Dysfunction Junction

Highland Park district, state on rocky terms

Finance chief cites trouble in effort to reduce deficit

By Melanie D. Scott Free Press Staff Writer

   LANSING — The financial director of Highland Park schools said many of the district’s money problems could have been resolved if state officials had a better working relationship with the district.

   “Truth and fairness has not been presented from Lansing,” Highland Park Schools Financial Director Randy Lane said during a hearing Friday in Lansing. “The district has taken action to turn around the deficit.”

   Lane added that the district already has a deficit-elimination plan in place that calls for fixing its finances over the next four years, if the state allows it the chance.

   “We’ve reduced operating costs significantly over the past year,” Lane told the members of the hearing, which included state Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Carol Wolenberg and the chair of the hearing, Deputy State Treasurer Roger Fraser. “About half of the budget has been cut.”

   Highland Park Superintendent Edith Hightower, along with school board President John Holloway and board members Alma Greer, Robert Davis and Soyini Williams, sat in the first row of a small conference room at the Richard H. Austin State Office building.

   The hearing was called at the district’s request in hopes of pointing out errors or possible omissions in a report that prompted Gov. Rick Snyder to determine the district has a financial emergency.

   Snyder appointed a 10-member review team under Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Responsibility Act, in November to review the district’s finances. The team recommended the appointment of an emergency manager.

   The team found that a financial emergency exists based on factors including ending the school year on June 30 with an $11.3-million deficit, a 51% increase from the previous year.

   The district had an operating deficit in excess of revenues for five of the six years evaluated and an average operating deficit of $2.3 million over seven years, Wolenberg said in her presentation on behalf of the review team.

   The district saw a decrease in enrollment from1,858 students in 2010 to1,331in 2011. There are currently 969 students enrolled, and about 40% of them live in Detroit, Wolenberg said.

   “That’s one effect that could further the (financial) decline,” Wolenberg said. “And the lesser restrictions in charter schools could raise the trend.”

   Wolenberg said the team also questioned the school board’s ability to work together, called the seven-member body dysfunctional and said she doubted members would follow a consent agreement that would be required to fix the deficit should an emergency manager not be appointed.

   But the district’s attorney George Butler argued that under a consent agreement, Hightower, and not the local school board, would be solely responsible for following the agreement.

   School Board Secretary Robert Davis said state officials were being disingenuous and that the board has worked to fix district problems and isn’t dysfunctional.

Something to be mindful of

Strained schools may get manager

Team recommends gov act to aid Highland Park district

Free Press staff

   A state review team is recommending that Gov. Rick Snyder appoint an emergency manager for the Highland Park School District to resolve its fiscal crisis.

   State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said the district “is in a financial free fall, and we must do everything we can to protect the students and educators from feeling the brunt of the impact.”

   The team is recommending an emergency manager because the district’s deficit, which was $11.3 million on June 30, increased 51% from the previous year. The team also cited declining enrollment, the fact that the district has been in a deficit for five of the last six fiscal years and that it owed more than $1.7 million in accounts payable.

   Detroit Public Schools is the only district in the state with an emergency manager. About a dozen more districts are on an unofficial state watch list because of financial stress.

   Emergency managers have the power to void union contracts, cut services and sell district assets.

   State Treasurer Andy Dillon said the team had no choice but to recommend action.

   “The No. 1 priority is making sure that kids have access to a good education,” Dillon said. “From a longer-term view, once they’re stable and they’re on a path to recovery, then that’s when we look to exit.”

   Highland Park Superintendent Edith Hightower said she is prepared to do what it takes to protect children.

   “The governor’s team made their recommendation, and I have to accept that,” said Hightower, who oversees a district with 969 students and a $20-million budget. “Anything that we can do to make sure that our kids get an education, we need to do.”

   School board Chairwoman Alma Greer said the district meets the state criteria for the appointment of an emergency manager.

