At 2300 Krafft Road, in Fort Gratiot, you can see a huge construction project on the north side of the road, just east of where a service road heads to the Mercy Hospital clinic.
It's a common-sense truth of environmentalism that rehabbing old structures is better for the environment than putting up new buildings. There are perfectly useful empty buildings in downtown Port Huron and up and down Pine Grove, all with plenty of room for parking. Instead of retrofitting one of these, the local SSA opted to destroy open space and put a parking lot next to a wetland. A few months ago, a caller to TalkBack aptly recommended the old Sperry department store building for a new SSA office. Or how about the space vacated by Farmer Jack? Either of these would have been a great idea, but a government in hock to developers cannot see obvious good sense.
The new site will be harder to reach for many of the people who need to conduct business with the SSA. The old site was accessible from much of the area via one bus ride. Now people will need to catch a bus downtown and then transfer to another. In the January 17, 2007, Times-Herald, David Wilkinson, spokesman for the General Services Administration, the government's real-estate division, is quoted, "I don't expect it's going to be difficult for people to get out there." That's true only for people who drive their own car and don't worry about the price of gasoline. What about the elderly or disabled who can't drive? It's coldly indifferent to our elderly and disabled not to see that the new site is less convenient than the old one.
This new facility is being constructed by West Second Street Associates, a private company based in Flint. It will receive $411,658 a year, for the duration of a ten-year lease, which will undoubtedly be extended. This firm has similar arrangements with the federal government for facilities in Flint, Detroit, Lansing, and Ann Arbor, among others, as well as sites in Illinois and Florida. Quite a nice little operation!
After this firm completed federal offices in Detroit and Lansing, it took the government to court and demanded cash for construction overruns (over $450,000) and higher monthly lease payments (see here). Will that pattern be repeated in Fort Gratiot? Don't forget, these are our tax dollars. We can apparently put up new buildings we don't need, destroying open space and lining the pockets of developers, but we can't hire enough immigration and customs agents to keep the traffic moving on the Blue Water Bridge. What we need in St. Clair County is jobs, not pork-barrel boondoggles; we especially don't need projects built by a contractor from outside the county.
One wonders who decided that the local SSA office needed new quarters and that the option of refitting an old building (for less money) was not on the table. What was the bidding process, if any? Does West Second Street Associates have a terrific record? Or does it have chummy relations with well-connected government officials?
BlueNovember.Org is a grassroots, progressive group of citizens who work to achieve social justice. We call on our neighbors to join us as we stand up and speak out to protect the earth, peace, justice, the truth, and each other.
1 comment:
IT just seems that government is unresponsive to the citizens it is said to serve. This is just one example, one of many, where common sense is thrown right out the window.THERE ARE 10 OTHER EMPTY BUILDINGS,that could have been renovated but no we have to build a new one in an obscure out of the way corner of the county.I FOR ONE FIND GOVERNMENT COMPLETELY INEFFICIENT.WE get what we don't want and pay a higher price for it!!
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