On the eve of a planned demonstration against the suspension of local rule in Benton Harbor, Free Press business columnist Tom Walsh warns that the hassles and embarrassment of recent political tumult may drive the locally-headquartered Whirlpool corporation out of town.

Following a tour of the new World of Whirlpool customer experience center in Chicago and an interview with CEO Jeff Fettig, Walsh writes that Michigan is in danger of losing Whirlpool.

Though Whirlpool is in the process of modernizing its headquarters complex in Benton Harbor, the nearly 100-year-old appliance giant may chose to relocate, he writes.

Can such loyalty to the historic hometown last, though, if Benton Harbor becomes a recurring national sad-sack story of fiscal insolvency, dysfunctional politics and racial strife?

The city has recently received unflattering attention from Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Even its annual Blossomtime parade last month was marred by protests against Gov. Rick Snyder and local officials, stemming from controversy over actions by Joe Harris, the city’s state-appointed emergency manager…

Jeff Fettig, Whirlpool’s CEO, talked last week about his company’s values — integrity, respect, a spirit of winning — being in lockstep with the southwest Michigan community where it’s based. But when I asked him about Benton Harbor’s chronic fiscal woes, and about the city’s loopy officials initially balking at accepting $3.8 million in donations to help out, he lamented the city’s “outdated political structure” and the actions of a few local “rabble-rousers.”

Today’s Whirlpool executives may insist that southwest Michigan is their corporate home — and they may mean every word of it. Today.

But it sure is easy to imagine a future Whirlpool headquarters in downtown Chicago if Benton Harbor doesn’t get its act together.

…

Cities or states that make it a hassle or an embarrassment to be a corporate citizen won’t have any left.

The state of Michigan has tried to keep Whirlpool by giving it millions of dollars in tax breaks and supporting Harbor Shores, a company-backed project that built an elite private golf course on Benton Harbor’s public lakefront.

Whirlpool has won the first round of a process that could end with tariffs being put on the importation of refrigerators from Mexico and South Korea after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that it is being harmed by cheap labor in those countries.

The Detroit Free Press reports:

Whirlpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, is being harmed by low-cost refrigerators from Mexico and South Korea, a U.S. trade panel ruled, paving the way for tariffs on those imports…

This unanimous decision by the ITC validates the action we’ve taken to protect our 23,000 U.S. employees and the communities in which they work,” Jill Saletta, a spokeswoman for Benton Harbor-based Whirlpool, said in a statement.

One must wonder if Whirlpool’s decision to close down their factory in Evansville, IN and move it to Mexico last year counts as an “action to protect” their American workers. That laid off 1,100 workers. Ironically, it came after the company got a $19 million stimulus bill grant to create American jobs.

And if they do impose import tariffs, will it be against those Mexican-made refrigerators made by Whirlpool themselves?

Opponents of the privatization of Jean Klock Park are hoping that all the attention focused on Benton Harbor as a result of the suspension of local government will bring support for the legal fight to take back the park.

In 2008, amid political pressure from Whirlpool heir and Republican Congressman Fred Upton , the National Park Service approved a plan to allow developers to swap former industrial parcels in Benton Harbor for the pristine Lake Michigan dunes at the heart of Jean Klock Park.

Federal approval of the swap was needed because the National Park Service had spent money on improvements for the park, and it cleared the way for Harbor Shores Community Redevelopment Inc. to build the Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course that now dominates the city’s park.

A group of Benton Harbor residents is arguing that the National Park Service and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers failed to follow environmental laws when they allowed the deal. The residents say that the scope of the golf project was trivialized in order to avoid federal environmental review and that information about the severity of the contamination of the parcels offered in trade for the park was not made available to the public.

Terry Lodge, attorney for the Benton Harbor plaintiffs, said that the federal agencies failed to meet their responsibility to ensure meaningful public involvement in the decision of whether to privatize public property.

In January 2011, Judge Robert Holmes Bell of the U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids rejected these arguments, and park advocates are now appealing that decision in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where oral arguments are expected this summer.

A key element of the appeal is whether local residents have standing to sue over an appraisal of the park that valued it at less than a collection of contaminated inland parcels, Lodge said.

A standard buildable lot with Great Lakes frontage was going for a million bucks an acre at the time of the 2007 appraisal of Jean Klock Park, Lodge said, but the 22 acres of lakefront dunes were appraised at only about $900,000. Meanwhile, the contamination of the parcels offered in the trade was not disclosed, and one industrial parcel of less than two acres was valued at $700,000.

“The appraisal is huge.” Lodge said, “There was a complete lack of disclosure to public that the land to be traded was seriously contaminated. If this had been disclosed, elected leaders might not have gone along with the project.

“If the appraisal is dead,” he said, “presumably the deal is off.”

