Nearly 30 Michigan residents filed a lawsuit Wednesday that seeks to overturn a law that gave state-appointed "emergency managers" near carte blanche in cases of state takeover of indebted municipalities and school districts.The suit names Gov. Rick Snyder (R) as a defendant, and claims the law is unconstitutional because it suspends home rule, eliminates citizens' voting rights and violates the separation of powers. The suit also names State Treasurer Andy Dillon as a defendant.
The law in question, Public Act 4, passed in March and gave Snyder the power to appoint "emergency managers" in cities in financial disarray, revising an earlier law that allowed for the appointment of "emergency financial managers," a more circumscribed role. The suit claims the managers, endowed with fuller powers, have made local elected officials moot.
Several groups, including Detroit's Sugar Law Center and New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, are representing the plaintiffs in the suit.
"We haven’t seen this form of government put in place over a locality before," said John Philo of the Sugar Law Center. "It says you're not going to have local elected officials. They'll have one person with absolute authority. People across the country assume that if there's going to be a government, it's going to be an elected one."
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Source: Huffington
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