Dearborn Heights City Council Chair Mo Baydoun (left) addresses concerns to Mayor Bill Bazzi as City Councilmember Hassan Saab (right) listens during the April 9 council meeting.
By SUE SUCHYTA
Times-Herald Newspapers
HEIGHTS – City Council Chair Mo Baydoun confronted Mayor Bill Bazzi at the April 9 council meeting over his intention to sell city residential properties at auction to investors, not homeowners.
Baydoun was also furious over the mayor’s insinuation that his motives with respect to the issue were self-serving.
“This is an ethical war, mayor – an ethical war,” Baydoun said. “Please refrain from ever insinuating that we would ever do anything in that nature. It is wrong and you shouldn’t be acting that way.”
When Bazzi asked Baydoun for permission to speak, Baydoun said he would not allow him to if the mayor planned to say something derogatory.
When City Attorney Roger Farinha tried to interject while Baydoun was speaking to the mayor, the chair said that Farinha should be urging the mayor to respect the meeting rules of order.
While Farinha attempted to offer an explanation to defuse the mayor’s remarks, Baydoun insisted that the mayor’s comments were “extremely disrespectful” while pounding the gavel and calling for order.
Bazzi insisted that agenda item 7-A, a bid award for auction services for city-owned residential properties, which sparked the contention, was “completely transparent.”
Baydoun said he started the meeting with the hope that it would not become hostile. He then asked for the controversial agenda item 7-A to be tabled until he, the council chair pro tem, the mayor and the city attorney can have a “cordial conversation,” as well exchange emails, about the bid process the mayor is implementing.
Baydoun said that if the mayor had attended an earlier study session on the issue, a sit-down meeting between them would not be urgently needed.
The council chair said that he has repeatedly requested, for more than a year, that the mayor be more transparent with respect to bid processes.
Baydoun expressed concern that city-owned residential properties are being auctioned off to absentee landlords without making it possible for potential first-time homebuyers to bid on the city’s residential properties.
Councilmember Tom Wencel said he agreed that if a vendor auctions off city properties they should be making an effort to place them with buyers who intend to occupy them, not rent them out.
Baydoun reiterated that he didn’t want to see the city’s residential properties sold at auction to absentee landlords by an outside vendor.
He said it is an ethics board issue, and the residential properties should be offered only to first-time home buyers for the first 20 days, after which the properties may be opened up to investors.