Wind Harvest in Gratiot County

Driving north on 127 out of Lansing, the terrain is fairly flat.  Then, all of a sudden, they appear:  wind turbines.  There are one hundred thirty three with thirty four more on the way.  They draw attention and they change the view.

They stand in testimony to the fact that an economic development organization can make a real difference.  Without the work of Don Schurr and the Greater Gratiot Development Company (GGDI), it is highly unlikely the wind turbines would be there at all.

Economic Development is a fad-ridden business, whether it is robotics, life sciences, or green energy.  The rhetoric in economic development far outstrips the accomplishments in green energy.  Gratiot County stands alone in Michigan, a true best practices case, in making a green energy strategy work.

Don Schurr is a thirty five year veteran economic development practitioner.  He is place based in that he has spent his career in Gratiot County.  Economic development work in Gratiot County mandates an understanding of the agricultural economy and nobody understands it better than Don Schurr.

So, when small family owned farms began to disappear across the country because they were at a severe competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the emerging giant corporate farms, Gratiot County realized it had to do something to assist the families who had farmed for decades.

GGDI gathered many of the farmers together and asked if they were open to a harvest of a different kind.  Instead of growing and harvesting vegetables and fruits, the farmers were asked if they would consider the harvest of wind energy for sale.

Studies had shown that the flat terrain of Gratiot County was conducive to the placement of wind turbines.  The circumstances were right for this kind of agricultural land use, only this time the product would be renewable energy.

A land pool was formed throughout the county.  People had to indicate whether they were interested in having a turbine placed on their property.  They also had to agree that the sites selected would be done through a strict process governed by engineers who would select the most likely sites for success.

The next step was to gather all governmental units within Gratiot County in a room and stay there until they crafted a countywide ordinance.  A countywide ordinance was necessary as there is considerable risk for the investor.  The ordinance was crafted to protect the citizens of Gratiot County and to provide some reasonable assurance to energy investors.

They came out of the room with two things:  a new ordinance and a level of collaboration worth a brand.

In my own mind, there are many questions about green energy as an economic development strategy.  There are other considerations such as advancing technology in oil and gas extraction that now promises our country full energy independence.  While the advanced technology is new and promising, it must be part of a bigger picture where all possible sources of energy can be harnessed to meet the needs of our country.

There will be more about green energy in future columns, but for now, Michigan should be proud of what a small county and a plucky economic development operation have successfully accomplished.

Great Lakes Shipping and a College Education

“There go our jobs,” the tetchy lakes veteran said.  He punctuated his remark with a stream of tobacco juice into the already ensepulchered waters of the Cuyahoga River.  It was summer, 1969, and we were moving slowly up the river, past the ship building activities that would culminate in the MV Roger Blough, an eight hundred fifty foot ore carrier that would ply the steel making routes of the Great Lakes.

Today, even the Blough is significantly smaller than the new generation of 1,000 foot vessels that carry coal, taconite, limestone, and grain in quantities that would keep dozens of one hundred car freight trains moving overland each day. 

I was one of the fortunate kids who left college for the summer, jumped a ship, and worked the summer months hauling taconite from Duluth or Two Harbors, Minnesota, down to one of the steel mills on southern Lake Michigan or Lake Erie.  The work was hard, but the pay was good.  I did not have many opportunities to spend my pay, so there were savings to finance the costs of a college education.

With college campuses inflamed with protest and unrest in the late 1960s, it was also an enforced opportunity to stay in touch with the real world of hard working people that had their own opinions about what was going on in the country and the world.  It was a challenge to earn the respect of my shipmates who generally prefaced the words, “college kid” with adjectives like “dumb” and far worse, but this is supposed to be a decent column. Only by working as hard as the hardest working person on the boat was I ever able to overcome the malediction of pursuing a college degree.

The scene on the Cuyahoga that day was marvelously prescient.  I was on a ship that was six hundred feet long and maybe carried one-fourth of what the one thousand foot, automated, self unloading monsters are capable of hauling today.  My ship had thirty people working on board.  Our work was comprised of cleaning, chipping paint, priming and painting, shoveling, tending mooring cables, taking soundings, and whatever else needed to be done.  The newly automated vessels have largely eliminated most of that kind of work. 

At one time, during three straight days of dense fog, approximately one hundred twenty ships went to anchor on either side of the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.  Today, a recurrence of those circumstances would produce no more than forty ships waiting to lock through.  I doubt that tourism at the “Soo” locks has the same vitality as back then when people used to see in an hour what today takes twenty four hours to see.  Older ships were shown the way to the ship graveyards as the new vessels came on line. 

Larger, more efficient ore carriers mean fewer ships are necessary to carry the raw materials to the steel making process.  The high degree of automation means fewer sailors are necessary to do depth soundings and to tend mooring cables.  The sophistication of the navigation equipment means that the skill levels necessary for these jobs are far in excess of what the summer college kid possesses, or for that matter, men who had toiled the lakes for all of their lives.

The union halls of the Upper Midwest teem with workers with considerable seniority, hoping for an opening within the reduced numbers of people needed to transport raw materials for the steel industry.  The summer college kid working on the boats is clearly a thing of the past.  A lost step on the ladder of upward mobility that went the way of the summer factory job.

When we think about the transformation of business and industry, one need only look at the changes that have taken place in Great Lakes shipping over the past thirty years to understand how the process impacts the lives we lead and the lives we thought we would lead. 

The real lesson to be learned, contrary to what politicians and special interests tell you, is that we do not lose most jobs to “outsourcing” or to the Chinese or the Mexicans.  Far more jobs are lost to productivity improvements and technological advances. 

The old lakes veteran was right.  There went our jobs.