Detroit is at a crossroads.
It’s a cliche that always feels true in this city, where each year can bring a new crisis, layered atop the problems we haven’t quite solved.
This year, Detroiters will elect a new mayor for the first time since 2013, when Mayor Mike Duggan won his first term in office. Re-elected in 2017 and 2021, Duggan is running for governor next year.
Duggan has a hold on the regional imagination in a way few politicians have.
You can hear it in the stump speeches of the frontrunners among the nine candidates vying to replace him ― each eager to claim that he or she is best suited to continue Duggan’s work, whether with business leaders whose confidence in Duggan’s public-private sensibility buoyed investment; elected officials in Lansing who believed the mayor could deliver on his promises; or the 20% of Detroit voters who participate in municipal elections, and with whom Duggan’s approval rating is off the charts ― 83% in a May survey conducted by the Glengariff Group, one of few public polls conducted in this election.
But voters in that poll were near-evenly divided on whether Detroit’s next mayor should continue Duggan’s policies, or lead the city in a new direction. It’s a striking counterpoint to those same Detroiters’ enthusiasm for the man himself.
During Duggan’s tenure, our city has made visible strides. Downtown and Midtown gleam. The Michigan Central Depot re-opened last summer. New investment has poured into parts of the city that once seemed destined for obsolescence. Property values have risen across the board.
Duggan has also done the tedious work of normalizing processes. Twenty years ago, Detroit’s mayor could not (or would not) tell his constituents how much cash the city had on hand. An annual audit intended to balance the city’s actual expenditures against its planned budget was routinely filed more than a year late. The city’s insolvency eventually led to a 2013 bankruptcy filing.
Now, emergency response times are closer to national averages. Cops have gotten raises. Garbage is collected routinely and without fuss. Parks and vacant lots are mowed. The audit is filed on deadline, and Detroit’s budget process is public and transparent. The city has a rainy day fund.
None of this should be exceptional. In Detroit, it’s remarkable.
Yet Midtown and downtown don’t gleam quite as bright when just a few blocks away, children walk to school past unsafe, dilapidated houses, or wait at broken curbs for unreliable city buses. The poverty rate here remains higher than the state or the nation; over a decade, the number of middle-class neighborhoods has dwindled, Detroit Future City research shows, and new, well-paying jobs are more likely to go to new residents than longtime Detroiters.
The work isn’t done. And it’s going to get harder.
Duggan took office with advantages his successor won’t have: A clean balance sheet, bought with concessions from retirees, courtesy of the bankruptcy; a White House keen on showering the city with grants and technical aid and an unexpected $826 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding; a 10-year hiatus from paying its share of retirees’ pensions.
Now, the COVID dollars are running out, and the federal government is blaring its intention to cut funding to essential programs inside and outside city government, from health care to community development.
This isn’t a year for grandiose campaign promises.
Detroit’s next mayor will be hard-pressed to hold on to what we have.
But Detroit’s next mayor has to give Detroiters hope.
The mayor we need
Detroit’s next mayor must be pragmatic, able to align the city’s resources with its most pressing needs. Detroit’s next mayor needs to see the big picture, encouraging business investment and growth at every level. Detroit’s next mayor needs her eyes fixed firmly on our neighborhoods.
Detroit’s next mayor has to be tough, because too many powerful people will view Duggan’s departure as an opportunity to push their interests, at the expense of ours.
And Detroit’s next mayor must have the community roots to re-engage Detroiters in a civic process too many have abandoned.
In the Aug. 6 primary ― when turnout is likely to fall far short of 20% ― voters will choose among nine candidates: Jonathan Barlow, James Craig, Fred Durhal, Joel Haashiim, Saunteel Jenkins, Solomon Kinloch, Todd Perkins, Mary Sheffield and Danetta Simpson. A write-in candidates, Rogelio Landin, has also thrown his hat in the ring. The top two vote-getters will advance to the Nov. 5 general election.
The field is stocked with qualified, accomplished professionals, but four stand out: Council President Mary Sheffield; The Heat and Warmth Fund CEO Saunteel Jenkins, herself a former council president; Triumph Church’s Rev. Solomon Kinloch; District 7 Councilman and former state lawmaker Fred Durhal III.