Lodge said that now that Benton Harbor is under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, “conditions are ripe for a “to hell with you, try and stop me” transaction in which the remaining acres of the park could be leased or sold without any public involvement.

“I am genuinely afraid of the fact that the remainder of the park could be conveyed into other ownership.” he said, “Benton Harbor has nothing else to sell off.”

“In addition to the repudiation of democracy, everyone should know that the key to Whirlpool getting control of Benton Harbor was first getting this beautiful half-mile of Lake Michigan lakefront in Jean Klock Park for their golf course,” said LuAnne Kozma, of the Park Advocate Alliance, who has worked with people in Benton Harbor on the park issues.

Kozma said that the takeover of Benton Harbor’s city government by Emergency Manager Joe Harris shows a scaled-up attack on the public commons.

The federal case over the conversion of Jean Kloc Park will show whether environmental laws like the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act will endure as meaningful tools to uphold protections for the nation’s parks, she said.

“The Jean Klock Park-(Protect Jean Klock Park advocate Julie) Weiss case is going higher in the federal courts, and it will set precedent for all parks in the nation protected by LWCF,” Kozma said. “There are other LWCF-protected public parks that are also in the middle of takeovers by corporations, including Lake Texoma State Park in Oklahoma, being taken over by corporate CEO Aubrey McClendon, and many Ohio state parks are threatened by fracking for methane gas by the gas companies.”

“This is more than just a trend,“ she said. “It’s a plan.”

More information about Weiss v. Salazar is available here.

Residents of Benton Harbor should not lose their democratic rights or their city parks just because the city is poor, Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday, and he called for people to speak out against Michigan’s Emergency Manager law.

In an op-ed to the Chicago Sun Times Jackson wrote:

Benton Harbor’s finances are a mess. How could they not be in a town stripped of jobs and hope? So, the state has stripped its residents of their democracy. In what is accurately termed “fiscal martial law,” the state has named a czar to run the city. That appointee, Joseph Harris, has issued an order essentially stripping the elected city council of all powers. No money can be spent, no taxes raised or lowered, no bonds issued, no regulations changed without his approval. Benton Harbor’s residents now live in a dictatorship imposed by a Republican governor famous for his belief that the poor should be punished and the rich rewarded.
This appointed dictator claims breathtaking powers. He can sell public assets, dismiss pension boards and take control of public pension funds and revoke labor contracts. What triggers this takeover? The law is remarkably vague. The governor may act if a payroll is missed, if there are complaints of late bill payment, if pensions are underfunded, if there is a significant budget deficit, a term that goes undefined.
This takeover is a recipe for the worst abuses of oppression, cronyism and corruption. And here, too, Benton Harbor is the example. One of the few citizen treasures in Benton Harbor is the Jean Klock Park, a half-mile of sandy dunes on the edge of Lake Michigan. It was bequeathed to the children of Benton Harbor by the Klock family in 1917 in memory of their daughter.
But developers backed by Whirlpool now want to appropriate a large portion of the park to turn it into a Harbor Shores golf resort with a 350-room hotel, two marinas, a 60,000-foot indoor water park (for members only), and a fancy golf course open to all who can afford a $5,000 entry fee and be approved by the club. The town’s citizens have resisted this development, which is under litigation.
But the new czar’s first act was to take over the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, most likely as a way to proceed with the development and sidestep the lawsuits. Why be suspicious? Because the law that the new czar is operating under was introduced by Republican state Rep. Al Pscholka, former staff aide to U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, an heir to the Whirlpool fortune.
They’ve shut down the jobs, and taken over the schools. Now they want to shut down the democracy and turn the public parks into a rich man’s playground. But in Benton Harbor, as in Selma and Montgomery, they forget even the poorest people have a sense of dignity. Dr. King wrote, “the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” In Benton Harbor, it is time for the good people to make themselves heard.

People from throughout the region are expected to converge on Benton Harbor tomorrow for a noon march and rally in response to the suspension of local government.

But the HQ itself isn’t likely to employ any more people than were employed at the old one; heck, with technological improvements it might even employ fewer people. So this hardly makes up for the factory they closed in the same city earlier this year, destroying 216 jobs and sending them overseas — after getting $19 million in stimulus money to ostensibly help create jobs in this country.

That was just shortly after the company closed its factory in Evansville, Indiana, destroying another 1,100 jobs — and warning the workers there that they’d better not exercise their constitutional right to protest that decision because it might “hamper employees when they look for future jobs.”

Walsh praises Whirlpool for staying in Benton Harbor rather than moving their offices to some other city, but he only briefly — and incompletely — mentions one of the reasons why they were unlikely to go anywhere else:

In recent years, Whirlpool also has stepped up its investment in an array of civic projects, from Habitat for Humanity homes to a huge new lakefront golf and residential complex.