   “We are in financial distress. We have to admit to that,” she said. “We’ve done many of the things that we could. We privatized transportation. We privatized maintenance. We privatized security. DPS is providing food, at no expense, to us (as part of the federal free-lunch program).”

   But board member Robert Davis said he may pursue legal action against the state.

   “There’s no doubt in my mind that being a duly elected member of the board … my rights are being violated, as well as the rights of students and their parents,” Davis said.

   Davis said the board and Hightower have worked the last few months to implement the state’s recommendations to eliminate the deficit.

   “I believe with the direction in which the board and administration are now headed in, this deficit could be cured and eliminated,” Davis said. “We can do the same thing that an appointed emergency manager would be required to do.”

Lightning in a Bottle?

January 2, 2012

Storehouses for Solar Energy Can Step In When the Sun Goes Down

By MATTHEW L. WALD

If solar energy is eventually going to matter— that is, generate a significant portion of the nation’s electricity — the industry must overcome a major stumbling block, experts say: finding a way to store it for use when the sun isn’t shining.

That challenge seems to be creating an opening for a different form of power, solar thermal, which makes electricity by using the sun’s heat to boil water. The water can be used to heat salt that stores the energy until later, when the sun dips and households power up their appliances and air-conditioning at peak demand hours in the summer.

Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening.

Whether the technology will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but companies like Google, Chevron and Good Energies are investing in it, and the utilities NV Energy and Southern California Edison have signed long-term contracts to buy power from these radically different new power plants.

One crucial role of the plants will be complementing solar panels, which produce electricity directly from sunlight. When the panels ramp down at dusk or on cloudy days, the plants will crank up, drawing on the stored thermal energy.

That job will become more important if photovoltaic panels, which have plunged in price lately, become even cheaper and sprout on millions of rooftops. As the grid starts depending more heavily on solar panels or wind turbines, it will need other energy sources that can step in quickly to balance the system — preferably ones classified as renewable.

Most utilities are trying to generate as many kilowatt-hours of renewable energy as they can to meet stiffer state requirements on incorporating more alternative energy, said Kevin B. Smith, the chief executive of SolarReserve.

“As we move forward, we’ll get more and more traction with the fact we can provide more capacity,” Mr. Smith said, referring to his company’s storage technology.

The Energy Department seems to agree: in September it gave SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee for its project in Nevada. The plant will generate 110 megawatts at peak and store enough heat to run for eight to 10 hours when the sun is not shining.

The public’s view on loan guarantees for solar projects has soured somewhat since the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a California company that received a $535 million loan guarantee to build a factory to make solar panels — only to see the market for the modules crash.

But the outlook has always been clearer for companies that make electricity, which, unlike solar modules, is generally presold by contract.

Technical details of the SolarReserve and BrightSource plants vary slightly, but both will use thousands of computer-operated poster-size mirrors aiming sunlight at a tower that absorbs it as heat.

SolarReserve absorbs the heat in molten salt, which can be used immediately to boil water, generating steam that turns a conventional turbine and generator. Hot salt can also be used to retain the heat for many hours for later use. BrightSource heats water that can be used immediately as steam or to heat salt for storage.

The plants rely on salt because it can store far more heat than water can. But once molten, it must be kept that way or it will freeze to a solid in part of the plant where it will be difficult to melt again. “You’ve made a commitment to those salt molecules,” said John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource.

The technology is not complicated, but the economics are.

The simplest, least expensive path for solar thermal is to turn the heat into electricity immediately. But the companies are a bit like the farmer who harvests the grain and stores it in a silo rather than shipping it straight to market on the expectation that prices will be higher later. They are betting that in revenue terms, the hour at which the energy is delivered will be more important than the amount generated.

The notion is that widespread adoption of solar panels — whether on rooftops or in giant arrays in the desert — will change the hours at which prices are highest.

Today, electricity prices usually peak in the late afternoon and evening on hot summer days. “Photovoltaic panels will do a pretty good job of chopping that peak” in the late afternoon, said Paul Denholm, a solar specialist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

In other words, the new price peak will be pushed to later in the day, to just before and after sunset, when solar photovoltaic production is small or nonexistent, he and other experts say.