In hour-long endorsement interviews, each shared a deep understanding of Detroit’s challenges and opportunities, and voiced thoughtful, nuanced plans to sustain and expand the steps we’ve made toward solvency and functionality.
Jenkins has a deep command of the city’s challenges. Kinloch knows how to inspire. Durhal is a thoughtful policymaker.
But we believe MARY SHEFFIELD has the skills and vision to lead Detroit into the future.
She can deliver
Sheffield made history in 2013, at age 26 the youngest person ever elected to the Detroit City Council, and again in 2021, when she became the youngest person chosen to serve as council president.
We believe she’s poised to make history again, as the first woman elected to serve as Detroit’s mayor.
Sheffield comes from a family with a strong tradition of public service ― her grandfather, Horace Sheffield Jr., founded the Detroit Trade Union Labor Council (TULC) and the Detroit Association of Black Organizations (DABO). Her father, Horace Sheffield III, is a pastor and an activist.
Sheffield says she has the combination of street credibility and C-suite savvy required to move Detroit forward.
All of the candidates we interviewed emphasized that Detroit needs a mayor who understands what the community needs and how the city works, can connect residents with programming and resources and develop new programs to meet unaddressed needs.
Sheffield’s plans were the most clear and precise. And her performance as council president shows she has the ability to bring her ideas to fruition.
Sheffield is able to discuss the minutiae of city government with ease and depth. She has delivered substantive public policy. She prides herself on meeting her constituents live, identifying the places people naturally gather and getting out to those places to tell residents about city services and programs.
Her plans don’t rely on large sums of new revenue that may or may not materialize, but largely on connecting residents with existing programs and expanding successful offerings. She’s made no bones about asking our corporate community to do more, but can passionately argue why that’s in business’ best interest.
She’s is backed by a broad swath of business leaders and community groups, in which she finds no contradiction: “You can be pro-labor, and pro-business,” she said. “Business needs people, and people need business.”
Sheffield is the most enthusiastic among the candidates about sustaining the work of Community Violence Intervention groups. Using temporary federal stimulus money, those groups worked with vulnerable youth to address the root causes of violence, making strides toward a real public safety turnaround.
She knows exactly what she wants in a police department, saying she would keep Police Chief Todd Bettison in place and maintain a focus on community input and preventative policing.
Sheffield supports boosting technological support for police, but is appropriately averse to facial recognition technology in particular, because of its history of misidentification.
She wants to start more community hubs like the Durfee Innovation Center, which provides after school and extracurricular programming for kids, workforce development and nonprofit office space in an old school building.
Although she’s the candidate with the strongest visible support from the business community, she knows when to say no.
Sheffield was the only council member to vote against another $1.5 billion in development incentives for the District Detroit project last year, citing the Ilitch family’s Olympia Development’s history of broken promises and underperformance on community benefits agreements.
Over more than a decade in public office, Sheffield has grown into a leadership role on the council, and developed a reputation for effective representation of both business and neighborhood needs.
Sheffield was also the only candidate, when asked about the mayor’s role in supporting education, to offer up exactly what Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti says students needs from the city: Improving the public bus system and after-school programming support.
Each of the candidates are eager to support the school system, yet Sheffield’s approach most closely aligns with Vitti’s vision for city help: filling gaps without jamming too many cooks into the kitchen.
Sheffield is not without vulnerabilities.
The reparations task force she championed has been dogged by infighting and delays ― after a third deadline extension, the group has yet to deliver a report. It is now due in October.
Support from secretive political action committees has raised eyebrows, particularly after she was forced to admit last week that a recent campaign email falsely claimed she was not backed by any billionaires or corporate PACs.
Detroit billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Moroun family have indeed been sources of funding for Sheffield’s run.
In light of her willingness to stand up to the Ilitches, and her clear understanding of the need to leverage downtown investment into neighborhood benefits, having support from the biggest spenders in town may not be a bad thing.
