Hackel says no “dust-up” with Detroit’s Sheila Cockrel

“It definitely was not a dust-up,” Hackel said at the
Reinventing Macomb leadership forum in Warren. Hackel drew attention at
Thursday’s Detroit Policy Conference when he said that the proposed $47 million-a-year deal for Detroit to lease the system to a suburban authority
provides no advantages for Macomb County.

Cockrel, sensing that Hackel was not particularly
grateful for Detroit’s willingness to transfer control of the water system,
recalled that Macomb County sued the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department in
the 1950s to force an extension of sewer and water lines – an overexpansion,
she reportedly called it – into the suburbs. That helped lead to suburban
sprawl and the demise of Detroit, Cockrel intoned.

At the Reinventing Macomb event,
Hackel said he is no hurry to negotiate a deal by March 1, as Detroit Emergency
Manager Kevyn Orr hopes.

The county executive said the suburbs lack considerable
data about the DWSD’s financial condition and the current state of its assets.
The century-old water system could have hundreds of pipes in the ground that
won’t last much longer, he said, but Detroit refuses to release those details.

As for the $47 million, Hackel said the 40-year lease
would provide an annual revenue source to help the city rightsize its pension
funds, but the cash would contribute nothing toward modernizing the DWSD network
of infrastructure that serves more than 120 municipal customers across
southeast Michigan.

“I’m going to be regional, but I’m not going to be
irresponsible,” Hackel said. “We have to be responsible to the rate payers.”

*****

Guy Gordon for Congress?

WDIV-TV anchorman Guy Gordon, while moderating the
Reinventing Macomb discussion, raised an issue that none of the
politicians on hand seemed to grasp.

The new $148 million high-tech manufacturing research
institute that President Obama announced this week, Gordon said, is a much better fit in
Macomb County than in the host community, Canton Township.

At the same time, the proposed Pentagon budget also unveiled this week,
which would eliminate the A-10 aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in
Harrison Township, could have been more than offset, from a political
standpoint, if the Obama administration had agreed to put the American
Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute and it’s 10,000 new
jobs in Macomb County.

Macomb defense and manufacturing facilities are already
working on developing lightweight materials and the county’s advanced manufacturing assets have a huge
advantage over anything the Canton area (western Wayne County) has to offer,
Gordon noted.

ALMMII is designed to create a synchronized system to
support the production of advanced lightweight metals among several players in
private industry and academia. In addition to research and development, the institute will prepare the workforce through education and training programs.

The the ALMMII will move these lightweight metals out of the
lab and into the trucks, airplanes, and ships — in both the commercial and
military sector.

OK, so how is it that a county with a large military
base, the U.S. Army TACOM complex (including numerous research labs), the
General Motors Tech Center, Lake St. Clair, the headquarters of General
Dynamics Land Systems (the leading manufacturer of military vehicles) and so
many defense industry supplier firms that Macomb is now labeled the defense
capital of the Midwest … how is that Canton Township was designated as a
better choice than Macomb County?

Someone should force the Pentagon and the Obama
administration to deliver a very detailed and very public explanation for this outcome.