ANN ARBOR – More local governments say their finances have improved, but the number is far short of a majority of local officials surveyed, say results released Tuesday by the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
Survey results showed that 29 percent of the officials questioned said their communities were in better fiscal shape than previous years. However, another 29 percent said they were in worse financial shape.
Those numbers varied dramatically from the results from a 2010 survey when just 9 percent of those questioned said their communities were in good financial shape, but 61 percent said they were not in good shape.
The latest survey also shows that 48 percent of the local governments asked said their property tax revenues are down. Also, 30 percent expected their finances to be worse shape in another year.
However, the survey found that somewhat larger communities – those with populations of at least 30,000 – were doing better than smaller communities. Some 44 percent of those communities said they were in better fiscal shape. In 2012, the number was 36 percent.
The results seem almost ironic because a number of the state’s largest communities, beginning with Detroit, are under emergency management. Also, when the national recession began in 2008 and 2009, larger communities were the first to really feel the financial pinch.
The survey was taken from April 8 to June 9, and had responses from more than 1,300 local officials in the state.