Mr. Woolard said the chief goal of the new plants would be to produce electricity when the utilities need it most. “We’re optimizing around what is important for different times for the utilities,” he said.

His company’s contract with Southern California Edison still requires approval by California regulators.

Adding storage capacity helps keep the air-conditioners humming when solar panels are not producing, but there are other financial benefits.

The equipment that makes electricity from steam is the most expensive part of a solar thermal system, but if it is connected to storage technology, it can run almost twice as many hours as a plant without storage. That means the unit cost of electricity drops.

Another has to do with the arcane economics of electricity. A utility must assure a supply of electricity in two forms: energy and capacity. The difference has never meant much to most consumers, who directly pay only for energy, as measured in kilowatt-hours.

But capacity, the dependable ability to produce power, is becoming more important as renewable energy forms a larger and larger part of the grid.

Wind and sun provide a lot of energy but not much capacity. Today, backup capacity for wind and solar power comes in the form of expensive gas-fired generators, which sit idle most of the year but operate when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining.

Storage could cut costs by 4 cents a kilowatt-hour, Mr. Denholm calculates — a considerable benefit for a commodity that retails for an average of 11 cents. A big part of the savings is not having to build the gas-fired generators for backup.

For competitive reasons, neither BrightSource nor SolarReserve would discuss capital costs. But Mr. Smith of SolarReserve said that the storage technology amounted to less than 5 percent of capital costs. For BrightSource, Southern California Edison was willing to pay extra for a plant that could deliver when the sun was not shining.

The success of any given project may depend on the particular details, but other experts agree that a market is opening for plants with storage capacity. A study completed in July by Navigant Consulting, Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest Laboratory on the potential effects of adding large amounts of photovoltaic energy to NV Energy’s portfolio found that to integrate the new power sources, the utility would need more standby generation.

NV Energy would also need generation whose output could be adjusted over very short intervals to compensate for variability in solar photovoltaic production, the report suggested. The solar thermal storage system is designed to meet exactly those needs.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 2, 2012

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for the chief executive of BrightSource. He is John Woolard, not Paul.

Lighting Challenged to Lighting Opporutnity

December 29, 2011

Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off the Lights

By MONICA DAVEY

HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. — When the sun sets in this small city, its neighborhoods seem to vanish.

In a deal to save money, two-thirds of the streetlights were yanked from the ground and hauled away this year, and the resulting darkness is a look that is familiar in the wide open cornfields of Iowa but not here, in a struggling community surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit.

Parents say they now worry more about allowing their children to walk to school early in the morning. Motorists complain that they often cannot see pedestrians until headlights — and cars — are right upon them. Some residents say they are reshaping their lives to fit the hours of daylight, as the members of the Rev. D. Alexander Bullock’s church did recently when they urged him to move up Saturday Bible study to 4 p.m. from the usual 7 p.m.

“It’s just too dark,” said Mr. Bullock, of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church. “I come out of the church, and I can’t see what’s in front of me. What happened to our streetlights is what happens when politicians lose hope. All kinds of crazy decisions get made, and citizens lose faith in the process.”

Cities around the nation, grappling with what is expected to be a fifth consecutive year of declining revenues and having exhausted the predictable budget trims, are increasingly considering something that would once have been untouchable: the lights.

Highland Park’s circumstances are extreme; with financial woes so deep and long term, it has extinguished all but 500 streetlights in a city accustomed to 1,600, utility company officials say. But similar efforts have played out in dozens of towns and cities, like Myrtle Creek, Ore., Clintonville, Wis., Brainerd, Minn., Santa Rosa, Calif., and Rockford, Ill.

