The Harvey City Council voted unanimously to apply for a rare status designating the city financially distressed at a contentious special city council meeting Thursday night, at the urging of Mayor Christopher Clark.

Clark also announced an imminent partial shutdown of city government to deal with the city’s financial situation.

The Illinois Financially Distressed City Law gives the state broad authority to intervene in a city’s financial affairs in order to “provide a secure financial basis for the continued operation of a financially distressed city.” The law has been invoked once before, when East St. Louis was given the designation in 1990.

Harvey’s finances have been turbulent for years, and most of the meeting was taken up by a 90-minute presentation by Clark that laid the blame

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