Hello Supporters!
The Detroit News had a good feature on the Marshall Megasite today. There's more information about the proposed Ford Blue Oval Battery Plant. This article was very harsh on the overall project.
SeedKeepers is a Nonprofit organization that was formed to find an alternative to the Ford battery plant. Our purpose is to advocate for the protection of the historic farmsteads and the environment within the proposed mega site. We believe taking 2000 acres of prime agricultural land that borders the Kalamazoo River to build a battery plant is a grave misuse of our natural resources.
We further believe there is a legal case to challenge the PA 425 land transfers and have obtained the services of Mika Meyers Law Firm out of Grand Rapids. Money is needed to cover the $10,000 retainer fee and your support is urgently needed.
Please consider making a donation today and/or share this message with five of your friends. Donations may be made anonymously if you prefer. Time is of the essence! Please act today.
Online donations can be made at:
https://donorbox.org/legal-defense-fund-2
DETROIT NEWS ARTICLE FOLLOWS
Michigan's knowledge economy takes back seat behind factory labor
Chad Livengood - The Detroit News
Two multibillion-dollar economic development projects are emerging this year in Detroit and rural Marshall that rely on different forms of taxpayer subsidies to make them a reality.
In both projects, taxpayers would shoulder about half of the cost. But these projects will likely produce vastly different economic prosperity for Michigan, a sobering fact that doesn't seem to faze policymakers who are rushing to outbid Southern states for auto industry manufacturing investments.
In Marshall, Ford Motor Co. is promising to build a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant if Michigan taxpayers shell out $210 million in direct cash subsidies and then spend at least $630 million bulldozing farm fields, installing utilities, building and widening roads and expanding highway interchanges to handle an influx of truck traffic.
For all of this, at a cost to taxpayers of $336,000 per job, Ford is promising jobs that pay an average of $45,000 a year. And then the Dearborn automaker wants to live mostly property tax-free for the next 15 years on this land, reducing its real and personal property tax bills by $772 million. That's $1.61 billion in subsidies or 46% of the cost of the project.
Ford Motor Co. is planning to construct a $3.5 billion manufacturing complex for electric vehicle batteries on a rural tract of land west of Marshall in Calhoun County. The project is expected to receive $1.61 billion in total subsidies or 46% of the cost of the project.
In Detroit, billionaires Stephen Ross and Chris Ilitch are planning a $1.5 billion constellation of new buildings across Ilitch family-owned parking lot land downtown if the businessmen can secure about $798 million in taxpayer subsidies, roughly 53% of the cost.
The majority of those subsidies — $616 million — would be realized through the refunding of sales tax on construction materials and the capture of state income taxes for construction workers and the future workers and residents who will work and live in these buildings for the next 35 years.
The long-awaited build-out in the Ilitch family's District Detroit will be anchored around a new University of Michigan graduate school building that Ross' real estate development company will construct for UM that's being dubbed the Detroit Center of Innovation, which the Legislature has separately committed $100 million in state tax dollars toward.
With the UM center as its anchor, the District Detroit project aims to become a tech company hub that can attract entrepreneurs, high-paying white-collar jobs and residents to Detroit. The project is modeled after Cornell Tech, a Cornell University satellite campus Ross' helped build on Roosevelt Island in New York City's East River.
Get the COVID-19 Update newsletter in your inbox.
Updates on how the coronavirus is affecting your community and the nation
Delivery: Varies
realpeoplemedia@gmail.com
Your Email
Andrew Cantor, executive vice president of development for Related Cos., said the District Detroit project will be geared toward attracting office workers and residents with "six-figure jobs."
"We think this is the economy of the future — a knowledge economy," Cantor said last week in an interview with The Detroit News. "... We think this is a really strategic use of state resources in service of the largest city in the state."
A conceptual rendering of future office and retail developments along Woodward Avenue adjacent to Comerica Park in the District Detroit. New York-based Related Companies and the Ilitch family's Olympia Development are planning a $1.5 billion investment in new office and residential buildings in downtown Detroit on plots of land that are mostly Ilitch-owned parking lots. The developers are looking for tax subsidies that amount to 53% of the cost of the project.
Based on the recent priorities in Lansing, however, state lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's administration are running in the opposite direction of the knowledge economy with nine-figure bets on manufacturing plants.
Despite the enormous potential for luring tech jobs to Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and other cities where young people want to live and work, the policy focus in Lansing over the past year or so has been reminiscent of a classic late-20th century economic development play for factory jobs.
It has included enormous outlays of taxpayer cash to win EV battery plant projects in rural Calhoun and Mecosta counties — far away from population centers — and $666 million that Whitmer and the Legislature forked over to General Motors Co. for 4,000 factory jobs in Eaton and Oakland counties.
