Fresh off of his national TV appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” this past Sunday, Flint’s Acting Mayor Michael Brown sat down with NBC25 to discuss what he called the need for financial intervention from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

”There are no longer any illusions about what we’re facing here.  And that is good news,” Brown said on Tuesday. On CNN, Brown said GM’s gradual pulling away of jobs have left the city in an economic slump dating back to the 80s. 

“With GM leaving, we’ve got 1,400 acres of brown field where 80,000 people at one time worked for General Motors.  Now, we’re down to about 7,500 jobs,” he said to anchor John King. 

Brown is the latest Michigan mayor to go national.  Lansing Mayor Virg Benero has made several appearances on cable news channels, talking GM as well.  But as Brown said in our interview, the story here is nothing new. 

“We’ve been dealing with this for 25 years,” he said.  “We’ve lost 50 percent of our tax base in the last 10 years; industrial tax base.  We’ve lost 40 percent of income tax revenue,” Brown added. 

The latest job losses, however, are new.  On Monday, General Motors announced the end of the 560 truck line, eliminating 400 jobs.  Days ago, GM said Flint’s Powertrain North was closing.  About one thousand people work there (846 hourly and 166 salaried as reported by the Detroit News). 

“Flint North we kind of expected,” Brown said.  “Even the medium truck line,” he added. 

Yet, this is the type of economic contraction helps create the cuts in government for things like public safety.  Brown looks to stimulus dollars for short term help. 

“The recovery dollars are for short term needs, because we have this huge gap,” he said. 

Brown said the city needs about $9 million to help add 30 to 40 police officers back to the streets after several dozen have been laid off.  But as difficult as the GM cuts have been so far, Brown said the auto company will still be part building Flint’s future. 

“(The plan includes) working in partnership with GM and the business community, organized labor, the UAW in particular, to make sure we’re protecting those assets,” he said. 

The mayor also said he had the chance to show some of the good things happening in Flint on CNN.  He talked about the creation of a local automotive crisis task force which is a collective of union leaders, business professionals and others working to help fix the city’s economic crisis.