But Detroit’s next mayor also needs to make a practice of transparency, especially when that candidate has distinguished herself from an, at times, complicated family legacy. Her father, Horace Sheffield III, has an outsized presence in Detroit activism.
But Sheffield emphasized that while her family has shaped her, she is her own person, pointing to high-profile issues her father has supported and she has opposed, like a bond sale to fund neighborhood demolitions, or those tax incentives for the Ilitches.
“I speak for myself and I lead for myself, and I make my own decisions,” she said. “No one has ever had any influence on what I do and the decisions I make besides the people that I represent, and the information that I receive from various departments within the City of Detroit. And it will always be that way.”
In 2013, Sheffield was a newcomer to city government, eager to learn.
The Sheffield of 2025 is confident, poised, authoritative ― mayoral.
Saunteel Jenkins
A former city council president with a background in social work and a decade of CEO experience, Saunteel Jenkins oozes level-headedness. She has a temperament that can turn the temperature down.
And Jenkins ― who stepped down in 2014 to become CEO of THAW ― wields perhaps the most uniquely complete understanding of the needs of Detroit neighborhood and families. She has ambitious yet reasoned and specific plans for supporting comprehensive strategy around social determinates to education and health.
But she’s struggled to break into the top three spots in polls, and doesn’t have broad business community support. Of course, in this race, business support yet to solidify behind one candidate.
Solomon Kinloch
Inspiration is Rev. Solomon Kinloch’s biggest strength in this mayoral race.
That’s a huge advantage when it comes to recruiting volunteers and backers, both as a candidate and as a mayor.
A charismatic pastor who grew a congregation of fewer than 50 to 35,000 across seven church campuses, Kinloch knows better than any other candidate how to rouse enthusiasm. Kinloch intends to continue pastoring his church, both as a candidate and as a mayor, a prospect that gives us pause.
He promises to bring 10 new grocery stores to Detroit, aiming specifically for locally owned shops rather than national chains. He promises to build 10,000 new units of affordable housing. And he wants to appoint a chief compliance officer for proactive prevention of corruption. But his plans lack specificity.
Fred Durhal
Fred Durhal III, a second-generation Detroit lawmaker, is unapologetic about supporting large-scale development in central business areas, but has also successfully championed business growth in his own District 7.
He has ambitious ideas, like expanding the Downtown Development Authority outward along Woodward, Michigan and Gratiot avenues, and even building light-rail transit along those corridors.
Durhal wants to gradually reduce property tax in the city by 19.5 mills, making up the revenue in part by charging real estate speculators for sitting on underdeveloped land.
He’s struggled to catch up in the polls to the leading candidates in this race, but luckily, he’s a dedicated Detroit advocate who’s sure to serve the city well in whatever role comes next. He’ll be missed as a councilman.
Todd Perkins
Candidate Todd Perkins has a wealth of experience in law, business and advocacy, and he’s clear-eyed about what may lie ahead, financially, for Detroit.
He has ideas around establishing neighborhood business leaders as “community quarterbacks” to drive growth, and says anti-poverty initiatives should be built into every economic development plan.
But he lacks the operational knowledge Detroit’s next mayor will require.
James Craig
Former Police Chief James Craig is one of very few Republicans who can viably run for office in Detroit. His tenure as chief coincided with post-bankruptcy reinvestment that included more pay and better technology for policing.
Craig oversaw the rollout of the city’s Greenlight surveillance camera program, and led the department through the George Floyd protests, which stayed relatively peaceful in Detroit even as riots erupted elsewhere. He’s been widely praised and criticized on both those topics.
He boasts a relationship with President Donald Trump that he says could yield the city some relief in a time of intense fear for federal funding that has kept many Detroit programs afloat. He also says that he would, and has, disagreed with the president on some topics, and told him so.
But outside of police expertise and White House connections, Craig has offered little in the way of policy plans while seeking a term of office that will be filled with fiscal and operational land mines.
He’s simply not qualified for the city’s top job.
Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.
Like what you’re reading? Please consider supporting local journalism and getting unlimited digital access with a Detroit Free Press subscription. We depend on readers like you.