Michigan taxpayers will pay GM $166,500 for each new job averaging $46,800 annually at an EV battery plant under construction west of Lansing, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corp. At GM's Orion Assembly Plant, which is being expanded to build all-electric Chevy Silverado trucks, the new jobs will pay $56,160 annually, about two-thirds of Oakland County's median household income.
The state's current strategy for growing the knowledge economy is scattershot compared with the concentrated effort to secure factory jobs that could be represented by the United Auto Workers union.
“We want to make sure that we’re moving the economy forward and we are investing in good paying jobs,” House Speaker Joe Tate, D-Detroit, said last week.
Lawmakers are quick to spend tax dollars on jobs that require little post-high school training. But there's not an equal amount of money being invested in increasing the number of college-educated adults to fill jobs in the knowledge economy that, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, pay on average 133% more than production jobs.
“If the goal is good-paying jobs — not a job — the preponderance of good-paying jobs are now professionals and managers predominately working in knowledge economy industries,” said Lou Glazer, president and co-founder of Michigan Future Inc., an Ann Arbor think tank.
Lou Glazer, president and co-founder of Michigan Future Inc.
Glazer argues Michigan lawmakers and Whitmer are overspending state tax dollars for factory jobs that don't have the same economic multiplying effect as an engineer — the kind of college-educated worker the District Detroit development seeks to attract.
In this rush to buy jobs, no one in Lansing is even weighing what the $840 million in cash subsidies for Ford could buy instead. For some perspective on how much money that is, $840 million would pay for four years of tuition at UM-Ann Arbor for 18,500 residents to get a world-class engineering degree.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual income of any kind of engineer in Michigan is $95,300 — twice the average starting wage Ford will be paying at the EV battery plant on the outskirts of Marshall.
Despite Whitmer’s goal of having 60% of adults with some level of college education by 2030, just 50.5% of adults ages 25-64 had a college degree or credential as of 2021, according to the Lumina Foundation. Michigan lags behind the national average of 53.7% of adults with a college degree or credential.
Imagine the companies that might flock here for that talent if they were required to live in Michigan for five years after graduation. Or the $840 million could have been spent on improving the quality of life that tech workers desire.
"For the cost of the state’s incentive in the Marshall plant, we could have created effective rapid mass transit across Metro Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Flint and Ann Arbor," said Ned Staebler, president & CEO of TechTown Detroit, Wayne State University's hub for entrepreneurs.
Glazer correctly points out that what made Metro Detroit wealthy in the 20th century was not the assembly of vehicles but the invention of them and the production processes that were exported globally. It was the tech centers in Auburn Hills, Warren and Dearborn, not the assembly plants in Flint, Detroit and Lansing that built the wealth.
"What's going to make us prosperous in the 21st century, particularly Metro Detroit, is whether the knowledge part of the mobility industry is centered here or not," Glazer said. "And there is no Michigan strategy for doing that. And that strategy has got to be talent-based, not subsidy based."
And there's a real danger of knowledge-based auto jobs slipping away, Glazer warned. General Motors Co. is already developing autonomous vehicle technology not in Warren, but in San Francisco.
Just last week, Ford announced its new automated driving tech subsidiary, Latitude AI, will remain headquartered in Pittsburgh, with support from engineering teams in Dearborn and Palo Alto, Calif.
There's nothing in these battery plant deals with GM and Ford that ensures the automakers keep their best-paying jobs in Michigan. And some of those jobs are already disappearing, Staebler said, so the automakers "are hiring them remotely in Colorado, Oregon, California and Washington."
There's nothing in these battery plant deals with GM and Ford that ensures the automakers keep their best-paying jobs in Michigan. Some of those jobs are already disappearing, said Ned Staebler, president and CEO of TechTown Detroit, so the automakers "are hiring them remotely in Colorado, Oregon, California and Washington."
"We should give the money to Ford and GM to hire those workers in Michigan — at Michigan Central or the Tech Center in Warren," Staebler said, referencing the mobility tech hub Ford plans to open later this year in Detroit's old train station.
In selling Ford's Marshall plant deal to lawmakers last week, the state's chief economic development official sort of made the point of critics by touting purported economic benefits that the Marshall area will see from the creation of 1,900 semi-skilled operators at the Ford battery plant earning $20 an hour or about $41,600 a year.
“They may want to open a bowling alley or a restaurant — things to support the additional dollars that are going to be spent in the Marshall region,” said Quentin Messer Jr., CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
In other words, the battery plant will spur the creation of even lesser-paying service industry jobs. This is not a path to Michigan being one of the nation's leading economic powers again, Glazer said.
"We should be celebrating 2,500 jobs in Marshall — that is a good thing," Glazer said. "That they pay $40,000-$45,000 is also a pretty good thing. It's not high enough to support a family of three; it's not horrible jobs."
"We just shouldn't be spending a billion dollars in subsidies on it," he added.
clivengood@detroitnews.com