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124K, give or take, and dropping like a stone.
But they're all just moving to the nearby suburbs. About 450K (and climbing) in the whole county.
If you want some good reading, below is an article from last Wednesday's NYTimes about Flint. The volunteer they quote is actually a friend of mine. While there are a littany of problems here, there are also lots of positives too where it concerns people, culture and the like.
August 10, 2005
Butts in the Street? The Least of Their Problems
By MICHAEL WILSON
FLINT, Mich.
Asking smokers not to flick their cigarette butts into the street or
crush them on sidewalks would seem a perfectly reasonable step toward
beautifying a city, an extension of the broken-windows theory that
keeping up with the little things can keep a place clean and safe.
Except that here, not only are the windows broken, but the buildings
are abandoned and falling apart, and some parks are so overgrown that
people have been known to dump their dead dogs in the tall weeds.
Mayor Donald J. Williamson has promised to clean up the city, but he
is busy of late threatening to arrest the members of the City Council,
whom he has called "idiots" and "a cancer on society." The councilors,
in turn, are exploring ways to recall the mayor and have ignored him
when he has called emergency meetings.
So the three women from Keep Genesee County Beautiful were pretty much
on their own on a recent day on Saginaw Street, the main drag through
downtown, smiling at workers puffing outside an office building or at
ragged men lighting up outside the courthouse.
One volunteer, Erin L. Caudell, 27, carried a sack of "pocket
ashtrays," little plastic containers where smokers could dispose of
their cigarette butts instead of tossing them on the ground.
"Would you be willing to try this?" Ms. Caudell asked one man. "It's
yours for free."
Those four words alone are enough to get a person's attention in
Flint, where far more has been taken than given away in recent memory.
General Motors employed 80,000 people here a quarter-century ago and
is down to just 17,000. The city's unemployment rate, at 13.9 percent
in June, is almost three times that of the nation's.
The city has struggled to recover, and many see nowhere to go but up.
But infighting between the City Council and the mayor's office has
held up real progress, both sides have said, leaving hopes for
short-term change in the hands of groups like Keep Genesee County
Beautiful.
In 2002 the city, with a population of 125,000, had spiraled to $40
million in debt, prompting the state to put a financial manager in
charge, effectively replacing the mayor's office for over a year.
It was in that period that Mr. Williamson, 71, a multimillionaire
automobile dealer and previously unsuccessful candidate who liked to
say that he retired from the 10th grade to go to work, ran again for
mayor with an effective "Clean Up Flint Now - Not Later" campaign. Mr.
Williamson bought a street sweeper and sent it all over Flint, and
invited residents to dump their garbage into containers that he paid
to have hauled away.
Members of the Council endorsed him, with some even campaigning
alongside him. "We needed our parks mowed," said Joshua Freeman, 29, a
council member. "We needed our garbage picked up."
Mr. Williamson had to overcome a checkered past. In 1962 a federal
jury convicted him in a conspiracy to steal automobiles and sell them
over state lines. In 1963 he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court
to violating the National Bankruptcy Act and served three years and
four months before being paroled, The Flint Journal reported.
Mr. Williamson went on to found Sports Resorts International, a motor
sports organizer and maker of truck bed liners. His wife, Patsy Lou,
owns an auto dealership that has repeatedly been named the country's
largest in Buick sales.
Councilman Freeman said that he, like others, had looked past Mr.
Williamson's criminal background and taken comfort in his tough talk.
"I figured he had paid his debt to society," he said.
Mr. Williamson won the 2003 general election, taking office on July 1,
2004, when the state yielded oversight of Flint. Council members said
he turned on them almost immediately.
"I don't think he understands the process of government," Mr. Freeman,
an automobile salesman, said. "It's not a business. You can't
unilaterally make decisions with people's money."
Another councilor, Edward Taylor, a 46-year-old retired police
officer, was less generous. "The man is stone crazy," he said.
Mr. Williamson defended his record. "Why did I run for office? To help
the city of Flint," he said. "We've paved more streets. We've cleaned
this city up. We've done more stuff since I've been here." He said he
was accepting only a dollar a year as salary.
Council members say Mr. Williamson has publicly accused them of theft
and other crimes. At a meeting last month, after the Council voted to
finance a department at less than a third of what the mayor had
sought, Mr. Williamson lashed out.
"I look at this Council here," he said, "and I see three sets of Three
Stooges." He added that he was looking forward to this year's general
election in hopes that "these idiots will be gone."
Since then, he has called two emergency meetings of the Council, but
not enough members have shown up to begin the sessions. He has
threatened to have council members arrested the next time they ignore
a meeting.
The members have said that the mayor chooses meeting times when he
knows they cannot attend, to embarrass them.
"He calls people like me names like idiot, imbecile, and I respond
politically by saying, 'Well, I'm not approving his appointments,' "
said Mark Horrigan, a council member who is not seeking re-election.
The mayor's critics concede that he has paved roads and fixed up
parks, but they add that the pace of improvements seems to be slowing.
Mr. Freeman said he was walking by an overgrown park early one morning
this spring and saw two drunken men singing over a campfire. Mr.
Horrigan said that illegal dogfights were held in Flint, and that the
bodies of the animals killed were dumped in the parks.
Yet the area's economic picture may be slowly brightening, said Mark
J. Perry, a professor of economics at the University of
Michigan-Flint. Housing construction and sales are at all-time highs
in Genesee County, which includes Flint, and Bishop International
Airport has doubled its passenger totals in the last decade, to more
than one million a year, he said. "There is probably a lot more wealth
and prosperity going on than people would think," Mr. Perry said.
At the offices of Keep Genesee County Beautiful, the goal is at once
less spectacular and more ambitious than cleaning up dead dogs. Keep
America Beautiful, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving
communities, named Flint as a test area for a cleanup of cigarette
butts.
The turmoil within the city government actually helps projects like
this, said Karen West, 51, the group's executive director.
"It's encouraged ownership," Ms. West said. "People have finally
gotten past the stage of 'Woe is me' and 'I've had it up to here,' to,
'I'm tired of waiting for someone else to do something about it.' "
_________________
Kwame Kilpatrick texted to his mistress: "NEXT TIME, JUST TELL ME TO SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, and DO YOUR THING! I'm fucked up now!"
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