I again ask, and no one here on FR has answered this, as this question has come up before. The Detroit Police Dept has Horses and yes it maybe mis-appropiations of funds but was this farrier used exclusively for the DPD’s Horses? Given the dysfunctionality in Detroit I could see how they might have another Dept foot the bill even though is was wrong, wrong, wrong...
The Detroit Police had a mounted division until some felt is was better business to give real job slots to virtual union employees. Volunteers took in the retired horses, giving them an easy, well-earned retirement. The police officers either transferred elsewhere, or retired.
The farrier position was civilian, and AFSCME. With no Mounted Division, the only place left to guarantee him lifetime employment, and no horses was the water department, which had a position for a farrier on the org chart for the last 120+ years, but no horses for at least 80 years. So they transferred him there. The poor guy would probably go into shock if someone actually brought in a live horse, even as a joke.
If a report says that Detroit has 2x the "workers per gallon" compared to that model of honesty and efficiency, Chicago, it means there's about a 1-1 ratio of real people (not necessarily all of them "working") and phantoms whose paychecks go into the pockets of the well-connected.
That's also why the Detroit water system is surrounded by a wall of secrecy. It's the biggest honeypot left as far as corruption goes, and they'll fight to the other guy's death to keep the sunlight out. Detroit companies and residents get an automatic pass if they don't want to pay even their subsidized rates, so nobody in the city gets too worked up about water.