The city has provided significant tax subsidies to a large number of enterprises as incentives to engage in development projects in downtown Detroit. In some years, the city handed out as much as $20 million to private interests. To the extent that the development would have occurred without these tax subsidies, or with less subsidies, the program was a burden on city revenues at a time when it was particularly damaging. In any event, the subsidies that have not yet been received should be treated as obligations of the city, in the same category as debt service and funding of future employee benefits, subject to readjustment to help resolve the cash flow crisis to the extent revenue is not increased to cover the demands on cash.
Expenses
Contrary to widely held belief, Detroit does not have a spending problem. Since the onset of the Great Recession, the city’s total expenses have actually decreased by $356.3 million, driven by a 38 percent reduction ($419.1 million in absolute terms) in operating expenses, although its financial expenses have gone up.
Operating expenses.
Between FY 2008 and FY 2013, the city drastically cut operating expenses by $419.1 million. This was accomplished in large part by laying off more than 2,350 workers, cutting worker pay, and reducing future healthcare and future benefit accruals for workers. The city reduced salary expenses by 30 percent between FY 2008 and FY 2013. Total operating expenses have been reduced by nearly 38 percent during that same time.
Legacy expenses.
The city’s “legacy expenses” increased by $62.8 million between FY 2008 and FY 2013. These legacy expenses include the city’s debt service and financial expenses as well estimates of its future liability for healthcare and pension benefits it pays to retirees. A close look at the city’s legacy expenses reveals that this $62.8 million increase was driven heavily by the city’s complex financial deals, not retiree benefits.
- The city’s financial expenses increased by $38.5 million between FY 2008 and FY 2013, accounting for more than 60 percent of the total increase in legacy expenses.
- The city’s pension contribution expenses remained relatively flat, rising only $2 million during this time. The city’s contribution might have been larger if it had had more money, but increases in the actual contributions it did make did not contribute materially to the cash flow crisis.
- The city’s healthcare contribution expenses increased by $24.3 million. This constitutes an increase of 3.25 percent, per year, which is less than the nationwide annual increase in healthcare costs of 4 percent.
The city’s pension contributions in particular did not play a role in pushing it into bankruptcy because they did not contribute materially to the increase in the city’s legacy expenses that added to the cash flow shortfall. While the city’s healthcare contributions did increase, this was largely because of rising healthcare costs nationally, not because the city’s benefits were too generous. In fact, a comparative analysis of Detroit’s retiree benefits shows that its pension and healthcare benefits are in line with those of other comparable cities.
Financial deals.
Detroit’s financial expenses have increased significantly, and that is a direct result of the complex financial deals Wall Street banks urged on the city over the last several years, even though its precarious cash flow position meant these deals posed a great threat to the city. The biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit’s legacy expenses is a series of complex deals it entered into in 2005 and 2006 to assume $1.6 billion in debt. Instead of issuing plain vanilla general obligation bonds, the city financed the debt using certificates of participation (COPs), which is a financial structure that municipalities often use to get around debt restrictions. Eight hundred million dollars of these COPs carried a variable interest rate, which the city synthetically converted to a fixed rate using interest rate swaps.
These swaps carried hidden risks, and these risks increased after the Federal Reserve drove down interest rates to near zero in response to the financial crisis. The deals included provisions that would allow the banks to terminate the swaps under specified conditions and collect termination payments, which would entitle the banks to immediate payment of all projected future value of the swaps to the bank counterparties. Such conditions included a credit rating downgrade of the city to a level below “investment grade,” appointment of an emergency manager to run the city and failure of the city to make timely payments. Projected future value balloons in low, short-term rate conditions. This is because the difference between the fixed swap payments made by the city and the floating swap payments projected to be paid by the banks increases. Because all of these events have occurred, the banks are now demanding upwards of $250-350 million in swap termination payments.