What distinguishes these latest austerity measures is how noticeable they are to ordinary residents. If health care cuts, pay cuts, layoffs and furloughs — and even limits on enforcing building codes or maintaining parks — are most apparent to the people inside city halls, everyone notices when his streetlights go dark (and some cities, like Colorado Springs, where the issue boiled over, have already resumed some lighting when revenues allowed).

Turning off the lights has drawn grumpy crowds to city council meetings, stirred jealousy among neighborhoods and neighbors, and set off conversations about crime.

“I go around town, and even I think some areas seem a little darker than they should be,” said Tim Hanson, the public works director in Rockford, where officials turned off 2,300 of the city’s 14,000 lights. “It was not anything that I wanted to do, and it was nothing that the mayor or aldermen wanted to do, but it’s like your own budget at home — we can’t afford this anymore.”

Here in Highland Park, that had been true for a while. Over a matter of years, the city accumulated a debt of about $4 million to DTE Energy, the utility company. The city was paying less than half of its $60,000 monthly bill for an antiquated lighting system that was costly to maintain. So the company and city struck a deal. The company could turn off and take away 1,300 of the city’s lights, add 200 lights in strategic locations, and the debt would be forgiven, said Scott Simons, a spokesman for DTE.

The result in this 2.9-square-mile city feels like this: Lights are still abundant along Woodward Avenue, the crowded commercial strip. But a block away, along the quieter, residential streets, lights now remain mostly at intersections. Long stretches of blocks are dark, silhouettes of people are barely visible and potholes appear suddenly beneath tires.

Some people here say they learned of the plans this fall only when a truck pulled up outside their homes and workers began pulling the poles from the ground. (Though the added step of removing the lights — not just turning them off — seemed an affront to residents, company officials said it had to be done for liability reasons and to avoid continuing reports of power failure and the risk of metal theft.)

“The people were basically left in the dark,” said DeAndre Windom, who was elected mayor in November. He said the disappearing streetlights were the top concern of residents as he campaigned door to door.

“When you come through at night, it’s scary; you have to wonder if anyone is lurking around waiting to catch you off your guard,” said Juanita Kennedy, 65, who said she had installed a home security system and undergone training to carry a handgun in the weeks since workmen carried away the streetlight in front of her house. “I don’t go out to get gas at night. I don’t run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls.”

Highland Park, home of Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line, was once a well-off enclave of 50,000 residents. Ford left long ago, and Chrysler’s corporate headquartersmoved away in the 1990s. Now it has fewer than 12,000 residents — half the size it was just 20 years ago.

So for this city, a shrunken tax base and financial crisis have been long in the making, and the recent national downturn has only made matters worse. More than 42 percent of Highland Park’s residents live in poverty, unemployment is high and the median income here is nearly $30,000 below that of the state.

“To understand our street lighting situation is to understand the wealth that Highland Park once had; it was a situation where we had the best of almost everything and an abundance of lights,” said Rodney Patrick, whose father insisted on moving his family to Highland Park in the early 1950s because of its advantages — its status, in his words, as the shining city on the hill. “But we don’t have the residents to have the luxuries we had when we were a city of 50,000.”

If the outcome seems imperfect to many residents, not everyone views it as dire. “The lights are not out in Highland Park,” said Mr. Patrick, who serves on the City Council. “We’ve had a reduction, a responsible reduction.”

It is too soon to judge whether the lights have affected safety here. Officials from other communities and studies on the question of streetlights and crime draw mixed conclusions.

Somehting Old, Is New Again!

Frank Lloyd Wright: An Eco Visionary Before Green Became The Rage

An exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum tries to bill Wright's "organic architecture” as a predecessor to the environmentally minded design of today.

One imagines that Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s most famous architect, would’ve laughed mightily at the suggestion that he is linked to the environmentally minded architects who litter the profession nowadays. They’re just so earnest the way they like to talk about their green roofs and their fancy solar panels and their taste for group work and collaboration. Whereas FLW liked to... well,he liked to do other things.

