Above: Waukegan, Ill., Mayor Richard Hyde stands along an industrial harbor on the Lake Michigan lakefront. Hyde hopes to replace the industry along the lake with recreation area and residences.
Photo by Anne Ryan for USA TODAY
Great Lakes see a future beyond industry
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
By
Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
WAUKEGAN, Ill. — When Mayor Richard Hyde looks at the waterfront here, he sees beyond the toxic waste, the empty factories and the vacant lots. He envisions a post-industrial future of condos, shops and restaurants — a bustling community of 10,000 affluent people on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Unfortunately for the mayor, three factories have no plans to leave. They've been in Waukegan for generations and their owners don't appreciate being treated like outcasts to be evicted. "We've given them notice," says the mayor, 80, who was born here. "They can stay another five years, maybe 10 or 15 years, but after that
they must go." Why close a profitable, non-polluting wallboard plant that would cost $100 million to replace? asks National Gypsum plant manager Steve Rogers, 31.
Sixty workers would lose jobs paying $18 to $20 an hour. "They aren't going to make that kind of money serving mocha frappuccinos," he says. The conflict in Waukegan symbolizes the dramatic changes sweeping across the five Great Lakes, a region that is trying to reinvent itself in a way that could have major implications for the nation. Attitudes about the Great Lakes have changed so drastically during the past three decades that manufacturers are finding themselves unwelcome even in cities they once ruled.
"The Great Lakes are viewed more today like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite — a natural resource rather than a waste receptacle for industry," says Cameron Davis, executive director of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, the oldest environmental group dedicated to the lakes' protection.
The five lakes — Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario — cover an area equal in size to New England and half of New York state. Some heavy industry is still attracted to the lakes. Two oil companies want to spend $10 billion on mammoth refinery expansions, one on the shore of Lake Michigan, the other on Lake Superior. What's changed the region, however, are foreign competition, politics and lifestyles.
Today, the political and economic clout of tourism and real estate development is rising, especially at the state and local level. The influence of heavy industry has been sapped by the decline of industrial jobs through factory closings, automation and foreign competition. Waukegan once had 35,000 people working at waterfront factories. Today, only about 200 remain — "and most don't live in Waukegan," notes the mayor. National Gypsum makes more wallboard than ever at its Waukegan plant, which is great for customers and stockholders nationwide. But the plant produces few local voters.
In all, the eight Great Lakes states have lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs since 2001. During that time, the hospitality industry added 300,000 jobs. The trend is even more extreme close to the water.
State legislators worry more today about invasive aquatic species in the ballast water of cargo ships than about dredging harbors to keep the freighters running full. Oceangoing vessels are blamed for bringing more than 140 non-native species into the Great Lakes, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. "We used to treat the lakes as a resource to make beer in Milwaukee and steel in Gary (Ind.)," says John Austin of the Great Lakes Economic Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "We've evolved into thinking it's a scarce resource that can't be touched."
The future, he adds, should lie between those extremes.
People who love the Great Lakes complain that they are the nation's neglected treasure, ignored in Congress and overshadowed by the East and West coasts. The Florida Everglades, for example, are a sensitive subject in the region.
"The Everglades are a wonderful place, but it's a minor ecosystem compared to the Great Lakes," says Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. "Yet the federal government stepped in to help the state of Florida. The Great Lakes need the same kind of national attention."
A recent federal water resources bill authorized nearly $2 billion to continue restoration of the Everglades, where alligators and panthers roam in subtropical wilderness. Meanwhile, the Great Lakes' biggest score was Congress' authorization on Nov. 8 of a $342 million mega-lock to handle 1,200-foot ships at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. The Great Lakes need $25 billion to restore the ecosystem from its days as a waste dump, the Brookings Institution estimates. Even today, many cities dump raw sewage into the lakes after heavy rains. Last month, the Council of Great Lakes Governors challenged the presidential candidates to say how they would protect the lakes. The most notable response came from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who committed a Great Lakes faux pas by suggesting that their water be shipped to the arid Southwest. That idea would violate an agreement the governors and Canada negotiated in 2005 to keep all water inside the region. The water compact, which still needs approval by Congress and state legislatures, is designed to help the economically struggling region by locking in Great Lakes water — 95% of the USA's surface freshwater. "Freshwater is becoming the most valuable resource in this country and planet," says Doyle, chairman of the governors council. "We're trying to get the presidential candidates to better understand what we need."
Changing fortunes
Since the early 19th century, the Great Lakes have been the center of America's industrial might. Freshwater was the key ingredient used to make steel, autos, rubber, paper, refined oil and other vital products. A century ago, the economic winners were the places that got factories. Industry made boomtowns of Cleveland and Buffalo and Muskegon, Mich. The losers were places you've never heard of because the waterfront wasn't used.
Today, the tables have turned. Pristine coast is a gold mine. A developer recently paid nearly $40 million for 420 undeveloped acres of beachfront property on Lake Michigan in Saugatuck, Mich. At the same time, thousands of waterfront acres of abandoned industrial sites, mostly in urban areas, cannot be given away because of huge environmental liabilities.
