Detroit voters will elect two at-large city council candidates in 2025. Incumbents Coleman Young II and Mary Waters are on the ballot. So are former council member Janeé Ayers and Detroit Fire Department Community Relations Chief James Harris.

Why she’s running

Ayers joined the council in 2015. She was appointed to replace Saunteel Jenkins, who vacated her seat to become the CEO of The Heat and Warmth Fund. Ayers won a special election in 2016 and secured a full four-year term in the 2017 general election. She ran for re-election in 2021 but lost.

At the time, the federal government was investigating corruption in city government. FBI agents searched her home for evidence but found none. The Justice Department closed the case in 2025 without charging her.

Ayers says if not for that ordeal, voters would have re-elected her.

“It was horrible, but I’ve come through it,” she says.

Ayers says she couldn’t talk about the investigation until now but welcomes voters’ questions about it. She also says it helped her understand many of the problems Detroit faces.

“I’ve lived it in a way that makes me so much more keen on the issues that people are dealing with,” she says.

Support local police

One of those issues is crime and how to fight it.

Detroit has seen a steady drop in the number of homicides and other violent crimes in recent years. Despite that, President Donald Trump has insisted crime is out of control in Detroit and other U.S. cities.

Vice President JD Vance repeated those claims while visiting Howell, Michigan, and said Trump would send the National Guard to Detroit if Governor Gretchen Whitmer requests it.

Ayers doubts she would.

“She and I know each other well,” Ayers says. “If she did, she’d have some serious questions to answer.”

Ayers says the federal government doesn’t need to police the streets of Detroit. But she does see a problem on the horizon—replacing Detroit Police officers who are retiring.

“We’ll be losing a lot of the institutional knowledge in those folks that have been on the job,” she says.

Ayers chaired the Public Health and Safety committee throughout her years on the council. She says the city needs to encourage young people to join the Detroit Police Department as older officers leave.

“We definitely need to strengthen that pipeline for Detroiters to start taking those positions,” she says. “So that we just have people that are from our community policing our community.”

On housing and jobs

Besides public safety, Ayers says she’s concerned about affordable housing in Detroit. One reason why it hasn’t been affordable for many, she says, is the formula the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development uses to calculate the city’s median income.

“For us, it is Detroit, Warren, and Livonia, and they take the median income from those three cities,” she says. “We can’t get a median income that makes sense for Detroiters as long as we’re compared to those two cities.”

Ayers says more Detroiters could afford to buy a home if they had better jobs and better access to transportation. She would also like to pick up where she left off with a task force to help people returning to the city after being incarcerated.

Don’t call it a comeback

While Ayers hasn’t been on the council for almost four years, she has been busy running her own consulting company and returning to work for the city’s recreation department where she started.

“I’ve been right here doing all the things I would have done with or without the title,” she says.

More election coverage

In about a month Detroiters vote to re-shape the city’s government.

After a dozen years, a new mayor will lead the Motor City.

But Detroit City Council member Scott Benson hopes one thing stays the same. The incumbent is running for reelection to represent northeast Detroit.

Benson says Council District 3 faces a flood of problems, including dealing with actual and sometimes massive flooding.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Scott Benson: We still have to help with public safety, we still need to help with jobs. We still need to help grow our infrastructure. We need to reboot our infrastructure, in many ways. Our infrastructure is hundreds of years old in certain places within the city of Detroit. And you don’t see it, so it’s easy not to think about it. When we look at stormwater infrastructure, advocating for new pipes, advocating for green stormwater to make us a more resilient space, that takes work. And it doesn’t happen without the heavy lifting and being very strategic and prescriptive around how we rebuild our city from underneath the ground as well. We can get the development from private investment. But the infrastructure, that’s public investment. We have to work with the state, the county and the federal government, which has its ebbs and flows, as we all know. We have to work with all those partners to make sure that we continue to invest in our infrastructure.

Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: When you are trying to pay for that work, there’s been a lot of talk about the so-called “financial cliff” the city’s facing because federal and other sources of funding are running out. In your view, what should the city do to get more revenue in?

SB: I want to go back to that statement about the financial cliff. I am a fiscal hawk on the Detroit City Council. We have been very strategic in how we utilize that federal funding. It was used as icing and not the cake. We have lived beneath our means in the city of Detroit. I want to continue to ensure we do that we save more than we spend. And we just saw where the mayor made the announcement that we got about a $60 million surplus that we’re going to reprogram this year. So we are in a position where we’re not worried about the loss of federal money.

To get more money in, we’re going to have to continue what we’ve done. Since I’ve been on the Detroit City Council there’s been over a 50% increase in the General Fund. We need to continue that growth. Which means we need more investment, we need to continue population growth. And that’s how we grow our General Fund.

QK: Some of the Detroit mayoral candidates have talked about possibly raising taxes on certain things in the downtown or other areas. What do you think of those proposals?

SB: The one that I’m thinking of is a tax on events. I’m not opposed to that. I believe the thought is that we would use that revenue to offset other tax obligations. It would be an additional opportunity to reduce property taxes. We have to figure out a way to reduce the cost to live in the city of Detroit when it comes to operating a home. We have to incentivize people to move back into the city of Detroit. And our property taxes and our car insurance, that’s a disincentive. We need to figure that part out. But having a tax of that nature, it hits on the downtown-specific events and it’s something that’s been done successfully around the country. So I am more than happy to take a look at how we can implement something like that in the city of Detroit.