Yet, as a new exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum tries to show, Wright’s signature “organic architecture” was a powerful predecessor to today’s sustainable-design movement. You see it in everything from Fallingwater in Pennsylvania to Taliesin West in Arizona and many of the lesser-known projects in between: “Wright’s concerns with materials, efficient use of space, sustainable manufacturing, attention to local environment and use of natural light mirror those of contemporary architects worldwide,” James Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum, says. “This exhibition provides an exciting forum for which Wright’s work can be re-examined and applied to concerns of the day.”

That seems to ring particularly true in Arizona, where Wright designed more than a dozen buildings. But looking out over the state's mind-numbing landscape of highways and tract houses, you wish architects drew on his ideas a little more.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Centuryruns through April 29. More info here.

Groundbreaking News!

Groundbreaking set for farming, energy center in Highland Park

By Melanie D. Scott Free Press Staff Writer

   Highland Park Community High School students will have a chance to experience urban farming and learn about solar energy as early as next spring, thanks to a new Green Economy Leadership Center being built on the school’s campus.

   At 12:30 p.m. today, district officials, parents and students will gather at the high school on Woodward to break ground on the center, which is expected to be completed in February.

   The center will be housed in a large greenhouse and will include an urban agriculture training center, a passive solar hoop house, raised beds, a solar photovoltaic lab and an outdoor classroom that will catch rainwater.

   “The greenhouse concept was Superintendent Dr. (Arthur) Carter’s dream, but I picked it up,” said current Superintendent Edith Hightower. “Ideally this will give the students an alternative instruction environment and a hands-on experience.”

   The district and Distributed Power, a sustainable development company, are working together to create the program. The center will be built with a $100,000 grant.

   “Nothing like this has been built,” said Scott Meloeny, founder of Distributed Power. “We will have a solar lab where students will learn how to create energy from the sun. They will learn to reuse resources.”

   Meloeny also said students will maintain a perennial orchard with apples, pears, raspberries and cherries. Fruits, vegetables and herbs grown in the garden will go to support a special in-school café, where students create their own menu based on the items harvested.

   “It will give a new meaning to Made in Michigan,” Hightower said.

   Once the program is operational, Hightower said she would aim to establish similar models at the district’s two schools that serve kindergarteners through eighth-graders.

   “In prepping kids for the 21st Century, this is an opportunity to look beyond high school,” Hightower said. “This is a premier education center that will teach them they now have options that are limitless in this economy.”

   ! CONTACT MELANIE D. SCOTT: 313-222-6159 OR MDSCOTT@FREEPRESS.COM  

GREEN-SMART House

 

Twine, A Tiny Gizmo That Holds The Internet's Future

TWine, a puck filled with sensors, detects anything from moisture to magnetism: Stick it anywhere, and it'll tweet status updates at your command. And there's no coding skills required.

"In the future, your house will send you a text message to warn you that your basement is flooding." Sounds like the kind of hooey you only hear in those fantastical "future of..." videos, doesn't it? Not anymore. Two MIT Media Lab graduates have created a "2.5-inch chunk of the future" called Twine that does exactly that, and more, and is available right now.

Well, not quite: it will be available in early 2012, thanks to its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. And the best part about it, the part that surely made that fundraising surge to over $170,000? With Twine, you can make that future magic happen without any coding skills at all, right out of the box.

It's "the simplest way to get the objects in your life tweeting or emailing."

Here's the basic idea behind Twine: software and physical stuff should be friends. You can program webpages, data, all kinds of apps to do whatever you want them to--and even use awesome tools like IFTTT.com to hack them together without knowing how to code. But making that software talk to stuff in the real world--especially stuff that's just laying around your house, and not pre-designed to be a "smart product"--takes PhD-level skills. And that, according to Twine creators David Carr and John Kestner, is just plain wrong.