These swap deals were particularly ill-suited for a city like Detroit, which had been hovering on the edge of a credit rating downgrade for years. Because the risk of a credit downgrade below “investment grade” was so great, the likelihood of a termination was imprudently high. The banks and insurance companies were in a far better position to understand the magnitude of these risks and they had at least an ethical duty to forbear from providing the swaps under such precarious circumstances. The law recognizes special duties that sophisticated financial institutions owe to special entities like cities in providing complex financial products. A strong case can be made that the banks that sold these swaps may have breached their ethical, and possibly legal, obligations to the city in executing these deals.
Conclusion
Detroit’s bankruptcy is, at its core, a cash flow problem caused by its inability to bring in enough revenue to pay its bills. While emergency manager Kevyn Orr has focused on cutting retiree benefits and reducing the city’s long-term liabilities to address the crisis, an analysis of the city’s finances reveals that his efforts are inappropriate and, in important ways, not rooted in fact. Detroit’s bankruptcy was primarily caused by a severe decline in revenue and exacerbated by complicated Wall Street deals that put its ability to pay its expenses at greater risk. To address the city’s cash flow shortfall and get it out of bankruptcy, the emergency manager should focus on increasing revenue and extricating the city from these toxic financial deals. Here are some recommendations for doing that:
- The emergency manager, ideally in collaboration with the state, needs to increase revenue by $198 million annually to bridge Detroit’s budget gap until structural programs can be put in place and the city can benefit from increased general economic improvement. This includes enlisting state involvement on an emergency basis and restoring discretionary state revenue sharing to pre-crisis levels. The shortfall amount can be reduced as FY 2014 proceeds by factors such as improved collection of unpaid taxes (which has yielded modest results to date).
- The emergency manager should drop his proposal to move city workers to a defined contribution pension plan and abrogate vested pension benefits. The city’s pension fund contributions did not cause the crisis. Reducing benefits runs counter to the long-term goal of structurally improving city services. Moreover, converting to a defined contribution plan at just the moment when new active employees will be added as services are improved (a goal of the emergency manager) would adversely affect the financial dynamics of the pension fund for existing retirees and other beneficiaries who have already vested under the defined benefit system. Over time, the new active employees will rebalance a fund that is currently top-heavy with retirees and will improve the long-term investment horizon of the plan, to the benefit of city cash flow.
- The emergency manager should drop any plans to privatize or otherwise monetize the Water and Sewerage Department, since the asserted benefits of such a plan are not likely to be realized and, even if they were, would have no net effect on the current cash flow crisis. The sale price of the system or components represents an investment by a buyer that must be repaid by system revenues, the same as bonds issued against those revenues. If the sale price is applied to retire existing bonds, the effects balance out. If they are not used to retire bonds, it is just like issuing new debt, which presumably the system could do without selling off parts of itself. The plan calls for an annual payment to the city, but this payment is from user fee revenues net of operational expenses and debt service (and return on equity investment if true privatization is used), a financial structure that is parallel to the current system.
- The emergency manager’s plan to pay the swap termination fees outside of the bankruptcy process should be abandoned. The bank counterparties should be made to bear the consequences of the original swap transaction, and they should be pushed to forego their projected profit (the measure of the termination payment), given the large profits they have already earned as a result of the unusually low interest rates that resulted from the financial crash. The emergency manager should also press for prorated rebates on the premiums for insurance on the swaps. And, if necessary, the state should be enlisted to guarantee the city’s swaps to avoid payment of termination fees. The termination fees will become smaller as interest rates rise over time, which they are likely to do.
- The emergency manager should negotiate directly with the holders of the pension financing certificates of participation, apart from other unsecured creditors. The circumstances of the COPs issue are unique. Unless these circumstances are shown to have benign explanations that are not currently available generally to the public, the leverage that the emergency manager has over this negotiation is high.
- The emergency manager should reclaim tax subsidies and other expenditures to incentivize investment in the downtown area. These tax subsidies should be treated similarly to the city’s other financial obligations. The residents of Detroit have already suffered as a result of the crisis, as have the public employees. The recipients of tax expenditures should share in the sacrifice as well.
Once Detroit gets through this immediate crisis, the city’s elected officials, hopefully working collaboratively with the state Legislature and the governor, can turn their attention to post-crisis, structural programs that would grow the city’s tax base and allow it to return to prosperity over time.