NEWARK, N.J. — The latest challenge to the municipal authorities in New Jersey’s largest city came in March, in the form of an ominous letter from a state official.

“Newark is experiencing an extraordinary level of fiscal distress,” Local Government Services Director Tom Neff wrote to Newark Mayor Luis Quintana, who was appointed last year to complete the term of former Mayor Cory Booker, now a U.S. senator.

Later that month Neff made the threat clear. “We may ask our Attorney General’s Office to ask a judge to place Newark under supervision,” he told the state Local Finance Board.

State takeover of a troubled city is a relatively rare step. But events unfolding in Detroit, where an emergency manager appointed by Michigan controls operations and is taking the city through bankruptcy, have raised the profile — and perhaps the political appeal — of such a measure. While fear of becoming another Detroit has become commonplace in urban political rhetoric, Newark loosely shares enough traits with the Michigan metropolis — the spiral of disinvestment, middle-class flight, violence, poverty, a majority African-American population under strain — for the possibility to carry weight. Views differ, however, on just what it means to become another Detroit, let alone how to prevent it.

In Newark the specter of a state takeover has added tension to an already tough mayoral race, which pits Shavar Jeffries, a law professor and former prosecutor, against Ras Baraka, an activist, a city councilman and a former high school principal. The contest is in its final days, with the election on May 13. Both men are Democrats, but they offer sharply contrasting approaches to city finances and economic development.



The new mayor will inherit a $40 million deficit and a perennially slow budget process, along with personnel appointments by Quintana that aroused state ire. He will also have to clean up a major scandal involving the Newark Watershed, the agency in charge of the water and sewer systems, whose director, a Booker ally, diverted millions of dollars in contracts to friends and payouts to herself, according to an inquiry. The agency has since been dissolved.

These concerns come on top of Newark’s chronic problems, which a series of big-ticket downtown developments and state-subsidized corporate relocations have not managed to blunt. Nearly one-third of its population and more than 43 percent of its children live below the poverty line. Its high school graduation rate is 68 percent. There were 111 murders there in 2013 — the most since 1990 and a shocking number in a city of 280,000 people.

As things stand, Newark has less than full control of its affairs. The state has run the schools since 1995; current Superintendent Cami Anderson, an appointee of Gov. Chris Christie, has alienated even supporters of her reform plans.

In addition, Newark gave the state power to approve hires in exchange for budget aid in 2011 and 2012; that agreement expired on Dec. 31. And talks are underway with the Department of Justice to submit Newark’s police to federal monitoring.

Although its scope could vary, a state takeover of the city’s budget would mean a more thorough loss of local control. There is precedent: New Jersey took over operations in Camden, another major impoverished city, from 2002 to 2009. But the cautionary tale of Detroit carries greater impact, and Jeffries, for one, raises it often in his stump speech.