If we want to grow our city, we have to do it by bringing in everybody.

QK: When I talk to some people around the city, they still bring up the specter of crime. They fear sometimes being in their own neighborhoods, including over in your district, which I go through every single day. In your view, what can be done about that? I know you favor the ShotSpotter system, which is supposed to alert police when it detects gunfire. And there’s lots of talk about community policing. But if you do something like add more personnel to the police department, that would take extra money. So what do you see as the best ways to address crime?

SB: ShotSpotter was something that I championed back in 2015, before it was cool. CVI, community violence intervention, I’ve also championed that in the third district. and we’ve seen results. So I continue to champion those items. We’ve given a pay raise to our police department so that we can keep and attract additional police officers. But we’re going to have to continue to leverage those items because we are not a wealthy district. We don’t have any of the traditional sexy neighborhoods. But we see a huge brunt of the crime, which means that my bosses, the residents, are often victims of crime. And when you tell other people, “Hey, come to the city. We’ve got all these assets, the quality of life that you’re looking for.” People say crime, either real or perceived, is an issue. If we want to grow our city, we have to do it by bringing in everybody. Income diversity is something that we need here in the city of Detroit.

QK: You’d been caught up in some controversy a while back as part of a federal corruption investigation into several public officials in the city over bribery allegations. They charged former Detroit City Council Member Andre Spivey with that. But they closed other cases at the beginning of this year with no charges filed against anyone else, including yourself. Do you feel exonerated after all that? Or are there any lingering concerns that somehow you could have been tarnished to where opponents can try to throw something at you about it?

SB: Any time that the federal government comes to your house unannounced, that’s a problem. But the grand jury did not indict anyone in my office, in my colleague’s office, none of us. The federal government even provided a letter indicating they were dropping the investigation, which it rarely, rarely does. There’s always going to be that. “Oh, your name was spoken with those words.” But you know what? They took a very deep dive into me, my personal finances. And we came up clean. My team came up clean, my colleague’s team came up clean. So I do feel exonerated.

QK: One thing I try to always ask anybody that’s running for office is why people should vote for them. So what would you tell voters? Why should they reelect you to Council?

SB: Number one, I have added value to my district when it comes to jobs. And I am all about jobs. My three priorities are jobs, jobs and more jobs. And we are not a typical area where people think about investment. Because we are overwhelmingly low-income in the third district, it does not mean that we are low-quality. I fought for the “Dining with Confidence” ordinance when I saw there were a number of major restaurant chains that thought they could serve residents on the northeast side of Detroit poisoned food, improper food. I fought very hard and lost once but won the second time to get an ordinance that holds restaurants accountable. They have to publicize their scores when it comes to their food compliance and food safety. It’s not just about being treated well in the downtown area. We pay taxes on the northeast side of Detroit as well.

More election coverage

In this episode of The Detroit Evening Report, we cover the Detroit Police Department as they increase enforcement of the city’s curfew policy. Plus, Canadian wildfire smoke is headed this way.

Subscribe to the Detroit Evening Report on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curfew enforcement

The Detroit Police Department has some new tools to increase enforcement of its curfew policies. City Council approved a bill along those lines on Tuesday, July 29. Parents of violators will see fines rise from $75 to $250 for the first offense. A second offense will result in a fine of $500. That’s up from $100.

Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison says the goal is to prevent crime and keep kids safe.

“We’ve had too many instances of young people being out past curfew and have been arrested with a firearm, have been shot, have done other mischievous type things,” Bettison said. “Just this past weekend, I had a 13 year old that we arrested after curfew, set multiple collision shops on fire. That’s totally not acceptable. 13.”

Parents will no longer face jail time for curfew violations. Fines may be waived if they take a parental responsibility course.

Detroit’s curfew policy requires kids 15 and under to be off the streets between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless they’re with a parent. 16 and 17 year olds have an 11 p.m. curfew.

Air quality alert

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy has issued an air quality alert has been issued for all of Michigan for Wednesday, July 30 and Thursday, July 31. That includes the city of Detroit.

Canadian wildfire smoke is traveling south through Michigan today. That will bring fine particulate matter into the area. The result will be air quality that is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups. Some areas could increase to the “unhealthy” range.

People with asthma, heart disease and other health conditions should limit their time outside. Those residents should also keep their windows closed. Others should avoid strenuous activities outside until the air quality alert has lifted.

50 years since Jimmy Hoffa disappeared

Today is the 50th anniversary of the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. The former head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters vanished some time after arriving at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township on July 30, 1975. His body has never been found. There are scores of rumors and theories about what happened to him, but none have been proven. Hoffa served as president of the Teamsters union from 1957 until 1971.

Lions to play in Hall of Fame game

The Detroit Lions are getting ready for their first pre-season game of the year. The Lions will play in the nationally-televised Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio tomorrow evening. They play the Los Angeles Chargers.

The Lions have high hopes for the 2025 season. The team won 15 games and lost just two during the regular season last year. Detroit lost the NFC Divisional playoff game to the Washington Commanders to end their season.

The Hall of Fame Game will be played on Thursday, July 31 at 8 p.m. on NBC and Peacock.

Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.