To serve Hamtramck, remain hyper-local

We say this as a matter of caution.
The mayor and city council struck out twice with respect to who they supported in the Democratic Primary Election for who will go on to serve in Congress.
They supported candidates who didn’t even come close in the Primary race for Congress, in our district, for U.S. representative and senator.
We understand that political passions can run deep.
But, what is the cost of those partisan passions when you serve in an elected office in a city that desperately needs all the federal funding it can get?
Do our mayor and councilmembers think they are players on the world stage?
In these highly charged political times, how far out on a limb do we go?
We ask this because their support for a challenger to our current congressman, Shri Thanedar, has already cost the city millions in an expected federal grant that Thanedar then redirected away from Hamtramck, once he caught wind of their endorsements.

The issue was that Thanedar has supported Israeli funding in Congress.
Mayor Amer Ghalib said losing out on that grant money was “OK.”
OK? Really?
It doesn’t seem OK to us, because that money was going to help continue repaving alleys.
Mayor Ghalib has said, in his Facebook page, that withholding votes can act as a form of “punishment.”
But who, exactly, got punished in this instance?
So far, those supposedly punitive tactics have worked against Hamtramck’s residents.
Perhaps the mayor and councilmember have a few extra million dollars they could donate to the city, to make up for the loss of those millions of dollars in that federal grant that Thanedar steered to somewhere else in his district?
The mayor and council need to become hyper-local and hyper-focused on all things Hamtramck.
Posted Aug. 16, 2024