Detroit Mayor-elect Mary Sheffield is shaping her administration’s personnel and policy priorities.
A group of 18 committees will advise Sheffield about what issues to tackle first.
She calls it the most inclusive mayoral transition in Detroit’s history.
Attorney Butch Hollowell is leading Sheffield’s transition team, as he’s done for many other officials.
Hollowell says he finds this change in city leadership unique in a variety of ways.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.
Butch Hollowell: We’re off to a flying start. I think the whole team and the whole city is just energized behind the first woman mayor in the city of Detroit. She came in with 77% of the vote. That in and of itself tells you that there’s a mandate from our community for what Mary Sheffield stands for. And that’s making sure that we have a city where everyone feels that they’re included as we deliver core city services, improve the quality of life and address these issues at the kitchen table level. Mayor-elect Sheffield has asked me to put together a transition team that’s smooth in terms of the handoff from the Duggan administration to the Sheffield administration. And that it is the most community-driven transition in Detroit’s history.
Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: What is your role specifically in the transition? Do you recommend certain people to lead on policy or do you say there’s certain positions on the mayor-elect’s staff that have to be filled right now? How do those nuts-and-bolts work?
BH: It’s a little premature to talk about that. Right now what we’ve done is focus on 18 different policy areas such as infrastructure and transportation and housing and education, the meat-and-potatoes issues that affect Detroiters on a day-to-day basis. Once we get down the line with those discussions, we’ll also begin to think of what should the administration look like and what skill sets would be necessary to carry out those policy initiatives. That kind of tells you the kind of person needed to head this agency or that agency.
It’s interesting, the cross-section of amazing Detroiters that have agreed to participate in this. You’ve got the city’s premier grassroots agency for Latino issues working with the chief operating officer of Henry Ford Health. You’ve got the individual who heads the neighborhood community violence initiative on the grassroots level working with the chair of Huntington Bank. We have the East Side Community Development head working with the vice chair of the Detroit Pistons. We’ve never had that kind of a team all in one room, all rowing in unison on the same boat and with the same oars. It was inspiring.
QK: Were you choosing specific individuals for this? Did people volunteer and say, “Boy, we want to help?” How hard was it to decide who was going to be on the transition team?
BH: First of all, nobody told me, “No,” not one person. We looked at people who have a certain skill set in an area, people that have known the mayor-elect, who know me. Then we have an internal team that we kind of bounced some names off of, and I reached out and made phone calls about whether or not they’d be willing to serve. Ultimately that decision was presented to Mayor-elect Sheffield. She’ll make the call for each one of those leadership positions.
Part of it was to explain what we wanted from them. We want concrete plans that can be achieved by this new administration in the 100 days, the first year and the first term in office. They’re going to be looking at what Mary Sheffield’s been saying on the campaign trail. What is her vision for this city in a particular area? And then we test that against national best practices. Is there something that they’re doing in Philadelphia that’s really great or something they’re doing in Los Angeles that particularly works? Maybe we’re the best at it. But maybe we can learn from others. Then the third part of it is to ask each one of those co-chairs to use their own background and experience to work with each other, work with their committees and come up with these concrete results.
We want concrete plans that can be achieved by this new administration in the 100 days, the first year and the first term in office.
QK: There’s always competing interests in various groups. Do you have a sense yet as to what the initial major priorities would be for the mayor-elect? As you say, she mentioned several on the campaign trail.
BH: There two parts to that question. The first part is some things overlap. For example, you can’t talk about transportation by itself, given that 35% of Detroiters go outside of the city for employment and come back in every day. Transportation has to be top of mind also as an economic development issue. And even though there’s a separate economic development team, there are educational initiatives that are important for that and other areas. So we talked about that internally in the work group saying, “You’re going to have some overlap. That’s okay. Just make sure that we have open lines of communication.”
The other part about it is yes, there are some priorities that the mayor-elect had talked about on the campaign trail, particularly just really lifting up the community violence initiative that’s gotten the buy-in, I think, from the entire city. That’s a real top priority for us. Education is a top priority as well. We’ve got to make sure that our kids are ready for the workforce and ready to be able to enter into civic life. Transportation is a critical area, as I said, so that people can get around efficiently. And, of course, the neighborhoods. We need to make sure that everybody feels and can recognize that everyone has a say, everyone has a stake. She wants everyone to know that’s being honored. Those are things that jumped out. There are certainly others but we’ll get through that as this process evolves.
You’re given such a short window in which to bring these plans to fruition and make sure they’re not just something that’s going to sit on a shelf and gather dust. These are action plans. We’re very committed to saying to each of these 18 groups, “Come up with, not a laundry list, but a list of two, three, four things that can be achievable, that Detroiters will see the results of in a focused period of time.” Again, in that first 100 days, first year, first term.
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