Twine is a small slab of grey plastic that hides that PhD's worth of engineering magic--a bunch of internal and external sensors and a wi-fi hub--"the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing," in Carr and Kestner's words. To create the aforementioned "house that alerts you when the basement floods," just plunk your Twine in the basement where its built-in moisture sensor will get wet if there's a flood. (And make sure it can still connect to your home wi-fi signal.) Then head to Twine's companion webapp, Spool, and create a simple rule-based program: "if Twine gets wet, send me a text message." (Yep, the "programming language" is actually that simple.) And blammo, that's it. You now have a "smart" house.

Carr and Kestner created a completely ingenious incentive to send their Kickstarter ask over the moon: for every $10,000 they received in pledges, they promised to build in another sensor to Twine's repertoire. Out of the box, Twine can sense temperature, motion, moisture, and magnetism; if Carr and Kestner keep their promise, Twine will ship with thirteen additional sensors, all controllable and programmable from the elegantly simple Spool web interface. That should be enough built-in "smart product" power to handmake a personalized version of Ericsson's phony super-home, but in real life. Not bad for a couple of guys working in their spare time.

Greenfield's!

Editorial

To grow urban farms, give Detroit local control

   Urban farming can redeem at least some of Detroit’s more than 40 square miles of vacant land — nearly a third of the city — for productive use. But those efforts won’t move ahead until Michigan’s largest city can use local control to protect its residents and neighborhoods. That’s why legislators ought to approve a soon-to-be-introduced bill — cosponsored by state Sens. Virgil Smith, D-Detroit, and Joe Hune, R-Hamburg Township — that would secure the city’s right to regulate agriculture within its borders.

   As it stands, the Michigan Right to Farm Act supersedes local ordinances and zoning regulations, precluding municipalities from exercising zoning or regulatory authority over farms. The law has already been invoked in local clashes over farming activities in Madison Heights and Sterling Heights.

   But the Right to Farm Act was never intended to give commercial farmers carte blanche in densely populated cities. It was enacted in 1981 to protect existing farmland from urban sprawl and nuisance suits, and then amended two decades later to protect farmland from annexation and zoning changes. It provides needed protection for the commercial production of farm products where agriculture is the preferred use.

   But agriculture is unlikely ever to become the predominant use of land in the city of Detroit. Without a change in state law, the city risks losing control over land use if it approves one or two farming start-ups and then has its zoning pre-empted by the Michigan Right to Farm Act.

   Exempting Detroit from the Farm Act would enable the city to develop its own reasonable ordinances to regulate urban farming and protect residents from noise, odors, dust, truck traffic and other problems not generally associated with city living. Cleveland; Bloomington, Ind., and Madison, Wis., have already adopted zoning ordinances to govern urban farming.

   Detroit has large tracts of land unlikely to attract residential or commercial development in the foreseeable future. Commercial farming on certain vacant parcels, amounting to more than 25,000 acres, could create jobs while providing fresh vegetables and fruits — sorely needed in an impoverished city largely abandoned by chain grocery stores.

   But none of it will happen until Detroit can exercise reasonable dominion over the land within its borders, including farmland. Legislators can help Detroit help itself by approving a bill that would give the city the legal authority to do so.

Informs our Understanding

Activists working to save schools

In Highland Park, an emergency manager possible

By Melanie D. Scott Free Press Staff Writer

   A dozen Highland Park teachers, parents and community leaders gathered Saturday in hopes of creating a plan that will improve the city’s school district amid speculation of a state takeover.

   The group, which included City Councilman Rodney Patrick and state Sen. Bert Johnson, D-Detroit, discussed plans to form an organization to build awareness about the issues in the schools, including limited financial resources, low enrollment, overcrowded classrooms and lack of teaching materials.

   The two-hour meeting, held at Greater St. Mat-thew Baptist Church, also addressed the need to work with school officials to build a better district.

   Members of the school board and the superintendent were invited, organizers said, but none of them attended Saturday.

   “Highland Park needs every stakeholder involved. We all talk, but we need to work,” said Glenda McDonald, organizer of the group. “By Monday, the schools may know its fate and whether we have an emergency manager. As a community group, we still need to figure out how to work.”

