DETROIT — Members of Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano’s administration say the newly proposed deficit elimination plan would rid the County of its accumulated $175 million debt by Sep. 30, 2015. 

The state and Wayne County Commission would have to approve the plan before it is fully implemented.  

“There are a lot of people involved in implementing this plan, so it is going to take a lot of education, a lot of understanding, a lot of rallying together to make sure that it happens,” said Mark Abbo, the County’s new chief financial officer. “We are in the process of implementing some aspects of it right now, but other aspects of it would require commission approval.”  

Abbo, Ficano, Wayne County Deputy Executive, Jeffrey Collins and Wayne  County Director of Economic Development, Raymond Byers all discussed plan in depth with The Arab American News during a media roundtable at the Guardian Building here Tuesday.  

The plan includes concessions from the county’s unions and reorganizing and recapitalizing county-owned wastewater treatment facilities. It would save the county $121 million. County employees have expressed concern about how the concessions would impact them. 

The County’s deficit exists in large part to the 2008 decline in housing values that struck and devastated communities across the country. 

Since 2008, property tax revenue in Wayne County has declined by nearly 30%, resulting in $106 million less in revenue this year alone for the general fund. The County has lost $353 million in potential property tax revenue since the housing crisis first struck. 

In 2013, the Michigan housing development authority listed 182 cities, villages and townships as eligible distressed areas, and six Michigan cities now have emergency managers.

 The county has made tough decisions to reduce the growing deficit over the years, including cutting employee salaries by 10%, reducing the work force by more than 1,300 positions, decreasing the number of at will employees by 40 percent, cutting health care costs per employee in half, and reducing operating expenses by 20 percent. Employee pensions also took a major hit. Wilson says currently the county’s pensions are in line with the governor’s best practices.  

When asked whether he would run for another term in office, Ficano said, “When the time is right, we’ll see what we’re going to do.”