The Waukegan waterfront, for example, includes two Superfund environmental cleanup sites, the former headquarters of asbestos manufacturer Johns Manville and Outboard Marine Corp., which left 1 million pounds of cancer-causing PCBs in the harbor. Industry promises to spend what's required to be environmentally sensitive. Oil giant BP proposes spending $3.8 billion to expand a Whiting, Ind., refinery on Lake Michigan — originally built in 1889 by John D. Rockefeller — so it can refine heavy crude from Alberta, Canada. Murphy Oil wants to spend $6 billion on a refinery on Lake Superior in Superior, Wis. The refinery expansions face uphill battles to win regulatory approval from state and federal governments, even in a time of $3-a-gallon gasoline. Superior Mayor Dave Ross wants the refinery. It would bring in $25 million a year in property tax revenue to his community of 27,000. His support, however, hinges on the company polluting far less than the law allows.
In Indiana, BP promises to dump no extra pollution into Lake Michigan if it's allowed to increase capacity by 115,000 barrels per day. About $1.4 billion of BP's $3.8 billion construction cost would go to environmental controls, BP spokesman Scott Dean says. However, the plant would produce more air pollution than it does now and continue to discharge 1,000 pounds of ammonia into the lake daily. "It's ironic people complain about $3-a-gallon gasoline," Dean says, "when we've got crude oil next door in Canada but can't refine it."
From ships to boats
The shipping fleet on the lakes has declined by 75% since the 1950s to fewer than 100. During that time, the number of pleasure boats has soared to more than 900,000, estimates the Great Lakes Commission, a joint agency of the U.S. and Canadian governments. "I saw a ship yesterday and thought, 'Man, it's been a long time since I've seen one of those,' " says Evan Casey, president of Great Lakes Environmental & Safety Consultants in Buffalo.
Casey's office overlooks Lake Erie, now used mostly for fun — boats, casinos, vacation homes.
The change is profound.
"People forget that the Great Lakes were the superhighway of North America for 150 years," says historian Christopher Gillcrist, executive director of the Great Lakes Historical Society in Vermilion, Ohio. In the early 1900s, the Great Lakes transformed America through the development of steel mills and related industries. But foreign competition and technology started driving big factories out of business, a trend that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. The abandonment of toxic industrial sites coincided with the rise of environmentalism.
Longtime conservation activist Lee Botts, 80, of Gary, Ind., says environmental laws in the 1960s and 1970s changed everything. The public won the right to challenge pollution before it occurred. "Before that, you couldn't take legal action until the damage had been done, and only then if you were personally harmed," she says. "Industry … didn't understand that things would never be the same."
Today, mayors in Milwaukee, Manistee, Mich., and beyond want to remake Great Lakes waterfronts into upscale developments. Few plans have succeeded so far, despite government subsidies.
The region's troubled economy and the legacy of toxic waste are big hurdles, too. So are disastrous urban-planning decisions made during earlier times.
A common problem: shorelines separated from downtowns by highways and railroad tracks, a remnant of a time when industry occupied the waterfront and people lived downtown. In Waukegan, for example, a four-lane highway runs along the harbor. The highway doesn't go much of anywhere because the state never finished it. The road makes it nearly impossible to walk or bike to the 1,400-acre waterfront, which includes a public beach and the Superfund sites. National Gypsum has a lease on its land until 2058. The company pays $113,500 a year in property taxes. The plant is profitable and more productive than ever.
"We're good corporate citizens," says Rogers, the plant manager and an environmental scientist. His company doesn't dump pollution into the lake. The firm even spent $100,000 to build a berm and plant evergreen trees. "They wanted us to look prettier, so we did," he says. Ryan, who has been mayor for six years, regrets kicking out his city's remaining waterfront industry, but times have changed. Top-notch Chicago developers want to invest in the harbor, he says.
"The companies have been good to us. But we're taking control of our destiny."
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Though the idea is nice, I think it's a bad idea for Waukegan to drive these businesses out for the sole purpose of building lakefront condos and the like. I know the market is there (it's just north of Chicago so people who can't afford to live on the lake in Chicago are probably heading up towards Waukegan), but still. These businesses make money and provide well paying jobs.
With that being said, I
do support the idea of turning the Great Lakes into more of a natural preserve as opposed to the industrial wasteland that it is in many places today. In some Great Lakes cities, such as Cleveland and Buffalo, they're transforming the waterfront that used to be cluttered with heavy, polluting industry into healthy, pleasant, green spaces along the waterfront designed for recreation and pleasure. Chicago is not doing this as far as I know (much of Chicago's lakefront is already recreational space), and I don't know what the situation is like in Milwaukee, Green Bay, or Duluth. But I really love the idea of making the lakes something more like the Grand Canyon than the old Rustbelt dumping ground it historically has been. I just don't support the mayor's plan for Waukegan, because in that particular case I don't believe the benefits would really outweigh the costs. But eventually.....................I'd like to see it happen. What's cool about it is that there are several large cities on the lake, so ideally you could have the best of both worlds - urban life in the middle of a natural paradise. Am I being too idealistic? What do y'all think? Will it ever happen? If so, how long? How will it be done? Do you live in the Great Lakes region, and if so, do you want to see this happen, even at the expense of heavy industry that pollutes, yet keeps jobs in what is known to be an economically struggling region of the country?
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