With only ten days left before the NFL Draft takes place in Detroit, there is no sign whatsoever that Mayor Duggan (D?), the City Council or the Detroit Department of Transportation (D-DOT) feel even the slightest urgency in repairing visible damage to the Rosa Parks Transit Center.
Maybe the NFL Draft tourists who drive on Michigan Avenue won’t have time to notice the storm damage to a canopy that helps protect poor souls without access to a car from sun and rain as they wait for frequently tardy buses.
No one in the city’s government cares about those poor saps. Half of those people at the transit center just barely have money for bus fare, which is why they don’t just call an Uber or a Lyft.
There is a lot more damage inside the Rosa Parks Transit Center building itself. For example, one day, wanting a little bit of water but not wanting to get price gouged for a little bottle, I went into the building and headed to the water fountains. There are two of them, one for adults and one for kids. Now, what do you call those things that you push so that water comes out? Doesn’t matter, whatever it’s called, it was broken on both fountains.
Good thing I didn’t need to go to the restroom that time. Last time I was in there, I saw one stall divider about to fall off, the faucet stuck on hot water, no soap in the dispenser and a broken hand drier.
Those are examples of damage that you can’t see from Michigan Avenue. If the mayor and City Council don’t care about fixing what the NFL Draft tourists can see, there’s no hope that they will do anything to fix what the NFL Draft tourists won’t see.
The NFL Draft tourists won’t see how unreliable the D-DOT buses are. And if they stay at hotels in the northern suburbs, they won’t have any reason to go near the Rosa Parks Transit Center either. The transit center is located downtown, west of Woodward Avenue. Most of the NFL Draft events will take place east of Woodward Avenue.
I first noticed the damage pictured at left on July 29, 2023. I took pictures, and when I downloaded them to my computer and classified them into folders, I realized that I hadn’t taken any pictures of the Rosa Parks Transit Center since 2018.
This meant that I had no idea when the damage occurred. It could have been in 2018. It could have been in 2023. Surely I have driven past the Rosa Parks Transit Center dozens of times in between the 2018 and 2023 pictures. Could I have passed by and not noticed the damage? When did the damage occur?
Much more importantly, was anything being done to fix it? Well, emergency fasteners were put in place quite promptly, it seems. So theoretically, there’s no immediate danger. But how long can emergency fasteners keep things together?
I tried to get answers from the mayor and City Council. But seeing as I have way less than a million dollars in assets, Mayor Duggan doesn’t care in the slightest what I think about anything. I have actually talked to my representative in City Council face to face. But Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero (D?-District 6) is another politician who only cares about the wealthy. She has this way of listening to poor people that you really don’t know if she’s even paying attention.
In December of last year, I filed a FOIA request wanting to know what the mayor and City Council knew about the damage and what they were planning to do about it, if anything. The city’s FOIA department gave themselves a deadline of January 5, 2023. I didn’t notice the incorrect year until after January 5, 2024. They admitted their mistake but refused to give themselves an extended deadline or fulfill the request.
Finally, last week, I got the most insulting FOIA response I’ve ever gotten. The kind of FOIA response that ought to be reserved for dumbasses like Tom Fitton and Dale Gribble. Out of the dozens of pages of documents that could be relevant, the only thing that is supposedly fit for me to see is one brief letter from one of the councilwoman’s staffers to D-DOT in which the staffer asks for information. The cover letter for the FOIA response was way longer than that.
Or maybe there really was no communication between city government and D-DOT about the storm damage to the Rosa Parks Transit Center. That place is only for poor people, so Mayor Duggan doesn’t care about it and Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero doesn’t care about it either.
I’ve heard a lot of speculation from the mayor’s staff and the councilwoman’s staff. A couple of those staffers have said the visible damage to the Rosa Parks Transit Center will be fixed before the NFL Draft. It certainly sounded plausible last year. It’s starting to sound less plausible now with only seven full business days to go before the event.
Another bit of speculation is that the torn canopy will be fixed out of the city budget’s allocation for D-DOT “capital improvements.” But no one can confirm whether those “capital improvements” are things that any Detroit resident will notice or be affected by.
And what’s being done about those frequently tardy buses I mentioned earlier? Probably nothing either. Doesn’t affect rich people, so who cares.
Mayor Duggan and Councilwoman Santiago-Romero are technically Democrats. But they’re not “more and better Democrats.” Their failure to listen to their constituents on this or any other issues should be a bright red flag on their ambitions for higher elected office.