Detroit’s City Council is not working for the people of this city. That needs to change. Anita L. Martin is running to be part of that change. She gave me an interview last week, which I’ll quote and paraphrase here.
Some members of Detroit City Council are coming up for re-election. The council is a 9-member board in which seven members are elected by district and two are elected “at large.”City Council by district is a relatively new idea.
Supposedly it makes the council more responsive to constituents. It makes sense on paper. Detroit is a city of almost 139 square miles and more than half a million people. If a City Council district is one seventh of that in area and population, it is theoretically much easier for a district councilmember to be responsive to all of the district’s residents.
I don’t remember if that’s how it was sold. But it sure as hell is not how it’s working out. For example, in Martin’s neighborhood in the northern parts of District 6, many residents have never met their representative on the City Council.
Supposedly, Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero represents District 6. One time, District 6 Manager Eva Torres invited Martin to a charter meeting. Martin thought Torres was the councilwoman (the district managers are appointed by the mayor, whereas the council members are elected by the people).
The current actual councilmember for District 6 seems completely uninterested in Martin’s neighborhood. “Is it a race thing?” Martin wonders. Just that Martin is even asking that question indicates a major failure on Santiago-Romero’s part to represent all of the district’s residents.
While the city’s downtown, Midtown and a few other neighborhoods are flourishing, most neighborhoods, like the one Martin lives in, are languishing without “essential businesses” like supermarkets and pharmacies. “We have a lot of seniors, and the closest pharmacy is in Dearborn.”
Martin is learning about the unnecessary obstacles that the city places in front of existing businesses and which discourage other businesses from coming into the city. Some of her neighbors have to go out of the city, to the suburbs, to get many necessities of life. Martin would prefer that they be able to keep their business in the city.
A bus about to depart from the Rosa Parks Transit Center in downtown Detroit.
The issue of public transportation came up during our conversation in regard to residents who need to go far from the neighborhood to buy things they need. Martin has some first hand experience riding the bus. She got a feel for which bus routes were somewhat reliable, but since getting a car she hardly ever rides the bus anymore. It just wasn’t a practical option for when you need to get to a specific part of the city at a specific time, such as a job site.
When Mayor Duggan first came into office, he promised major changes to the city’s buses. There were changes. The city got some new, shiny buses with a more reliable mechanism for getting handicapped passengers aboard.
But the service remains inadequate, and many residents are still rightfully complaining about it. Martin will be listening to those residents and thinking about solutions to this long-standing problem.
I also asked Martin about car insurance. Although she’s satisfied with her own car insurance, she would never ignore the pain of those whose car insurance is, for whatever reason, not as good as hers.
True affordable housing is a major plank of Martin’s campaign. The definition of affordable housing has been gamed so that the prices are actually not affordable to those who most need housing.
“Mayor Duggan was very proud of himself at the ribbon cutting“ for some renovated units in Rosedale Park that were touted as affordable back in 2022, Martin recalls. It doesn’t look like reporters were all that interested in digging whether or not those units are actually affordable.
More recently, Duggan “celebrated” two “transformative” housing projects in Detroit’s Grandmont-Rosedale neighborhood, according to a press release from the city. In one of them, rent for a one-bedroom would be $838 a month, which might still be prohibitively expensive for too many in this city.
“I have a son who makes $4,000 a month,” Martin explained. “Someone making $48,000, it’s not just rent, but also groceries” that they have to spend money on. “What if they have a child on top of that?” Martin says that the mathematical formula for determining how much of a person’s monthly income should be for housing is unfair to Detroiters, and needs to be revised.
Martin has lived in Detroit her whole life. Her grandparents were the first blacks to live in the neighborhood back in the 1940s. Housing is very important for Detroiters to build generational wealth.
Martin intends to be a councilwoman for all of the district’s residents, including the ones vote for her, the ones who choose not to vote for her, and the ones who can’t vote for her, such as the undocumented immigrants living in this city.
Santiago-Romero has expressed great concern for Detroit’s undocumented immigrants, and Martin is willing to believe that that concern is genuine. Speaking only for myself, I don’t think Santiago-Romero’s concern is genuine, but rather opportunistic and convenient. If they get deported, they can’t confront Santiago-Romero for her failure and broken promises.
Martin understands that as a councilwoman, she would be one of nine members, and sometimes a majority of the others will disagree with her.
There have been a few times that Santiago-Romero has been on the right side of an issue, but it looks as if she made no effort to convince the other councilmembers to vote with her. In such a situation, Martin would not just give up. “They’re going to hear my voice,” Martin promises.