The last is a reference to the Harbor Shores gold resort project, and he sure makes it sound like a great deal. He doesn’t mention that the project swapped many acres of land that is highly contaminated as a result of Whirlpool’s manufacturing to the local government in exchange for pristine lakefront property that was given to the city on the condition that it remain a public park forever.

He doesn’t mention that the project removed 22 acres of public park land accessible to everyone to make way for a golf course that the local community will only have access to if they bus the tables or cut the grass — at wages far below what they were making at the factory the company closed down.

He doesn’t mention that the company swapped those contaminated parcels for the ostensible use as biking and hiking trails, then got Gov. Granholm to approve Brownfield tax credits for them — which effectively means that Michigan taxpayers will pay more than $12 million to clean them up instead of the company that contaminated them having to do so. Oh, and they’re getting more tax breaks from the state to build this new HQ, which means state taxpayers are going to actually foot the bill for that too.

He doesn’t mention that golf courses are a source of enormous environmental damage, using extremely large amounts of water, fertilizers and pesticides to maintain their appearance — and this one is located in formerly pristine public parkland that included natural sand dunes, and next to one of the world’s greatest bodies of fresh water.

So while it’s nice that Whirlpool is willing to allow Michigan’s taxpayers to build their spiffy new offices, it would be a whole lot nicer if they didn’t also expect us to clean up their past and future contamination while moving our jobs to Mexico.

But not to worry. Those newly unemployed workers can always apply for minimum wage jobs at the Harbor Shores private golf course, where they can serve lunch to Whirlpool executives who paid for that development — and swapped contaminated land for pristine lakefront property to improve their views from the second tee — or perhaps to Rep. Fred Upton, the Whirlpool heir whose home sits near that prestigious golf course.

The Herald Palladium reports that commissioners are frustrated that developers have tied into the city water system without paying the city and that jobs promised by Harbor Shores have failed to materialize.

The resolution is part of longstanding resentments of the project by some city residents who see the developers as carpetbaggers who’ve received millions in state tax breaks while not delivering promised jobs. Other residents were angered that the 18-hole Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course, scheduled to officially open in August, will include three holes on 21 acres of Jean Klock Park.

A rejected federal lawsuit filed by residents said federal agencies failed to properly assess environmental contamination in the 38 acres swapped for the 21-acre parcel in the park. A separate rejected suit residents filed in state courts challenged the right of the city to lease the parkland to Harbor Shores.

The resolution is a symbolic gesture.

In 2006 the city commission approved a lease that grants Harbor Shores use of the park for 105 years.

City residents have asked the Michigan Supreme Court to reconsider the State Court of Appeals decision that upheld the city’s right to lease parkland to Harbor Shores.

The Friends of Jean Klock Park warn that if the ruling is allowed to stand it will clear the way for further corporate takeovers of public land.

IUE-CWA Local 808 today filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Whirlpool, alleging the company interfered with workers’ rights by threatening employees if they participate in a rally tomorrow to protest a plant closing…

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who will speak at the rally tomorrow, said: “Whirlpool has taken the war against American workers to a new level by threatening to blacklist people who speak up. They don’t just want your job, they want your first amendment rights, too.”

A protest is planned outside the Evansville plant today. Whirlpool is based in Benton Harbor, Michigan. U.S. Rep. Fred Upton is an heir to the Whirlpool fortune.

Activists planned a high-profile protest for this Friday, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka visiting the plant for the first time. But Whirlpool says the effort is futile — they are fully committed to shutting the plant down. The company, however, still seems quite wary of the potential for bad publicity. In a memo sent to its employees and passed along to the Huffington Post, Paul Coburn, division vice president for Whirlpool’s Evansville Division, offers a fairly explicit warning to his workers: If they join Trumka’s protest they would seriously risk future employment opportunity.

“In the last six months we have delivered strong results in spite of having to see a good deal of our equipment taken out of the building and moved to its new location. I believe that it is a testament to your character that you have continued to work hard to preserve the positive reputation of the Evansville workforce during this period,” Coburn writes.

“With this in mind, we have shared our concern with Local 808 leaders that these negative activities will only hamper employees when they look for future jobs. The entire community is aware and sympathetic towards the situation we all face. We fear that potential employers will view the actions of a few and determine whether they would want to hire any of Evansville Division employees in the future. We hope that this is not the case, but think it is certainly a consideration.”

A union official who passed the memo to the Huffington Post labeled it a “potentially illegal” effort to suppress speech and said that the local union is examining whether it violates labor law rules. The irony was not lost that a company closing a plant to ship jobs abroad would threaten workers with the possibility of unemployment even after it moved.

