Awash in red ink, Detroit pays out nearly $500k in bonuses

NBCNews.com ^ | 12/13/2012 | Martha C. White

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Detroit is dangling at the edge of insolvency, but the city reportedly has enough funds to pay workers nearly $500,000 in bonuses, the Detroit News reported Thursday.

The newspaper said the annual longevity bonuses, which went out last Friday to 1,148 workers, ranged from $150 to $750, depending on how long a worker had been employed.

The city, which has fewer than 10,000 employees, eliminated longevity bonuses for union employees three years ago, the Detroit News added. But a statement emailed to NBCNews by Mayor Dave Bing’s spokesman Anthony Neely said the majority of workers — 697 of them — who got the payments were union members. Neely did not immediately respond to a request for clarification or say which union or unions had members who received payments.

The City Council’s pro tempore president Gary Brown told the Detroit News, “We need to get to the bottom of whether it was intentional or an accident of some sort."

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Last Friday, Bing announced at a news conference that the city would lay off 400 to 500 workers over the next few months. The city is struggling to fix its troubled finances and stave off a possible Chapter 9 bankruptcy

If Detroit can't get its financial house in order, it could become the largest U.S. city -- at a population of 700,000 -- to file for bankruptcy protection. Earlier this year, two mid-sized California cities -- Stockton and San Bernardino -- filed for bankruptcy.

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Not really sure what to make of RTW day protests. They didn’t come back much either.

Expected a lot more Detroit teachers there, if not all of them. And lot more purple SEIU stuff too.

But mostly the knuckhead hardhat types.

Guess they all know it was over so now they are just throwing threats against Snyder’s family, 2014 elections etc.