   Gov. Rick Snyder appointed a10-member financial review team Nov. 3 to examine the district’s finances. The team had 30 days to complete its review.

   State Superintendent Mike Flanagan asked Snyder to appoint the team in August after a Michigan Department of Education preliminary review of the district’s finances unveiled “probable financial stress.”

   The finding was based on the fact that the district had a deficit of more than 15% of its general fund revenues and recurring fund deficits. The Free Press reported in August that the district had a $19.9-million deficit at the end of June.

   Johnson said the appointment of an emergency manager was likely.

   Doris Harris, a parent, said she would be happy to have an emergency manager revamp the struggling district.

   “It would change things and it would be for the betterment of the kids,” Harris said. “When parents complain now, nothing is done.”

   Many at the meeting said the district is in desperate need of change.

   “We need to start a plan as soon as possible,” said Patrick, who started his teaching career in Highland Park schools. “There’s acancer on the district. …In order to be successful, we have to remove it.”

   ! CONTACT MELANIE D. SCOTT:

   313-222-6159 OR MDSCOTT

GELT "Open House" 2011 (GREEN Magic!)

Make a video of your own at Animoto.

Informs our Understanding

FINALLY GROWING

Hantz Farms begins planting saplings in Detroit

By John Gallagher Free Press Business Writer

   Nearly three years after businessman John Hantz sparked adebate over urban agriculture as an answer to Detroit’s vacant land problem, his Hantz Farms is finally in the ground and growing.

   Mike Score, president of Hantz Farms, began planting 900 oak saplings Thursday on three acres that the city sold to Hantz Farms earlier this year. The area is behind Hantz’s warehouse at 17403 Mt. Elliott.

   “It’s very small scale,” Score said Friday. “It’s really more keeping our promise to the city when we bought the land. It was to demonstrate that we could establish a farm and that it would be good for the city and good for the neighbors.”

   Under the terms of the land sale to Hantz Farms, the venture is not allowed to grow any food on the site or sell any products grown there pending further review and approval by the city. But the city did permit Hantz Farms to plant wood products that one day might produce some revenue if and when legal and regulatory issues are resolved.

   The saplings planted Thursday and Friday are 2to 3feet tall. Score said autumn is a good time of year to plant saplings because there are no leaves on them to draw energy away from building up the body of the tree itself, and the roots can continue to grow until the ground freezes hard.

   “As long as the ground’s not frozen, next spring we should have strong saplings that are ready for their first summer,” he said.

   The 3-acre tree planting this week remains far shy of the upto-2,000-acre commercial farm that Hantz first proposed to the city. In April 2009, when he first went public, he described his plan as a way to generate jobs and tax base in a city that desperately needed it, as well as a way to bring vacant and abandoned land back to productive use.

   But the Hantz Farms proposal, and similar proposals to engage in large-scale commercial farming inside Detroit, ran into a storm of opposition from many quarters. The city hesitated to approve any sweeping plan over fear that Michigan’s Right to Farm law, which protects farmers from undue regulation, would make it impossible to control anything Hantz may want to do.

   Then, too, many nonprofit community gardeners that operate small neighborhood plots on a volunteer basis feared they would be elbowed out by corporate farming. And still other critics say they fear that Detroit’s soil is too compromised by decades of industrial use to make it safe to grow food.

   Against that background, the 3-acre land sale to Hantz Farms and the tree planting this week are compromises that keep alive the idea of alarger farming project if and when the city is ready to accept it.

   ! CONTACT JOHN GALLAGHER: 313-222-5173 OR GALLAGHER99 @ FREEPRESS.COM  

JARRAD HENDERSON/DETROIT FREE PRESS Mike Score of Ann Arbor and Andy Williams of Detroit work to plant trees in a once-vacant lot at Hantz Farms on Thursday near the company’s headquarters in Detroit. They began planting 900 oak saplings Thursday on 3acres that the city sold to Hantz Farms this year.