To add to the irony, Whirlpool received more than $19 million in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — i.e. the stimulus bill that was designed to encourage job creation in this country. Upton voted against the ARRA, which I suppose might be regarded as noble since it meant voting against a grant for the company that makes him wealthy; then again, maybe he knew they were only going to be creating jobs in Mexico.

As Megan Carpentier at our sister site the Washington Independent notes, Whirlpool has been very busy closing down American factories and shipping jobs elsewhere over the last few years:

Whirlpool should be used to protests after plant closures by now: After shutting down factories and laying off workers in Newton, Iowa, Herrin, Ill., and Searcy, Ark., in 2006, in LaVergne, Tenn., and Reynosa, Mexico in 2008, and in Fort Smith, Ark., and Evansville, Ind., in 2009 and 2010 as part of its latest round of layoffs affecting 5,000 people, one would think they’d know the drill. People get mad and depressed when their livelihoods disappear, and especially when their jobs get sent overseas.

At least Upton still has his private Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course with breathtaking views of Lake Michigan to play on while Michigan taxpayers get stuck with the bill for cleaning up the parcels — contaminated by Whirlpool — that were traded for the pristine public parkland to build the course.

Locals say that Jean Klock park is being damaged by Harbor Shores which just received $12.6 in brownfield redevelopment money (photo courtesy www.savejeanklockpark.org)

Much of the formerly industrial land slated for development in the project is polluted with chemicals and heavy metals. Whirlpool has donated some parcels to the project.

In the latest round of public financing for the project, announced by the governor last week, the state agreed to subsidize the costs of building high end second homes and condos and a portion of a trail that is to link the homes to the golf course and other attractions.

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation approved $12.6 million in brownfield redevelopment tax credits and stated that the project is expected to generate $123 million in investment and create 45 jobs.

Brownfield credits are given to businesses who take a contaminated parcel of land, clean it up and make it usable again.

But some locals — who have been fighting the development though lawsuits still pending in state and federal court — say that the project is not worthy of public support and should not be seen as environmentally positive.

They accuse developers and public officials of side-stepping rules intended to protect natural resources and they warn that by building a golf course on top of a delicate lakeside sand dune, new areas of contamination are growing in what was once a pristine public park.

Three of the holes in the Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course that is the centerpiece of the planned development have been built in the center of Jean Klock Park, which was donated to the residents of Benton Harbor in 1917.

Developers said that the breathtaking dune views of Lake Michigan were needed to ensure a commercially viable project, and negotiated a long term lease with the city of Benton Harbor.

The conversion of the park required approval from the state because the state has funded park improvement grants. In October 2006, the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund Board voted 3-1 to approve a conversion plan that offered new parkland and a trail system in exchange for the dune parkland.

Developers have not delivered on promises

Now the board is asking whether the developers have held up their end of the bargain.

Excavation, tree removal and new parking lots have transformed part of Jean Klock Park into a private golf course, but the trails and new parks promised in exchange have not materialized.

In presentations to the Natural Resources Trust Fund Board locals have also complained that some areas of the park that were supposed to remain public are now difficult or even dangerous to access, and they’ve warned that chemical run-off from the golf course is contaminating the park as it flows into drainage ditches that were not shown in plans presented to the public.

In October, the Trust Fund Board established a working group to investigate the ways in which the Harbor Shores project has diverged from the plan approved by the board.

At the Dec. 2 meeting of the board, commissioner and board chair Lana Pollack expressed frustration over Harbor Shores’ assertion that the park conversion plan approved by the board was a concept rather than a commitment.

“When we approve a project we are approving a project not a concept. It is disturbing to see that used as a justification for going outside the bounds of what was approved.”

Pollack acknowledged that the patchwork of former industrial parcels traded for the park contain hazardous levels of contaminants.

“We have extreme concerns about the use of mitigation parcels because they are part 201 facilities, a toxic stew. They have to be dealt with in a way that is respectful of today’s and tomorrow’s children.”

Commissioners seek possible legal investigation

After listening to Benton Harbor resident Nicole Moon give a slide show and a litany of the shortcomings of the Harbor Shore project at the Trust Fund Board’s December meeting, commissioner Bob Garner suggested that it may be appropriate for the attorney general to examine Harbor Shores practices.

“What is coming up here are matters that strongly suggest that mitigation needs to take place, and allegations … that criminal activity has taken place,” Garner said.

“At some point we might ask the attorney general to step in and try to set the law straight on that.”

Garner said that he was not sure whether the trust fund board had authority to refer matters to the attorney general, but he said he was disturbed by questionable practices associated with the Harbor Shores development.

“It bothers me that these allegations are out there,“ he said, “somebody maybe ought to be doing a criminal check and either exonerate or bring criminal charges.”

Commissioner Dennis Muchmore also encouraged Moon to bring the Harbor Shores issues to the attorney general.