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Detroit City Council Rejects Mayor's Plan For Over Assessed Home Owners

(CBS DETROIT) - A resolution intended to compensate over-assessed home-owners was shot down by Detroit City Council.

Council took up the proposal Tuesday introduced by Mayor Mike Duggan to yield advantages to affected homeowners through city program preferences.

The options included discounts on city-owned property, housing and city jobs.

But the resolution loss popularity as the timeline didn't cover home-owners affected before 2010 and after 2013.

"The data shows at least 2008 to at least 2017 even though we do know it to be an on-going issue even now but there's hard data that has those years so what the mayor was proposing wasn't enough," said Lauren Thomas, Detroit Justice Community Legal Advocate.

Thomas says the resolution failed to fully compensate reach all affected.

The community legal advocate says the six-million-dollar program is a band-aid over a "$600 million" wound.

"There's this idea of failure, what did I do wrong that I lost my home? Instead of the shame being where it should be, on the city for over-assessing properties. For taking too much money from these homeowners and also for taking their homes, putting them land bank and flipping them and the city and the county are still making money off of the homes that were essentially stolen from these homeowners," said Thomas.

John Roach from the Mayor's Communications office is telling CW50 the mayor cut assessments by 20 percent and will support council on additional benefits within the law and budget.

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