Running for elected office wasn’t something Martin was thinking about prior to Santiago-Romero coming into City Council seemingly out of nowhere. Martin says that Prophetess Shontel Michelle Jackson-Nyamah of Shontel Michelle Ministries and Great Faith Ministries International saw in Martin a potential for politics that Martin did not see in herself.
Seeing Santiago-Romero’s apathy, Martin was spurred to run for the council seat, which is up for election later this year. Martin filed the paperwork on November 7 of last year and begun to collect signatures to get on the primary ballot slated for August.
Martin will need at least 300 valid signatures, or at most 650 signatures (there are roughly 94,000 residents in the district). Having already had to strike a few signatures, she’s now aiming for a thousand signatures total, for a comfortable margin of error if some more signatures are invalidated.
“I’m learning at warp speed,” Martin said a few times during the interview. In addition to talking to a much larger sample of the district’s residents than Santiago-Romero ever did, Martin is also making a thorough study of other topics that are pertinent to being on the City Council.
That includes attending City Council meetings and committee meetings. Martin has made a lot of annotations on her copies of City Council meeting agendas. She’s not happy to see that so much money is leaving the city and the state, money that could go to Detroit businesses and help raise the standard of living.
One particularly galling example is a $10 million contract for Oracle Fusion going to Oracle Corporation, a company based in Texas. I’m also aware of Detroit paying a lot of money for Salesforce, which is not a direct competitor to Oracle Fusion but does suggest to me some potential spending redundancies.
But maybe there’s a legitimate reason for the $10 million contract for Oracle. Martin noticed some other contracts that are much harder to justify not being given to Detroit businesses, like a $6.6 million contract for moving services that could easily have been given to a Detroit moving company.
We also talked about the problem of Detroit residents who have already graduated from multiple trainings for software development yet are no closer to any job as software developers than they were before. Later this month, yet another group of Detroit residents will graduate from such a training and for all of them it will be at least the second such training they graduate from.
Santiago-Romero’s indifference to those blacks and Latinos with talent for software development is especially insulting because Santiago-Romero was the so-called “diversity coordinator” at Grand Circus, a training provider for software developers which rejected several black and Latino applicants based on their race during Santiago-Romero’s tenure at that company in 2017.
Of course Santiago-Romero has made excuses for her own participation in this grotesque injustice, but without publicly denouncing any of her former colleagues at Grand Circus. At the same time Santiago-Romero worked at Grand Circus, that school graduated some white male morons who went on to get relevant jobs merely weeks after graduating.
Meanwhile, the black software developers who were enrolled during Santiago-Romero’s tenure at Grand Circus have still not found relevant jobs and some have been completely discouraged out of the profession. But they might still be paying off the loans they took out to attend. Did any Detroiters attend Grand Circus with the $2 million grant from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation? Looks like the whole $2 million just vanished into thin air.
I’ve known Santiago-Romero since before 2017, but not all that well. Her job at Grand Circus was a surprise to me. Just as much of a surprise to me was when she started her campaign for City Council in 2021.
Supposedly, Santiago-Romero and I were friends. Now, you would think a friend of mine would have asked me to vote for her. But she didn’t. Because she didn’t actually need my vote or even care about if I voted for her or not. Her predecessor, Councilwoman Raquel Castañeda-López (D?, 2014 — 2021), decided Santiago-Romero would be the next councilmember for the district. “The baton was passed,” as Martin puts it.
“Maybe she should pass the baton to me,” Martin jokes. But that’s just a joke. She intends to do the actual work of listening to the voters and convincing them that she’s the best choice for District 6.
Martin has some opinions on the other current members of City Council. “Scott Benson can go,” Martin said of the District 3 councilman. Of Councilwoman Angela Whitfield-Calloway, who represents District 2, “I notice she goes the extra mile for the people.”
Martin is not too impressed with at-large Councilman Coleman Young II, son of Detroit’s first black mayor. She recommends Ramone “Action” Jackson for one of the two at-large seats, both of which have terms ending January 1, 2026. Mary Waters is the other at-large member, she had hoped to beat nominal Democrat Shri Thanedar for U. S. Congress but fell short.
I now disclose that I signed the petition for Anita L. Martin to get on the ballot. Presently, I’m inclined to vote for her. Maybe another candidate comes along whom I think is even better. But I’m definitely not voting for the incumbent.
Gabriela Santiago-Romero has had four years to listen, to ask questions and to understand the problems facing her constituents. But she just hasn’t wanted to.
It’s time for that to change. Anita L. Martin wants all of Detroit “thriving together.”
For more information, go to her campaign’s Facebook page.