Former city manager Joyce Wilson denies purposely delaying ballpark-related debt until after mayoral election

Joyce Wilson on Wednesday said she and the former city council did not purposely delay the issuance of the ballpark debt until after the Summer 2013 Mayoral election between then City Rep. Steve Ortega and Oscar Leeser, a claim made this week by the City Attorney, Leeser and several city representatives.

“Frankly it is pitiful some individuals are still trying to discredit people who are no longer with the City instead of focusing on the business at hand like executing new projects and moving the city forward,” Wilson wrote in an email Wednesday.

Her response comes a day after the city council veered into a discussion at their weekly meeting about the timing of the issuance of the debt. Leeser said the prior city management decided to delay the issuance of the debt until the election, a move that cost the city $22 million.

A lawsuit by ballpark opponents initially delayed the issuance of bonds until April 2013 when the Attorney General issued a favorable opinion for the city, according to both Firth and Wilson. But the two have different accounts of what happened after that.

‘”After that we were ready to go and there was a decision made by management after consulting with city council members to wait until after the election and that was a critical time frame when you waited until after the election,” said City Attorney Sylvia Firth.

Wilson said Council approved the conditions of the debt in May 2013, right after the election that forced a later runoff between Ortega and Leeser. “We may have been able to go right before but we are talking about a matter of a few weeks not an extensive amount of time. I conferred with the former mayor about placing the item on agenda because of the controversy about the project but that was the extent of it,” Wilson wrote in Wednesday’s email.

She said the City went to market to issue the bonds in June but the market then destablized because of the City of Detroit filing for bankruptcy. She also said the City lost its underwriter and had to set up new bond parameters, a process that took another 60 days, extending the issuance of the bonds until Fall 2013. “The fact that we sold bonds at a higher rate did adversely affect our original financial model.”

“The ballpark is a huge success and has generated at least the same if not more in equivalent private investment in downtown in the two seasons it has been open. Investment that otherwise would not have occurred,” Wilson added.