It’s a pretty good sign you’re not qualified to be a municipal treasurer — you know, the job that requires collecting money owed to the city — when one of the debts you’ve failed to collect is the 90 grand YOU owe the city.
Still, it took a gadfly and a Wayne County circuit judge to finally end the disgraceful tenure of Highland Park Treasurer Janice Taylor-Bibbs after nearly 25 years in office.
I can’t speak to the first 13 years of Taylor-Bibbs’ tenure as treasurer in the perennially struggling enclave located about a mile north of Boston-Edison within Detroit’s borders. Given Highland Park’s long-standing failure to pay more than $20 million in water bills it owed to Detroit and, later, the Great Lakes Water Authority, I think it’s safe to say she was not able to meet all of the challenges her job presented. Then there was her failure to either detect or stop her former classmate, Arthur Blackwell II, from cheating the city out of hundreds of thousands of dollars while serving as emergency manager nearly 20 years ago. As treasurer, Taylor-Bibbs may have even signed some of those checks.